Game Systems: when a disadvantage is not a disadvantage

[Fwib]

Perhaps aging should give you negative levels you can't get rid of? (save by magically de-aging)

[Aycarus]

There are several options I can think of in order to allow the existence of item creation spells:

Entropy Balance: The amount of chaos in the universe must always increase. Creating an item out of raw materials removes entropy (chaos), and so there must be an equivalent creation of entropy elsewhere in order to balance the construction of the item. This can be in the form of a house collapsing, a tree dying, or any other act that would effectively create entropy.

Life Force Transfer: Whenever a caster creates an item spontaneously, he gives up part of his life force. This could result in quickened aging, permanent ability drain, or anything of the sort. When the item is destroyed or rendered back into the raw materials from which it was forged, the caster can regain the bit of his life force that he transferred into creating the item.

Poor workmanship: Any item "created" with a spell must be forged out of raw materials and is inherently of poorer quality than an equivalent item forged by hand. A typical "created" item will have a lifespan of little more than a day (after this time, the created item will disintegrate to dust) and is easily recognizable as being of poor quality.

In particular, there is at least one "law" that needs to be obeyed when designing any item creation spell:

Equivalent exchange: The spell cannot increase the wealth of the caster permanently. Wall of Iron should not exist as a manifestation, allowing the iron to be torn from the wall and sold on the market. P.S. FMA is actually a good series, but its rules of equivalent exchange are sketchy at best.

This ensures that creation magic is only used in rare circumstances, where the sacrifice is immediately beneficial, but provides no lasting benefit.

[Crissa]

Just because you have the ability doesn't mean you use it.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

1139025343[/unixtime]]
Equivalent exchange: The spell cannot increase the wealth of the caster permanently. Wall of Iron should not exist as a manifestation, allowing the iron to be torn from the wall and sold on the market. P.S. FMA is actually a good series, but its rules of equivalent exchange are sketchy at best.

I actually prefer a more unbalanced variant. An inefficient exchange so to speak. IMO, to balance an economy, magic should be fast, but highly inefficient. So you can get wizards creating stuff if you need it really fast, but peasants should be able to produce it way cheaper (though slower). This means that magic users effectively can never corner the market.

I'd also like to make food and water not conjurable at all. Making farming always an important aspect.

[Username17]

The thing with equivalent exchange or entropy balance or any of that is that it doesn't actually affect the wizard in any way. If the wizard's magic damages the world's economy in some large way, they'll still be rich.

That's how capitalism works. The buck gets passed from the rich to the poor. Really it would just be one more reason for the peasants to be in grinding poverty. Sometimes peasants will have their crops explode because of magic use and they'll cry.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1139089580[/unixtime]]The thing with equivalent exchange or entropy balance or any of that is that it doesn't actually affect the wizard in any way. If the wizard's magic damages the world's economy in some large way, they'll still be rich.

Well when I say equivalent exchange I mean to fabricate a suit of full plate, the wizard has to provide gemstones greater than the value of the suit of armor he's making. Thus the wizard doesn't actually get rich that way, in fact, he loses money if you make the gemstones more expensive.

Since peasants can make the armor for cheaper, wizards cannot go into business fabricating, since peasants can undercut them. Unless you need armor super fast for whatever reason, there would be no reason to pay a wizard to fabricate them.

[erik]

You can still undercut the peasants with Unseen Servant sweatshops, mind you.

In my last homebrew campaign world, at least 10% of the population was some sort of wizard/caster. Commoners were just the rare village idiots. In a world where peasants can't co-exist, why have them?

[User3]

Life Force Transfer: Whenever a caster creates an item spontaneously, he gives up part of his life force. This could result in quickened aging, permanent ability drain, or anything of the sort. When the item is destroyed or rendered back into the raw materials from which it was forged, the caster can regain the bit of his life force that he transferred into creating the item.

The wizard is only held slightly behind until an economy is created in which production exceeds consumption; then the wizard automatically wins because consumers throw away their old goods for brand-spanking new ones.

A wizard turning into an old man every time the latest batch of Reeboks or iPods come out and back to a young whippersnapper when South Park makes fun of PSPs is really silly.

Poor workmanship: Any item "created" with a spell must be forged out of raw materials and is inherently of poorer quality than an equivalent item forged by hand. A typical "created" item will have a lifespan of little more than a day (after this time, the created item will disintegrate to dust) and is easily recognizable as being of poor quality.

