[3.5] Spells that fvck with Logistics and Dragons

[Prak]

If someone were intent on making a game where real resources, and the management thereof (as opposed to magic'ing up whatever you need whenever), what spells need to be removed/restricted/made more difficult to acquire than "I hit level 9, so I'm picking Major Creation?"

Prestidigitation?
Create Food and Water?
Minor/Major Creation?
Plant Growth?

[Maxus]

Wall of Iron.
Fabrication.

[Winnah]

What about spells that can create a workforce?

[Maxus]

True. Invisible Servant can do some basic stuff. Summoning up Formians gets you even further...

[shadzar]

the entire conjuration school.

X to Y spells like sticks to snakes, rock to mud, etc....

[TheFlatline]

Wish obviously, unless Wish had to deal with the conservation of mass, which would fucking rock.

"I wish for 15,000 GPs"

*poof*

*Somewhere out there, a dragon's hoard lightens by 15,000 GPs in the transaction... and a howling scream of rage goes up in the night".

You can actually fix all of the "something from nothing" spells by maintaining conservation of material implicitly in them. So Create Food & Pure Water means that food and water *comes* from somewhere.

It'd be kind of interesting. Someone somewhere casts flaming hands and your fire dies out all of a sudden as it's channeled elsewhere.

[fectin]

Necromancy is the biggest offender.

[Prak]

For the endless work forces?


...the spells in D&D really support a post-scarcity setting, rather than anything resembling a medieval economy, don't they?

[Korgan0]

Teleport, Overland Flight.

[Chamomile]

...the spells in D&D really support a post-scarcity setting, rather than anything resembling a medieval economy, don't they?

Making the assumption that people capable of casting level 6 and below spells can and will reliably use them to better mankind, yes. The typical solution is to either assume that there aren't very many wizards using their magical power to set up longterm infrastructure (because they're all either shortsighted, hypocrites with savior complexes, or outright evil) or else that the wizards need their spellpower for personal defense/sustenance too regularly for civilization to ever rely on their intervention.

For the situation of a post-apoc scenario specifically, just assume that anyone who gets above level 8 or so is picked off by angelic/demonic forces so as to nip threats in the bud, and the past 16 years haven't been long enough to grow a fresh crop of high-level casters, or the leftovers of the otherworldly armies still go around knocking off powerful casters. That'll leave you with only a few spells like Create Food and Water to deal with.

[icyshadowlord]

Those spells have always been kind of a dilemma for me when it came to building my own campaign world.

I've tried to look up solutions for it like the ones shown here, though none of them have really helped solve the problem.

[Prak]

Fair enough. I'm toying with the idea that for non-adventurers it takes roughly a year to accumulate 1000 xp, which means that the max level for sixteen years of minimal threat is 5. The survivors of the war will be higher, but they've either been sent to purgatory our are working for warlords.

[Ancient History]

Well, the alternative is to assume that where practicable magic is integrated into the economy. If you have a mage that can cast wall of iron regularly and reliably, you lay off your iron miners. That said, a lot of D&D magic is...arbitrary. Why wall of iron instead of wall of gold or wall of silver?

[fectin]

For the endless work forces?

Pretty much. The obvious example is skeletons in treadmills, but things like haunt shift really start to get crazy.

We had a couple threads on it about two years ago.

[icyshadowlord]

Let's assume we have a nation of Wizards or something of that sort.

If the average citizen was a level 1-3 Adept while the upper class consists of Wizards and/or Sorcerers of level 5 and the leaders were a council of Archmages, how much stuff would they be able to do with spells? Which jobs would be made obsolete by that level of arcane power? Some examples have already been named, what with Wall of Iron, Minor/Major Creation etc.

[shadzar]

Why wall of iron instead of wall of gold or wall of silver?

because war wizards and adventurers have to come up with something to further their goals, and merchant wizards just never though to research those spells and instead create magic items instead of walls of platinum and walls of adamantium.


other than spells, you have to remove magic items that perform the same functions as well if you want scarcity. buckner's everfull purse, decanted of endless water, eversmoking bottle, everburning torch, etc....

[tussock]

I am firmly of the opinion that the benefit of friendly spellcasters (who charge impossibly large amounts of money for spells, BTB) don't even start to make up for the damage done by hostile NPCs and monsters in general.

I mean, you can pay 450gp for a Major Creation spell with a duration, or you can pay a fraction of that to have some peasants whip up the exact same real stuff. Why would anyone ever care about the spell? Wishes cost one thousand XP (via Gate), or five times that on a scroll. No one casts them. Planar Binding requires "individual persuasion", so they don't fucking cast them either. Planar Allies want fair trade too. None of that stuff works.

Sure, Wall of Iron makes iron worth much less than the book value, so either the book value is wrong or you can't use it as a fungible source of iron (it's just a wall and breaking it turns it to dust or whatever), take your pick. Most Instant spells have the same solution, fix the price or fix the effect.

Animate Dead has a fairly tiny HD limit (compared to just buying slaves peasants) and any unattended ones can live up to their Evil tag completely at random. Self-perpetuating greater undead hordes can all fuck off to the negative plane. Golems are stupid expensive.

