Core Principle: Your Fantasy Economy is Bullshit

[angelfromanotherpin]

I mean, Iron Man didn't have 5 intermediate upgrades of his suit until he settled at his current model spaced out over several months; he got the definitive model done in like weeks.

Um...

3 Armors of the 1960s
3.1 Iron Man Armor MK I (Grey)
3.2 Iron Man Armor MK II (Golden Avenger)
3.3 Iron Man Armor MK III (Original Red & Gold)
4 Armors of the 1970s
4.1 Iron Man Armor MK V (Classic Red & Gold)
5 Armors of the 1980s
5.1 Space Armor MK I
5.2 Iron Man Armor Model 07 (Stealth Armor MK I)
5.3 Iron Man Armor MK VI (Recovery armor)
5.4 Silver Centurion
5.5 Hydro Armor
5.6 Low Observable Armor (Stealth Armor, Mark II)
5.7 Iron Man Armor MK VIII (New Red & Gold)
6 Armors of the 1990s
6.1 Space Armor, Mark II
6.2 Telepresence Armor
6.3 War Machine
6.4 NTU-150 Telepresence Armor
6.5 Modular Armor
6.6 Hulkbuster Armor (Modular Add-on)
6.7 Arctic Armor
6.8 Crossing Armor
6.9 Retro Armor
6.10 Teen Tony Armor
6.11 Prometheum Armor ("Heroes Reborn")
6.12 Renaissance Armor ("Heroes Return")
6.13 Experimental Safe Armor
7 Armors of the 2000s
7.1 Outer Atmospheric Armor
7.2 S.K.I.N. Armor
7.3 Stealth Armor, Mark III
7.4 Tin Man Armor
7.5 Thorbuster
7.6 Cobalt Man impostor
7.7 Ablative Armor
7.8 Iron Man Armor Model 29
7.9 Anti-Radiation Armor
7.10 High Gravity Armor
7.11 Iron Man Model 30 (Extremis Armor)
7.12 Argonauts
7.13 Modern Hydro Suit
7.14 Hypervelocity
7.15 Hulkbuster Armor MK II
8 Armor of the 2010s
8.1 Bleeding Edge Armor

[Swordslinger]

Your example is marred by the fact that Wolverine is a hero only in his own comic, he's sort of an NPC in anyone else's comic. (The point of the comic is to pimp the hero.)

Well that's my point. The comic is using a different sort of rules where you get a benefit for being the hero. 3E D&D doesn't do this, in that the hero doesn't get anything special over just being another monster. 4E does this to a degree in that heroes and monsters are built differently.

[Lago PARANOIA]

angelfromanotherpin, Iron Man's suit upgrades happen all of the time for dramatic effect including him swapping out a power or two (like Batman's Utility Belt but the core powers (flight, deflector shield, missiles, shoulder-cannon, super sensors, repulsor array) didn't change much after the 70's.

Now there are characters who get real and definite upgrades, but they happen over a relatively short period of time.

[Niles]

Some Dragons are exactly like that, though; they're the extremely dangerous ones.

No there aren't.

Dragons definitionally guard valuables. Your statement is as sensible as "the best fire elementals are not composed of or in any way associated with fire" or "owlbears possess no similarity ti either owls or bears"

[Maxus]

No, dragons aren't.

Draconic culture in D&D places a a large importance on having a hoard of gold and jewels, in the same way that our culture places values on, you know, roof over your head, car, significant other, etc. It's a cultural expectation. At the same time, you can seriously be single and happily sleep in your car. Mainstream will look down upon you, but there are people who do that.

The main weakness of the huge-hill-of-money lifestyle is that you tend to stay in the same spot. For a long, long time. Therefore you are more easily found, despite being a large fast-flying creatures who could be quite damnably tough to find if you kept moving.

Also, fire elementals are inherently and physically made of fire. Owlbears, are, of course, physically a bear with an owl's beak on it. But last time I checked, dragons are not hatched holding a roll of quarters and snapping at anyone who gets too close there.