Then the wizards take control of industries where goods don't need to last more than a day (water, power plant fuel, entertainment).

[Crissa]

Then the wizards take control of industries where goods don't need to last more than a day (water, power plant fuel, entertainment).

I don't see being a cog in the power plant as being 'taking over' honestly...

-Crissa

[Username17]

Don't see it as being a cog in the power plant. Look at it as having investor veto as to whether there is a power plant at all.

The power plant has to ask for (and get) the wizard's permission every day in order to function. The wizard, thus, is the ultimate capitalist. Not only does he control the capital, h actually is the capital. Even if there was a communist uprising, he'd still control the capital because it comes directly out of his mind on command.

As long as any part of the economy has magic involved in it (and how could it not), the magicians have investor veto over the economy. And that means that no matter what kind of economic or social system you have, the wizards get everything they want.

-Username17

[Aycarus]

1139263330[/unixtime]]As long as any part of the economy has magic involved in it (and how could it not), the magicians have investor veto over the economy. And that means that no matter what kind of economic or social system you have, the wizards get everything they want.

If the wizard could only make items that were inherently inferior to hand-crafted item, there is no reason for them to have control over the economy. Sure, they can create them quickly, but that wouldn't affect the market share of most commodities and devices that the consumer doesn't have to worry about them fragmenting at any point.

As for the point of power plant fuel, there are two resolutions I can see. The first is to propose that wizards can only manipulate a degenerate form of matter that cannot be burned, eaten, or used for any purpose beyond simply being a solid object. The second is to insist that any item creation spell requires raw materials of equal worth and equivalent properties. Thus, to create a hammer you would need an equivalent amount of wood and iron. Since the item itself is of inherently poor quality compared to a forged item, there is no reason for it to corner the hammer market - but the spell still maintains the merit of being immediately useful.

[RandomCasualty]

Well, the wizards being a cog in certain industries isn't so bad.

The fact that mechanics are the only ones who can fix cars doesnt' inherently mean they have any special control over the economy. This is because they need stuff from the economy that they cannot produce and they have competition to keep their prices down. So they effectively become a cog as opposed to the dominant force.

The main problem with casters in D&D is that they're effectively cut off from the economy. They can make their own food, make their own items and they dont' actually need society for anything. Also wizards lack the competition aspect since most feats are limited only to rare higher level casters. Casters unfortunately are not so much a cog as they are a self sufficient microcosm of the entire economy.

Basically you can have wizards be part of the economy, but you want any low level wizard to be able to do that stuff, so that there is competition. So if the wizards suddenly decide to go on strike, they can train a few new ones and put them to work. The main issue has to be that wizards need something. So even if they can conjure power plant fuel, it doesn't help the wizard eat or get lodging for the night. And since there are quite a few wizards capable of creating fuel, one wizard can't shut down the whole plant by going on strike because they'll just bring in another wizard and let the greedy wizard starve.

Effectively wizardry has to fit in your economy like any other expert profession, like mechanics, architects and computer programmers.

And basically you have to accept that any job wizards can do will effectively become entirely dominated by wizards. So if you decide wizards can create food, there shouldn't be any farming on your world. Wizards would then be the farmers and trade their food for spell components, clothes, inn rooms, transportation and so on.

And that could actually work, so long as you don't have too many wizard dominated industries and allow wizards to become self contained economies.

[PhoneLobster]

If the wizard could only make items that were inherently inferior to hand-crafted item, there is no reason for them to have control over the economy.

Uh, what?

I'm right now siting on a chair that is inherently inferior to a handcrafted item.

Many people have diets dominated exclusively by food that is inherently inferior to handcrafted alternatives.

Most people in my country live in mass produced shoddy suburban houses that are inherently inferior to handcrafted alternatives.

We mostly wear clothes that are inherently inferior to handcrafted alternatives.

Being inferior doesn't stop something from dominating a market or a society.

Just look at Microsoft.

[Aycarus]

1139296279[/unixtime]]I'm right now siting on a chair that is inherently inferior to a handcrafted item.

When I say "inferior to a handcrafted item," I mean an item that is not particularly valuable for long term use. Most of the examples you gave can still be considered handcrafted by this definition, since actual effort was placed into their construction.

The customer base is going to start getting annoyed if your magic-crafted novelty chairs fall apart after a day of use. It would be useful for a few hours, of course, rendering the associated spell at least somewhat valuable.

Additionally, if a spell required the raw materials necessary to make that chair there would not be much cost-saving in purchasing an inferior magic-crafted item (depending on the markup imposed on hand-made items.)