I'm toying with the idea that for non-adventurers it takes roughly a year to accumulate 1000 xp

FFS, don't do that. The demographics rules are that 95% of people do not get XP. Ever. Cannot happen, even if they get in a lot of bar fights. Humans are 1st level Commoners, with a minority of them the better NPC classes also at 1st level (mostly Warriors). Half the people who do get XP can only level up in those shitty NPC classes. PC-types are rare and half of them aren't even spellcasters of any type. High level people are progressively more rare.

Why? Fuck if I know, but that's how D&D-land is for some intractable reason. Hill Giants are also almost all just no-level no-XP Hill Giants, same for everything.

So there are untold thousands of underemployed Com1's (who work for food) for every 9th level Wizard, and tens of millions for every one capable of popping open a Gate. That's a big part of why spells don't change too many things, there's a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of monsters out there tainting the seed and souring the milk, and Com1's can't even fight off a Giant Rat, let alone a Kobold.

[icyshadowlord]

What about nations filled with wizards like Thay?

[Ancient History]

Thay and Eberron are in a weird boat where people did say "They have lots of magic. Why don't they just sell it/use it to make their lives easier?" And in some cases this actually works, and some cases this does not.

I think in both cases you're looking at two different ideas coming into play. The first is Historical Fantasy Momentum - the idea is that nothing is free, and while magic is awesome, it must have some obvious drawbacks or else everybody would have golem-powered windmills and arcane marked paper currency to protect against forgery or conjuring just steals shit from other places, yadda yadda. This is basically people trying to justify the status quo, even if the status quo is silly or doesn't reflect the actual reality as the rules would have it.

The other is Fantasy Technological Revolution - the idea that if you do have a predictable, repeatable effect then that should have an effect on the economy - just as historically if you find a better method or source of doing X, that is going to have a demonstrable economic effect. This can get weird relatively quickly, but for most people it leads to magitech and magic-driven industrial revolutions. Which is understandable to a degree; if Medieval France had discovered a method to mass-produce Damascus steel by maintaining a cult to a pagan god, that would rapidly change the entire political-economic landscape.

And that can lead to a divergence in technology as well. The people of Papua New Guinea have innovative ways of farming tubers and deriving nutritious gruel from a slightly poisonous tree; this is not the sort of technology you develop if you have lots of open farmland and plenty of maize available. If you can produce relatively pure iron by the ton with magic, you're not going to develop the same skill at mining and refining as other nations because you don't fucking need to.

[hogarth]

Glibness is the first economy-breaking spell that comes to my mind.

[fectin]

Glibness breaks player wealth; I'm not sure it breaks economies.

[Previn]

I mean, you can pay 450gp for a Major Creation spell with a duration, or you can pay a fraction of that to have some peasants whip up the exact same real stuff. Why would anyone ever care about the spell?

There is nothing about Major Creation that makes it actually cost 450gp besides the rules being completely out of wack about spell casting cost as a service. If you're looking at how spells would change resource management, one of the first things you have to do is drop the listed rules for the cost of having spells cast.

[Koumei]

Wish obviously, unless Wish had to deal with the conservation of mass, which would fucking rock.

"I wish for 15,000 GPs"

*poof*

*Somewhere out there, a dragon's hoard lightens by 15,000 GPs in the transaction... and a howling scream of rage goes up in the night".

You can actually fix all of the "something from nothing" spells by maintaining conservation of material implicitly in them. So Create Food & Pure Water means that food and water *comes* from somewhere.

Does it have to be the exact same mass though? I mean, if you just rearrange the atoms a bit, diamond and soot are the same stuff, so you could create a diamond while cleaning your chimney.

That said, I fully endorse changing the Conjuration [Healing] spells to "Your stabbed-out kidney is now good as new. Meanwhile, a million miles away, farmer Bob collapses in pain as his kidney vanishes. The last words he gasps out are 'FUCKING CLERICS!'"

[nockermensch]

Wish obviously, unless Wish had to deal with the conservation of mass, which would fucking rock.

"I wish for 15,000 GPs"

*poof*

*Somewhere out there, a dragon's hoard lightens by 15,000 GPs in the transaction... and a howling scream of rage goes up in the night".

You can actually fix all of the "something from nothing" spells by maintaining conservation of material implicitly in them. So Create Food & Pure Water means that food and water *comes* from somewhere.

It'd be kind of interesting. Someone somewhere casts flaming hands and your fire dies out all of a sudden as it's channeled elsewhere.

It can't work exactly like this, at least in D&D, because the idea of infinite elemental/energy planes.

If you can access an infinite dimension that's all fire, all the time, then it's disingenuous to claim that the total amount of fire in the world is subject to a zero-sum game.

But what could work is something like an enforced cosmic balance. Like, there's an actual physical law on the Prime Material Plane that ensures that every time you cast a fire spell or open a portal to the plane of fire, somewhere else there's a sudden cold snap or portal to the plane of water/air opens and cools things down. Maybe in a world with magic the laws of thermodynamics need to lose all the subtlety to keep things from exploding.

[fectin]

Actually, it could be a zero sum game just fine, even if everything sums to infinity universally, because local sums change.

Just like charge fields in physics.