Plausible Social/Political Structures in D&D Land

[Spike]

To keep people from stealing your Magic Device of Create Iron, you first make it large enough to provide a logistical challenge to moving it around.

Yes, a Handy Pocket Watch of Iron Creation is far more portable, and thus resolves, potentially, the issue of how to get all that iron over the next mountain (you just move the pocketwatch around... much simpler) than the God Throne of Iron Creation, the God Throne requires a dozen men and oxen several hours to shift...

Oh, sure, there are many ways around that, with magic... but if you've got that sort of magic available, you might as well start looking to make your own God Throne.

There is a relatively low bar threshold where stealing the object (Moving it) is less useful than just letting it remain wherever and doing your level best to take that area. I've seriously seen players discuss taking over a dungeon as a base because it had some big, cool, thing in it they wanted.

Of course, I've also had players hire small armies of laborers to move relatively unimportant statues around too...

[Grek]

Ummm, you do understand what a zero-sum game is, right? The pigments make 2K worth of stuff, and they cost 2K to make. If you use a wish to make pigments to make stuff, you are actually getting less stuff than if you just wished it into existence directly.

Wishing for what the village needs requires that an actual high level dude spend his time working directing things and commanding the eefret or whatever to make what is needed. While you don't get more stuff, you do get a better return on "magehours to product", since you're replacing a pretty good portion of those magehours with an expert who's time is much, much less valuable.

For the kind of wealth that sets up people for life, they are willing to go through all those troubles. People rob banks all the time with much the same problems. Even in a fantasy world, the power of authority is not absolute.

Once we've got infinate wishes into the equation, being "set up for life" is not something that you get from stealing magic items. You get it for turning up at the Church of Pelor and praying, because they've almost certainly stuck a 7500 gp, automatic reset Create Food and Water 'trap' on the altar.

[Fuchs]

I still don't see much of an incentive for any powerful character to sacrifice power in order to make life better for the common people by creating magic items... especially if there's a threat of others taking over if you spend your resources on making items that don't make you better at fending them off.

[K]

Ummm, you do understand what a zero-sum game is, right? The pigments make 2K worth of stuff, and they cost 2K to make. If you use a wish to make pigments to make stuff, you are actually getting less stuff than if you just wished it into existence directly.

Wishing for what the village needs requires that an actual high level dude spend his time working directing things and commanding the eefret or whatever to make what is needed. While you don't get more stuff, you do get a better return on "magehours to product", since you're replacing a pretty good portion of those magehours with an expert who's time is much, much less valuable.

The mage time to create the pigments is exactly equal to just wishing for the items directly. The only savings is on shipping costs since you can have people ship the pigments and not the goods (but then, why do we care since demons can teleport shrunk item versions of anything?).

The only difference is that the pigments can be banked for future unforeseen needs so if the mage only shows up once a month to make crap for you then you can make items in between.... but then, who really cares since you can just store extra goods in a warehouse until they are needed and we already have a mage giving us free wishes who can just overproduce?

The pigments also require a DC 15 Painting check, so you'd need skilled craftsman everywhere to take advantage of your pigment scheme.

Basically, pigments are great for adventurers and terrible for everyone else.

For the kind of wealth that sets up people for life, they are willing to go through all those troubles. People rob banks all the time with much the same problems. Even in a fantasy world, the power of authority is not absolute.

Once we've got infinate wishes into the equation, being "set up for life" is not something that you get from stealing magic items. You get it for turning up at the Church of Pelor and praying, because they've almost certainly stuck a 7500 gp, automatic reset Create Food and Water 'trap' on the altar.

People have never been just satisfied with food. They want goods and services that come from a real economy, so theft is always going to be an issue.

Also, those wishes are not totally free. They cost mage time, and that is a finite resource that is a major bottleneck to any plan to destroy a scarcity-based economy.

[K]

To keep people from stealing your Magic Device of Create Iron, you first make it large enough to provide a logistical challenge to moving it around.

Yes, a Handy Pocket Watch of Iron Creation is far more portable, and thus resolves, potentially, the issue of how to get all that iron over the next mountain (you just move the pocketwatch around... much simpler) than the God Throne of Iron Creation, the God Throne requires a dozen men and oxen several hours to shift...

Oh, sure, there are many ways around that, with magic... but if you've got that sort of magic available, you might as well start looking to make your own God Throne.