[erik]

The chair-making, basket-weaving wizard isn't really the economic concern. Inferior goods solves almost none of things that makes casters dominant in any economy. They still make something from nothing and have other capabilities which blow away the mundane competition.

They can create heat or cold as needed, perpetual motion machines on a whim, and cheap simple labor as well (unseen servant, wood wose, animated skeletons, etc.).

Even if they don't directly produce meals with spells (good berries, hero's feast), they certainly control the weather and plant growth and thusly control the food economy.

Construction crews can build much larger structures and the like with a caster's help (summoning strong earth elementals, telekinesis in lieu of cranes, etc.). A castle built by hundreds of lay workers would take much much longer than as done by a single wizard.

All raw material harvesting goes to the casters, as nobody can find and extract ores, harvest food stuffs, or bring down forests faster. So craftsmen are reliant on casters to keep their forges running.

Shipping goes to the casters. Nobody moves more stuff faster.

Storage of goods goes to the casters. They can climate control to keep food goods fresher, even place things in stasis, shrink objects etc.

News media gathering information would rely upon divinations from casters. Illusions make for entertaining distribution of info as well.

Health care is a no-brainer to go to the casters.

Basically all the lay people can do are the service sector professional jobs, and highly skilled finishing touches on crafting. And that is just until the casters outsource those jobs to better summoned/created servants.

If you don't want a wizard/caster-centric economy, then you have to cripple the casters. Otherwise as soon as the first one gets the idea of making money, you hit an industrial revolution where they are the kings.

Best way so far to enact that change that has been proposed is the life force cost on casters. So literally crippling casters is about the only way to curb their rampant economic dominance. Not terribly fun for adventurers at first glance.

I suppose one could impose penalties for how many slots per spell level one burns, or how few one has left at the end of the day. Say if you ran out of your level one spells you are fatigued. Run out of level two spells then exhausted. Out of level three spells then ability damage. And on up to death by running out of level 9 spells (as death isn't insurmountable by then anywho).

Of course then it just goes to healer-wizard teams to run the world.

I say go with the wizards running crazy town and let there be a glut of NPC wizards who do various jobs. Weathermen, unseen servant foremen, way farers, ice makers, architects, and so forth. Most people have their particular interests, so no reason why the casters can't specialize and even max out a craft or profession to be all that they can be in their particular field. People who aren't intelligent, charismatic or wise (and their family is too poor to afford +2 study aids) will become management, marketing or serve burgers at McWizo's, and a few thrill seekers might become adventurers instead.

[edit: typoes]

[Crissa]

If any wizard can make the fuel for the engine, why does it matter any more that a specific wizard doesn't want to work today any more than the garbage man didn't want to work today?

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

When I say "inferior to a handcrafted item," I mean an item that is not particularly valuable for long term use.

What? The mass produced clothes and shoes we wear don't last as long as handcrafted equivalents.

The bread we eat (yes, basically all of it) is just short of toxic due to short cuts in the flour grinding and dough levening process.

And the mass produced houses people around here live in fall apart sooner, are improperly built for our climate making for vastly increased costs to heat them in winter and cool them in summer, don't have the facility to catch and store water on one of the driest continents on earth, eat excessive amounts of land in a country with one of the most expensive and inaccessable property markets in the world, and aren't sufficiently near any services that can be reached by any other means than expending increasingly expensive fuel driving your car across the inordinately large distances Australians travel over (we're very spread out out here).

These are all cases of products less viable for long term use.

And yet they dominate the market almost utterly.

This is not stuff like CPUs or something which are impossible to hand make or things like dice which are as good or better when mass produced.

[Username17]

Yeah, the only people who are seriously willing to throw down 6 liters of gold for a 5% improvement are adventurers. And that's only because they aren't allowed to play the quantity end of the quality/quantity quandary and they don't get anything for saving their money.

For everyone else, quickly producing inferior goods is a winning, even dominating proposition. Look at China's economic standing. When was the last time anyone told you to get something high quality by using China's subsidized labor management program?

-Username17

[Aycarus]

When I say inferior goods, I mean something whose lifespan can be measured in hours and cannot be harnassed for energy or nourishment. A hammer conjured in this manner would work fine for the first couple hours, but thereafter would quickly become unusable. I don't see a spell that functions for such a short duration would form a reasonable business model.