[Niles]

Also, fire elementals are inherently and physically made of fire. Owlbears, are, of course, physically a bear with an owl's beak on it. But last time I checked, dragons are not hatched holding a roll of quarters and snapping at anyone who gets too close there.

In Greek Myth they come about because a god miracles them up to keep people away from some treasure they stashed somewhere. There are other origins though too. Fafnir was a dwarf until lying on a pile of gold hidden in a cave turned him long and scaly by the process of him fitting the definition of a dragon well enough.

[tenuki]

Wow, this is one hell of an interesting thread. I very much enjoyed the OP and a number of the other more constructive contributions.

Where things get silly as fuck is the whole magic-replaces-labor debate. I know I'm being somewhat redundant here, so if you get bored, feel free to skip on to the next post.

Anyway, here's my two cents on the matter:

If your setting says that the world population consists of 91.5 % starving peasants, then that should take precendence over whatever there might be in the books that could possibly be used to trigger a magic-based industrial revolution. If the rules-as-written in fact did support such applications of magic (I'm in no position to tell, as I don't play D&D), then all that finding such an application proves is that some details in the rules don't stand up to scrutiny.

I mean, game designers have been struggling for decades to balance fucking combat, which is a focus of the game. Expecting the same ruleset to support a working emergent model of the world economy that is also consistent with a given setting is a bit much.

Back to the OP, I think it is a very good idea to think about the short-term socio-economic impact of a pack of adventurers descending on your average fantasy village. However, if you take your gedankenexperiment far enough, you invariably end up at a point where either your ruleset or your setting stops making sense.

I also firmly believe the above statement to be true for any combination of setting and ruleset. As a GM, if some bible-thumping player forces me to choose between ignoring a few details in the books and having such details unhinge my game world, I know what I'd do.

[tzor]

Some Dragons are exactly like that, though; they're the extremely dangerous ones.

No there aren't.

Actually, there are a few of these types in the original books, although most players would be hard pressed to really call them "dragons" even though they, for all practical purposes, are. Some of the lawful types were like that. (Off the top of my head I think the gold dragon worked that way.) They would often disguise themselves as humans and mingle with the populations of large cities.

Since they were good most parties rarely fought them, but you wouldn't want to dare oppose an anchient gold dragon run by a component DM who played the intelligence of the dragon to the max.

[Lago PARANOIA]

All soldiers are required to learn a trade of some sort and the trade counts as part of their collateral duties.

There is of course some kind of limit to how productive you can be while doing two jobs at once. Training and guard duty take up a lot of damn time and there will be basically some jobs that they won't be able to do. If the rulers are smart and have the militia working on jobs that are already grievously and probably permanently under capacity like blacksmith and carpenter they can probably (barely) squeeze in enough time to perform at the own pathetic level. Things like soldiers sitting on a chair at the gates and copying down Bane's Treatise while their buddy paints a chair or police officers pulling carts full of rock while they're making the rounds is just something that has to be accepted. And considering how most of the undercapacity occupations are skilled labor this can either be used as a credible way of creating a middle class from nothing or having a Spartan-style warrior overclass.


The Green Revolution comes 3000 years early.

Medieval farming techniques and practices suck snail bait. It's very likely that three households with WW2-style victory gardens in their 1-story suburban houses produces more than an extended Dark Age Europe peasant family could with three acres of land. While no one is advocating that peasants should be getting more than metal plows and oxen, you might have to introduce some miracle crops and fertilizers that produce at a rate that Monsanto can't even dream of. Peasants can harvest a patch of plump strawberries, watermelon, and string beans in the same field in the dead of winter with snow on the ground and they'll still probably end up choking each other out. Tomatoes and soybeans are considered a weed because if they get outside the fields they'll start tearing through bricks in the middle of town in a matter of weeks. During a drought.

Not to say that people don't still starve. Even with these ridiculous staple foods there's only so much safe land people can farm on. Even though people can cause acres of corn fields to pop up by accident the vast majority of it doesn't get harvested because if you go out further than a 100 feet from the edge of the cornfield in you'll probably never get seen again. Sure, you have your selection of pecan, orange, apple, and plum trees only half a mile outside of town but it still requires an armed detachment of guards to watch the peasants while they fearfully pick crops - and oftentimes even with a heavy guard detachment the farming teams just plain don't come back.