It comes down to profit. If I spend 10K in items to steal 500K in items, then I profit.

[Spike]

I did say it was the first step, not the only defense.

Having some great honking, twenty ton 'God Throne of Infinite Iron' makes it harder to steal, reducing opportunity and increasing cost over the pilferable 'Pocketwatch of Mining'... but if you leave it in the middle of an open field somewhere then all you've done is reduce the percentage of the people who will steal it from 'literally everyone' to 'Anyone motivated enough to figure out how to move it'... and the probability it will be stolen drops from 'dur, of course' to 'yup, gonna happen'.

Putting it inside some industrial complex, with people and guards and kumquats (or whatever you want to use to ward off throne stealing demons) works.

Because making it fucking huge keeps some asshole from just sneaking in one night and making off with it. Its a cost multiplier, its cheaper and more effective than a lot of other defense for just that reason.

Eventually your would be thief will decide that, yeah, he can totally steal the damn thing for less cost than it would take to make a new one, but it still just easier to go out and fucking make one anyway... because its NOT easier than just getting the money together some other way.


As this sort of thing is a major strategic asset, its worth looking at it like any other, real world, strategic asset. Lets say an Aircraft Carrier, which isn't a terrible analog for this thing.

Carriers have a redonkulous cost, as does our Magic Item. In fact, I would bet that it is cheaper for major industrial nations to put together covert military operations to just steal the damn things from each other rather than build them, and stealing your enemies ships is a great way to ensure they lack the military power to actually fight you for it.

Yet, oddly, we don't hear of chinese commando raids on the USS Enterprise, or Russian pirate attacks...

Because, while it is cheaper to steal the fuckers, its easier to build your own.

[Grek]

As for the Giant Throne vs. Pocket Watch deal, you could really go either way on that. It's an artifact item. Having it be a huge, immobile piece of geography that makes more sense to conquer than to steal has it's advantages, but so does making it small and light enough to stuff inside the pants of the head of state, who, being the most badass person in the nation, is the person most qualified to protect the thing.

[Vebyast]

The Wall of Iron item wouldn't be a pocketwatch or a throne. Both are too small; remember, you're simply magicking into creation about two and a half tons of iron per second, and you need the infrastructure to carry all of that iron away. The item would building-size. It'd be a loading dock with multiple rail line equivalents running through it. The heaviest trains in the modern world are over 3 km long and they carry over 20000 tonnes of iron or coal; this item would fill up one of these trains roughly every thirty minutes.

I'm not sure what D&D would use instead of rails (a constant stream of Wished earth elementals, maybe?), but whatever it is, it's going to need a marshalling yard, and the item is going to be built straight into that yard, both for efficiency and for security.

[Grek]

Probably a really huge minecart on two tracks pulled by a dire triceratops or something similarly insane.

[Spike]

Oh, I fully agree that it would be built inside a massive industrial yard... maybe even one working round the clock, designed to support that level of production... though the mind boggles at what they'd be doing with all that iron eventually.

Calling it a throne is rather confusing, as I do refer to an object somewhat larger than a simple chair, but making it the entire building is problematic as well. It simply needs to be massive enough that some dude with too much magic on his hands doesn't just teleport* in, snatch it up by hand or with a few conjured heavy lifters, and teleport out.

For amusement's sake, since we'll really have far more iron than we really know what to do with in an insanely small amount of time, lets assume that you want it small enough to mount on some sort of suspended rail structure, as moving a few ton object around over the smelting floor might be faster than getting the walls themselves out of the way ever six seconds. Not that its really important, I suppose....

* by teleport I mean, of course, any one of dozens of spells that allow you to bypass purely mundane defenses and just 'show up'. Obviously, warding the location of the Object with shit like Dimensional Anchor wouldn't be a bad idea... every thing a potential thief has to overcome is a potential reason for him to say 'fuck it' and move on.

[tzor]

When people start talking about a "throne of infinite iron" I get the thought "so this is what a rust monster's heaven is."

[Spike]

Well, that WOULD solve my little problem with the fact that we are now producing more iron in a year than has ever been mined... so what does this one nation actually DO with all that iron?

Obviously; THey use it to breed massive armies of Rust Monsters... robbing their enemies of the tools necessary to wage war upon them!

Feckin' brilliant!