[Username17]

So basically you're not talking about goods being created at all. In fact, you're saying that magic should have no telekinetic power, and probably no ability to create "energy" effects such as fire or cold.

In this model, magic would be entirely there to create temporary solid effects such as walls of force and minor ceation. Unfortunately, as we know all too well, even if we remove such economically problematic spells as fabricate, wall of iron, and planar binding, mages still control the viability of industry even with things such as teleport, shrink item, and even summon monster.

The fact is that wall of fire isn't any fun unless it violates the laws of thermodynamics, and if it does that the people who can do it can create perpetual motion machines if they want.

---

If you accept anything vaguely like D&D magic, you have to either have magic endemically in society and scrap the entire concept of the feudal economic model - or you have to accept Mage Kings of Industry.

Or to put it another way: Either the D&D magic system or the D&D socio-economic system have to go. They can't both exist in the same world.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1139443091[/unixtime]]So basically you're not talking about goods being created at all. In fact, you're saying that magic should have no telekinetic power, and probably no ability to create "energy" effects such as fire or cold.

Well, all the power has to be on the short term. You probably shouldn't be able to create permanent walls of fire for instance. Telekinesis isn't inherently dangerous for small one shot effects. It only becomes dangerous when you allow it for long term effects. Flight and unseen servant are potentially more dangerous than hurling a boulder. Summons are also only really dangerous in the long term, or if you have summons that produce long term effects, like umber hulks digging tunnels and so on.

[Username17]

Telekinesis isn't inherently dangerous for small one shot effects. It only becomes dangerous when you allow it for long term effects.

Unless items move back where they started at the end of the spell, every telekinetic movement is a long-term effect.

-Username17

[Aycarus]

1139443091[/unixtime]]So basically you're not talking about goods being created at all. In fact, you're saying that magic should have no telekinetic power, and probably no ability to create "energy" effects such as fire or cold.

Well, I imagine that's worth handling one item at a time. I figured the current debate was with regards to the actual creation of goods.

Or to put it another way: Either the D&D magic system or the D&D socio-economic system have to go. They can't both exist in the same world.

I agree completely. They are inherently incompatible, but I am more interested in attempting to build a magic system that lends to a socio-economic system that does not become hopelessly diluted with the addition of magic. I believe what you would need to do is limit problematic spells to effects that would, at best, duplicate a chemical or physical effect that is possible without magic.

Let's take telekinesis, for example. A mage should be able to maintain telekinesis with concentration and be able to transport no more than could be normally carried by a human, at a speed no greater than a human could carry. The merits of such a spell would be to pull a level across the room, but it would not substantially assist in construction efforts.

We already know that a wall of fire can be constructed by piling up a lot of combustable material and setting it ablaze. So, for a magical wall of fire, impose the same limitations of a physical wall of fire; namely that it can be put out with the addition of enough water. We can limit its duration substantially, but allow any fuel added to the blaze to allow it to continue burning in a non-magical way. As long as the "cost" for casting this spell is high enough (either by limiting spells per day or by requiring some sort substantial material component), a permanently maintained wall of fire is unviable.

A wall of ice is somewhat harder to explain, but its benefits are not much greater than a wall of fire. Again, limit the duration of the spell and maintain a reasonably high "cost" so as to ensure that a permanently maintained wall is not viable.

Edit: Too hasty to press the Submit button.

[erik]

The Wall of Fire is a potent perpetual motion machine component because it supplies endless heat when made permanent. You don't actually have to have the fire act as the radioactive rod submersed in water, but instead just have a rod run by/through the wall and continue on into water, and then you have your endless source of heat. Whether it can be extinguished really doesn't matter.

So your answer is to nerf spells into being no better than mundane actions? That is fine and dandy if you want to make Telekinesis into a level 1 or 2 spell (a slightly amped up mage hand), but if you want to have any high level magic at all, then the nerfing is a bit much. The whole idea with high level spells is that it is super human, and surpasses what can be done naturally.

Would teleportation take just as long as walking then? How about Ethereal jaunt? Control Weather sure doesn't have an equivalent mundane action.

You're basically going to wind up with a really really small list of spells which nobody will want to cast anyway if you ever succeed in nerfing magic enough to not be the focal point of economics.

[Crissa]

Why not have x amount of effect per level?

So once the Wall of Fire has depleted its length times five dice of damage, it no longer damages things that touch it.

Sure, you can use Tk to throw something out the window, but getting it to land on the far side of the canal and not in the water or the wall is a tough trick?

-Crissa