The net result is that even though the level of poverty and starvation is about the same as in Dark Ages Europe, it's certainly possible for the agricultural industry to ramp up its capacity a hundredfold just by a group of plucky adventurers passing through and declaring that all of the forest and field critters won't be coming back for a few months. Of course this explosion in production is only temporary because this IS a Points of Light game, the non-adventuring security force is only slightly better than untrained peasants in the grand scheme of things, and the monster population is so INTENSE not even a Z Warrior/JLA/Avengers team-up clear France of all of the bad critters even working nonstop for several decades. Grimdark.

Ironically I have the feeling that this is what people actually want. As Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Redwall, and those Pathfinder videos show people fucking love their food porn. But people also want to feel like they're making a difference AND they also want their pre-Industrial proles to be wandering around in sackcloth with mud on their face. So this is probably the way to go.


Economic guarantees are made by the gods.

Forget the invention of capitalism or the nation-state; this is before the invention of fractional reserve banking. So how the hell are you going to have anything resembling currency? You could just make it so that sometimes you head into Lizardmanland and they tell you that they only trade in amber and that's just part of the story. But a lot of people like the idea of being able to, even in the frozen city at the edge of civilization, be able to calculate exactly how many ice giant hookers that they can buy. So whatever.

The simple solution to this is that certain major gods simply declare what's acceptable currency in their realms and require their priests to set up banking systems. The fluff being that after Bane and Pelor wrecked the economy (more than usual) trying to undermine their rivals' economies they decided to just forge a pact to keep the currency more-or-less fixed for all time. On the rare occasion in which something is invented or a new kind of service is provided, priests pray to the gods in charge of finance for what the price should be. If the gods decide to adjust the price of wheat by 5% this requires weeks of hard knuckled negotiations and global prayer meetings. Seriously, Bane keeps a ledger stating how much a goblin child prostitute should cost. Now while private transactions of small amounts of goods get overlooked, doing something like declaring that muslin cloth should could 2 silver more per yard than the 'official' price can get you visits by the police force and eventually by inquisitors.

Obviously this kind of centuries-long price fixing causes rampant deflation (and depression) and locks out entire new industries or production methods (and keeps in old ones) but since this economy is made for the benefit of PCs and we kind of assume that fantasy worlds are in stasis for thousands of years anyway this is what we want anyway.

[Dr_Noface]

Man, food porn is such an apt description of the Redwall series. Brian Jacques loved going on and on about flan and strawberry cordial.

[Username17]

The idea of hyperproductive farmland combined with incredibly small and besieged homesteads makes for a pretty good D&D baseline. Really tiny villages with high food diversity coupled with a huge amount of added production every time you kill the local monsters. Sounds just about perfect.

-Username17

[tzor]

Medieval farming techniques and practices suck snail bait.

I am going to have to disagree with you on this one. I don't think the problem is as extreeme as you make it out to be. They were poor, but hardly "sucked snail bait."

Farmers did not know how to enrich the soil by the use of fertilizers or how to provide for a proper rotation of crops. Hence each year they cultivated only two-thirds of the land, letting the other third lie "fallow" (uncultivated), that it might recover its fertility. It is said that eight or nine bushels of grain represented the average yield of an acre.

Manor lands were therefore farmed using the three-field system of agriculture. One field was devoted to winter crops, another to summer crops, and a third lying fallow each year.

I don't think it really takes much magic to significantly improve this situation. The lack of fertilizers, an adequate water supply, and the elimination of annoying pests that would diminish crop yield are all various spells that could be under the employ of the local cleric.

It doesn't take major adjustments to the numbers to make the system work. It would still be nowhere near modern standards, the average person would be about 97% vegitarian, but adequately fed.

[Username17]

The average grain yield was like 200% in the middle ages. That means you plant 100 bushels of grain, and you get 200 bushels of grain. And you have to take half of that grain and save it for planting or next year's yields will be lower.

