[PF]Kingmaker Silliness

[Kamai]

Ok, so I'm running a Kingmaker campaign for my group, and they just made it to the Kingdom building phase. The first question that came out? Can we make at-will item of Purify Food and Water? From there, there was the implication of other spells that can change civilization, and I'm left with the question of why other civilizations in Golarion have not abused 0th and 1st level at-will items and infinite use cantrips. I'm hoping for some ideas that don't just say no to the idea, just ones that have made it more complicated than it's worth for most kingdoms, because I don't want to say no, but essentially not now.

[HunterOfJello]

Purify Food and Water is a 0th level spell that has a target area of 1 cubic foot of water / CL.

A caster level 1 At-Will Purify Food and Water item would cost you 500gp to build or 1000gp to buy. It would also only purify 1 cubic foot of water at a time. That is a valid item for a noble to own and use on a regular basis, but it is nowhere near what a normal village or group of peasants would be likely to possess.

The 'gp limit' stated on page 137 of the DMG describes the "price of the most expensive item available in that community". If you want to get an item worth 1000gp, then you need to go to at least a Large Town, which is a community of 2000-5000 people.

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You party could build items like these and hand them out to villagers to use, but those items could also be easily stolen and used for nefarious purposes. (A crimelord poisons the town well and sells clean water to people for a premium, etc.)

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Most shenanigans people pull with 0 level spells are by building non-harmful and highly beneficial, self-reseting traps.

[TroubleBrewing]

I'd just ban at-will items. Easier than dealing with players familiar with the Tippyverse being the bulls of a campaign's china shop.

[Kamai]

Purify Food and Water is a 0th level spell that has a target area of 1 cubic foot of water / CL.

You party could build items like these and hand them out to villagers to use, but those items could also be easily stolen and used for nefarious purposes. (A crimelord poisons the town well and sells clean water to people for a premium, etc.)

~

Most shenanigans people pull with 0 level spells are by building non-harmful and highly beneficial, self-reseting traps.

I do like the idea of these items being small plot devices in themselves. I've already rule 0'ed the self-resetting traps to not work beneficially, and the party was fine with that.


I'd just ban at-will items. Easier than dealing with players familiar with the Tippyverse being the bulls of a campaign's china shop.

I might go with that if I end up with no other good solutions, but I don't know if I could be reasonable with taking away the at-will cantrips, which can make huge changes in themselves.

[Coidzor]

They haven't because of 1. part setting designer blindness and 2. legacy issues.

All you've got to do is decide if you want to go down the rabbit hole of tippyversing it up or if you want to have a good reason why such efforts have been quietly taken care of every time in the past.

Getting it to work requires money, expertise, organization, and an inclination to do so. Any one of those things could be lacking, but getting something past the level of a small community requires a lot of scaling up.

[Matticussama]

Part of it is that D&D & Pathfinder portray their society as medieval/Renaissance with only cosmetic changes to represent how magic would change society.

However, part of it also stems from the Guns versus Butter economic model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model) which states that a nation has to choose between two options when spending its finite resources. It can buy either guns (invest in defense/military) or butter (invest in production of goods), or a combination of both. This can be seen as an analogy for choices between defense and civilian spending in more complex economies. In a low-level world this is particularly true; that 1,000GP for At-Will Purify Food & Water could purchase 100 Battleaxes, or 200 Chain shirts, etc.

In a D&D/PF context, the people with the money/magic to implement those changes wide-scale have to balance their resource use. If the Good-aligned kingdom puts all of its resources into helping people, the Evil-aligned kingdom who spends all of their money on weapons will simply conquer them.

I designed an adventure around this concept for a low-level group I ran. They found a long-deserted ruined city with surprisingly few traps (for a D&D adventure). The only real threat was wild animals which had taken over the overgrown ruins. As they investigated the ruins they discovered that it was a relatively peaceful civilization which had fallen to hostile invaders. In the end they found very little loot in the ways of weapons or money, but did manage to find a hidden cache full of Eternal Wands of Cure Light Wounds, Create Food & Water, Goodberry, etc that had escaped pillaging.

[Barstro]

However, part of it also stems from the Guns versus Butter economic model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_versus_butter_model)

That might be the best example of that model I have ever seen.

If the players were actually making a kingdom that was to last for decades, such generosity would probably backfire. If you allow everyone to have free food and water, then the kingdom will wind up with more than its share of the non-working, and eventually atrophy into decay.

A better solution would be to set up a university or artisan's area. This would allow more skilled/learned people to dedicate themselves to work and study. Isn't that sort of how DnD religious temples work?

[Xerxus]

Sure, guns are always necessary. But once your defenses are up, why not invest some money in the butter? Taking kingmaker as an example, why wouldn't you start making those infinite food supplying items once you had your military up and going? Sure, one 1/day create food and water item may not seem like much, but at CL 10 it will supply 30 people with food forever. Which is useful both for the military as well as the economy. In the middle ages it was something like 90 farmers for every 10 something else. So in a (small) country with 10000 people, only 1000 people could be fulltime soldiers or craftsmen. One of these items gives you 30 more.

[CaladanMoonblad]

If the players were actually making a kingdom that was to last for decades, such generosity would probably backfire. If you allow everyone to have free food and water, then the kingdom will wind up with more than its share of the non-working, and eventually atrophy into decay.



Um... It would free up labor for other necessary jobs. Free food and water? Great! I can now work on my masonry skills to build a higher wall. Oh wait, the evil kingdom over there is building an army? Well, since we need no farmers, let's all train to be elite warriors worth 10 ordinary soldiers for every one of us.