Yes, that's crappy. That is inconceivably crappy. You literally cannot imagine how fucking terrible the proceeds of farming were in the middle ages. It doesn't even make sense.

Between inadequate pest control, a total lack of understanding of fertilization, and just plain shitty planting techniques, the amount of grain at the end of a harvest was scarcely enough to feed the people harvesting it. We're in "untrained Americans picking tomatoes" territory here. The numbers that medieval people wrote down for their crop yields are so bullshit that many people assume they are jokes. But they aren't. Europe was just a really terrible place.

There is a reason that Teotihuacan had twenty times the people of medieval London.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm aware that the gods working in collusion to fix prices for hundreds of years and to send death squads if someone tries to raise or lower prices substantially makes them look like incredibly huge dicks, but unfortunately it's the culmination of several features people want out of their fantasy.

1.) People seriously want their fantasy settings to be stable over periods of hundreds, even thousands of years. While I doubt that most people would care whether the Empire of Blood redrew their borders or countries disappeared/popped into existence several times over, people WOULD care if someone started coming up with dynamite and lightning rods.

So while the incredibly unstable landscape is admirable to surpress economic scientific progress, it doesn't go far enough. You see, people aren't against laser guns (they like wands of Sunbeam after all), they're against mass produced laser guns--so it's okay if your wizard comes up with one after ordering his devil slaves to research crap for several decades, but don't you DARE try to extrapolate that as a common good. If the gods fix their prices it's incredibly easy to lock out new inventions. If a steam-powered plow increases grain yields by 500% but the parts to make it cost 5000 gold pieces it's not going to catch fire, no matter how much anyone improves or simplifies on the process. So most era-changing inventions or processes die directly in the crib, as isolated curiousities.

2.) People want prices to be the same across the landscape. The idea of having certain spells, trade goods, or even labor costing the same amount throughout the campaign setting is fucking bullshit even in a barter economy but even people who want to play logistics and dragons don't want to go through a ledger to see prices for certain things in a region. This makes things easier for DMs and tables at the cost of fucking over imaginary people in the game engine.

3.) Changing churches into banks actually makes sense from a historical standpoint. Of course back then the actual capital was land, not moneys, but since most land in D&D is as worthless as a condom made for parthogenic lizards actual money works just ducky.

[Chamomile]

Do people actually want fantasy worlds to be stable across hundreds or thousands of years? Tolkien had that (sort of, Numenor was more advanced than Gondor and Arnor, and Gondor of the late Third Age was less advanced than at its founding, and so on and so forth), but will people actually care if there was a grand magical empire three hundred years ago that fell into ruin because of whatever fantasy cliche it is that goes around ruining all these grand magical empires? That trope seems to be at least as common as "no one ever invents anything."

[Lago PARANOIA]

Do people actually want fantasy worlds to be stable across hundreds or thousands of years?

Whether people actually want fantasy worlds like this is an open question, but whether people actually create and more importantly say that they like fantasy worlds like this is another question altogether. But worlds that start out as Steampunk/Dark Ages Europe in which progress is fixed, returns to an old equilibrium, or actually declining? Those are a dime a dozen.

Now granted there are some games out there that are all 'fuck all that' and actually put you at the cusp of an exciting technological/sociological/economic evolution but they're few and far in between. The only fantasy world I can think of that actually showed significant and universal technological progress from one game to the next was Final Fantasy X-2 and that was only because it was a huge plot point in the previous game about how various forces intentionally tried to impede progress. The new Avatar series might end up like this too, depending how big of a gap it is between their 'normal' steampunk setting and the new one.

[Chamomile]

Having a fantasy world stable across the decade or so that adventures take place in is not at all the same as having a fantasy world that is stable across centuries, though. You can have a grim setting without having a hopelessly grimdark setting.

[virgil]

The average grain yield was like 200% in the middle ages. That means you plant 100 bushels of grain, and you get 200 bushels of grain. And you have to take half of that grain and save it for planting or next year's yields will be lower.

What is today's average grain yield?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm not sure exactly but I remember reading some statistic about pre-Green Revolution farmers during WWII feeling cheated at a 1000% yield. I'll go look for it.

http://www.cropyields.ac.uk/project.php

Anyway, the above link is an extrapolation of medieval field yields during the mid 14th century taken from ledgers back then. Frank was totally spot on about the 200% figure; over 25 years the barley average was barely above that. And this is well after the creation of the mud plow and three-crop rotation.

The point is that D&D can't function with staple crops that worked anything like they did historically. In addition to having weird insects and diseases that we've never ever heard of, villages get upended by zombie apocalypse like all of the time. The only way it even really works is if you assume something crazy like a 2000% grain yield and even so the setting is so deadly that it barely keeps people above a sustainable population.

[BearsAreBrown]

@200% crop yield, that figure is considered the bare minimum for sustainable life. Finding modern yield statistics is difficult because they're so high they're no longer measured by seed ratios.

There is a reason that Teotihuacan had twenty times the people of medieval London.

Why's that?

[Lago PARANOIA]

One (marginally happy) note about D&D civilization is that noble/vassal rebellions of non-superpowered people would probably be a lot less common. In historical West Europe a rebellious landowner could probably get away with it because their parcels were a lot more able to be sustained on their own. It's not particularly hard to see that if you are the territory producing a bunch of food and soldiers and you have the forests and iron mines as well you don't need to listen to some douchebag king 60 miles away. However this kind of intransigence is a bad idea in D&D-land since you're NOT self-sustaining due to security needs. A province that tried to go it alone, even without having to worry about reprisals from their parent leader(s) would quickly get crushed by monster attacks and the like. The ridiculous fragmentation we had in the old days would just plain not happen.

Of course once you introduce things like a wererat escaped slave living in an abandoned abbey, reading the books in the basement, then unexpectedly becoming the next Necromancer King things become a lot more unstable again but it was good while it lasted.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I'd expect early agrarian cultures to form around druids and Plant clerics. Rulers of other classes might come in and take over, but they'd still need a druidic priesthood until farming techniques became sufficiently advanced. You'd have the classic progression of theocracies to more feudal-style conflict between spiritual and temporal authorities, as well as nobles leveling up and seizing crowns.

[Edit] Also, resurrection [/Edit]

[CapnTthePirateG]

Silly question.

Due to Frank's comment about the Aztecs being better farmers than the Europeans...in settings like the Forgotten Realms which are mash-ups of Fantasy Counterpart cultures, could we safely assume that the Aztecs' non-shitty farming techniques make it over to fake Europe?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'd expect early agrarian cultures to form around druids and Plant clerics.

Err, why? Druid and cleric magic sucks for agriculture. They don't get any tricks better than what a TFC wizard would get or could be replicated better than a few farmers with a plow, saws, and pickaxes. Seriously. Even the sort-of-good exclusive tricks druid/cleric magic get like Plant Growth and Move Earth pale in comparison to what you could do with Fabricate, the Planar Binding line, Minor/Major Creation, Wall of Iron, Command Undead, Teleport, Permanency + Wall of Fire, Prismatic Wall, Permanent Image, and so on. If you trust the hell out of your diplomacy check, bribe skills, or slavery abilities you could also just plain get a coven of sea hags (three CR4 creatures) to spam Control Weather for you three times a day.

Hell, just the fact that wizards have fabricate and command undead should shoot them to the top of the list. 3rd level wizards ordering around colossal skeletons?



The sad fact of the matter is that D&D magic is and was designed to be used in a narrow dungeon crawl. Even spells that look like they'd be awesome on paper generally suck because of their limited range. For the most part you'll want to look for spells with open-ended effects like command undead or planar binding. Or for spells that are lackadaisical towards weight/volume/mass/energy input. Like wall of iron or fire. Or sometimes both, like fabricate or minor/major creation.

[OgreBattle]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plough#Heavy_ploughs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_collar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_drill


Iron, shaped plows, horse collars that don't choke the horse, and a seed drill to plant seeds, these are all inventions that dramatically boost agricultural productivity, and they are all "things China had 100's or 1,000's of years before Europe so that's why so many people live there."


I think the American natives big contribution was crop rotation, and corn and potatos and peanuts being awesome.