Look, at one time 9 out of 10 people in medieval Europe were involved in food production, but now only 1 in 100 people are involved in food production. The tractor did not destroy America or Europe.

[Rhynn]

Whew, this one's easy:


Can we make at-will item of Purify Food and Water?

No.

And not traps, either.

Just because the rules don't explicitly rule something stupid out doesn't mean it shouldn't be ruled out. Fortunately, magic item creation rules explicitly warn against letting players do just about anything (at-will free action true strike items, etc.).

Allow only harmful traps, and no at-will magic items.

[Xerxus]

So you can't make a Cauldron of Plenty?

[Alienist]

I do like the idea of these items being small plot devices in themselves. I've already rule 0'ed the self-resetting traps to not work beneficially, and the party was fine with that.


What? No Trappyverse? Blasphemy! /joke

If I remember correctly, most similar items have a 5/day restriction.
Simply enforce the rules about them having to be similar to existing items.

Now I'm curious ... how many command word activation items are there that don't have a daily uses restriction?

[Barstro]

Um... It would free up labor for other necessary jobs. Free food and water? Great! I can now work on my masonry skills to build a higher wall.

That is the original result. But then it becomes "Begging in this kingdom is hard. I heard that the one on the other side of the mountain has free food and water. I'll move there and park myself in front of the food dispensers". Now, if you can strictly enforce a no-vagrancy law, then it would work out a bit longer.

I worked in a town in which it was very easy to get welfare. It was one of the main places people moved to after serving their prison terms and leaving without marketable skills. The "kindness" of the town created many more problems.

[Alienist]

That might be the best example of that model I have ever seen.

If the players were actually making a kingdom that was to last for decades, such generosity would probably backfire. If you allow everyone to have free food and water, then the kingdom will wind up with more than its share of the non-working, and eventually atrophy into decay.

A better solution would be to set up a university or artisan's area. This would allow more skilled/learned people to dedicate themselves to work and study. Isn't that sort of how DnD religious temples work?

If you like the guns vs butter analogy, consider this:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs)

Note that when implemented in RTSes, guns vs butter is exemplified in the tank rush.
If you've been investing in production, and they've been investing in tanks, then if you can hold off their tank rush (or if they delay it long enough) you can outproduce them and crush them.

If you produce ten tanks per turn, and I spend ten turns upping my production to thirty tanks per turn, it doesn't take long for me to catch up and pass you.

With respect to the remarks about giving people food and water and thereby making them lazy, I present the Hierarchy of needs. (See previous link)

What happens is that they move up the hierarchy. A Trappyconomy can take care of the bottom two layers, so the economic activity shifts up the scale. Amongst other things, this is why Silicon Valley is in the US, not Mogadishu.

A simple way of looking at it is the example of ten men on a desert island. They catch roughly enough fish to keep them alive, and that is most of their time. One guy makes a net in his spare time. Now he can catch as many fish as all the others.

A traditional economist would scream and cry about this disaster. After all, the island economy now has 90% unemployment! A huge disaster!

But another way of looking at it is that now the other nine guys can start working on ways to get off the island!

What is being modeled there is a technology shift. Yes, unemployment is incredibly painful. Yes, it is an individual disaster at the time. But we no longer mourn the loss of blacksmiths, or people whose job it was to carry water all day long, or typing pools.

The magical trap thing is a way of buying tech levels for your country really really fast.

The process of rendering each layer of the triangle obsolete, naturally pushes people into higher layers. Note that even if it only doubles the number of people in the top triangle each time you go up a tech level, that's where creativity (and similar things) are found.

It is not unreasonable to draw an equivalency between that top triangle and the percentage of the population with class levels.

Note that in the last thousand years this has played out globally with a very high reliability; high tech nations beat the ever loving crap out of subsistence level nations every time.

Consider this - in all of recorded history, no low tech nation has ever won a naval battle against a high tech nation.

[Alienist]

I worked in a town in which it was very easy to get welfare. It was one of the main places people moved to after serving their prison terms and leaving without marketable skills. The "kindness" of the town created many more problems.

I recently read something about a prison where they focused on rehabilitating the prisoners rather than punishing them. The difference in results was incredible.

I am told that in New Zealand there was virtually no street begging until the goverment decided that building mental care facilities was too much like hard work, and so ~15 years ago they decided to go for something they called community care, which meant turning people incapable of dealing with society out into the community so that the community could look after them. After that begging became a thing. (NB: I don't remember any beggars / crazy people wandering around the last time I visited there, so the policy may have been reversed (for some strange reason it was extraordinarily unpopular))

But it's not all fun and games being a beggar. In London there were guys who sat and begged in the underground ramps at the train stations. I talked to one of them and he started crying. He said nobody looks at him or acknowledges his existence. Even if they put a few coins in his cup they won't make eye contact. By my estimation about half a million people would walk past you everyday. Each and every one of them rejecting you as a person.

[Xerxus]

That is the original result. But then it becomes "Begging in this kingdom is hard. I heard that the one on the other side of the mountain has free food and water. I'll move there and park myself in front of the food dispensers". Now, if you can strictly enforce a no-vagrancy law, then it would work out a bit longer.

I worked in a town in which it was very easy to get welfare. It was one of the main places people moved to after serving their prison terms and leaving without marketable skills. The "kindness" of the town created many more problems.

Assuming that it would be welfare. But it would be salary, just one which wouldn't require agriculture. So you could get 36 soldiers with a cauldron of plenty, or outfit the few soldiers you have with better equipment. It's not a clear cut case.

[Kamai]

I'm happy to see the thoughts on this other than ban at-will items. There's already a lot of stuff I feel like I could use, both to slow the situation and to extend logical results to what they do. Thank you everyone.