What would happen if one of us actually got into a world with magic?

[Renen]

Theres apparently a Harry Potter fan fiction where Harry grew up as a more schentifically educated boy.
Am i allowed to post a link to it?

Anyways, he already found out how to break economy, understood just how awesome handy haversacks are, and started filling his with stuff worthy of Shax.

[Honest Tiefling]

How many of us aren't Commoner 1 or Expert 1? I think that quite a few of us would have some knowledge that would be of interest to more primitive societies, but I don't really know how many of us would be able to apply it in a strange situation. The trick would be getting people to listen, not kill you, or not enslave you for your secrets.

[Red Fel]

I think a lot of people are already familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, despite its recent prolonged hiatus.

That said, a lot of what Harry is able to do comes from being (1) extremely rational, at least early on, (2) painfully genre savvy, and (3) a major player in the events of Magical Britain, and therefore entitled to certain protections (e.g. Dumbledore's got his back).

I'm not convinced that anyone else among us has all of those advantages. Genre savviness, certainly. Rationality, possibly, in some cases. But none of us would be considered "The Boy Who Lived," complete with built-in fortune, barring Wizard of Oz-style hijinks, which means that if someone here found himself or herself suddenly in, say, Faerun, the most likely outcome is either (1) getting killed or (2) starving. It's not like profound genre-savviness will protect you from a bunch of heavily armed and belligerent persons.

[Renen]

I think the easiest assumption would be that we would be capable of becoming wizards, due to being more open minded to magic. (I think maybe THAT is the requirement to being a wizard in DnD)

[Karl Aegis]

Initiate Xanatos Speed Chess with whatever deities existed in the world with the objective of eliminating random chance from the world a la Emperor Dornkirk from The Vision of Escaflowne.

[Honest Tiefling]

I'm not convinced that anyone else among us has all of those advantages. Genre savviness, certainly. Rationality, possibly, in some cases.

Oh, you're too kind.


I think the easiest assumption would be that we would be capable of becoming wizards, due to being more open minded to magic. (I think maybe THAT is the requirement to being a wizard in DnD)

But we didn't grow up with magic. We might be worse off then the average commoner in that department, they might have seen a few spells. We also assume it is DnD magic...What if the magic was cast by farting? Some sort of rituals drawing on symbol we don't understand? We understand magic as a logical system with clear rules...But we don't have a book telling us exactly what spells can do. We have to test it, over and over to know everything magic can and cannot do. And then we get to argue about the results of magical experiments instead of Monkday.

And what if magic required faith? I'm going to go ahead and assume we got a variety of religions here, and I doubt many people would be willing to toss that out the window so quickly.

Also, plenty of people are going to fail that intelligence requirement. Sorry to say, but we're probably not all Stephen Hawkings, guys. Now, if magic was fueled by arguing, then we're cooking with fire.

[oxybe]

I think the bigger problem is the assumption that the language they speak is the same languages we do. Throw me in the middle of nowhere rural japan and I doubt either my French or English will help me out much.

Assuming we that communication isn't a problem, I would say the second problem would depends on the society at large and how they treat outsiders. I could easily be barred from their places of magical study for being a fat, pale, hairy canuck with an accent instead of the farmer tanned and toned folks with the regional dialect they're used to if they don't take too kindly to sharing knowledge with outsiders.

Then there is the issue of how they treat the study of magic itself. If they treat magic like we treat electronics, having magical focusing crystals or whatnot replace combustion engines or computers or whatever, then it's really more an issue of learning how it works rather then applying our method of thinking to wow them. If they treat magic in a by-the-books "i use it like my teacher used it like his teacher used it like..." with little experimentation, I could be lauded as a hero for thinking out of the box or burnt at the steak for doing dangerous and unproven tests.

All in all, the question you're asking is "what happens when a radical thinker goes to a place and tries to apply his knowledge". The answer will vary just as much as the different cultures our thinker can land himself in.

[Judge_Worm]

Me in DnD world?
Str 11, Dex 9, Con 10, Int 11 (maybe 12), Wis 11, Cha 10
Expert 1
LE Medium Humanoid (Human)
Skill Focus Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering)
Able Learner

So I go kill some house cats and dogs while studying to become a Cleric of Tiamat. Make friends with a fellow cleric (preferably one really old and really big if you catch my drift), and live the easy life of being a dragon's favorite slave/proxy.

[Red Fel]

I'd like to point out another minor detail: Money. PCs get a starting package of money with which to buy their spellbooks, their longswords, their lockpicks, and their assorted rags. Unless you're able to pawn the contents of your pockets for quick cash, I don't see you starting with the same.

You could very well be a Wizard, Harry. Or a Barbarian on the make. You could have the trappings of an excellent Sorcerer, or even the chance at being a Fighter. But unless you have the money, you can't afford ink for your spellbook, swords for your violent tendencies, or bat guano for your favorite guano-based spells.

And I don't think anyone's going to pay you to help them optimize, either. :smallamused:

[Renen]

You just start splitting ladders into multiple components, or other similar ways that allow one to exploit economy.

[Red Fel]

You just start splitting ladders into multiple components, or other similar ways that allow one to exploit economy.

Ah, but to exploit economy, you have to have access to the economy. Where are you getting your first ladder, exactly? I have an answer, but I want to hear yours first.

[Renen]

Begging? Perform checks? Actually getting a minour job for a few days?

[Red Fel]

Begging? Perform checks? Actually getting a minour job for a few days?

I would have gone with "causing an economic revolution by introducing the concept of 'credit,'" but yours work too. :smallamused:

[Tvtyrant]

I'm too old to apprentice myself, so I would probably starve and die. If I was 15 I might have been a level 1-3 expert with some skill, but as is I am a professional historian in a world where practical skills are not that important.

[Elkad]

Ah, but to exploit economy, you have to have access to the economy. Where are you getting your first ladder, exactly? I have an answer, but I want to hear yours first.

Steal a ladder.
Borrow the ladder and short-sell it.
Do some unskilled labor to pay for one. (Or skilled. If you know the language, a scribe gets paid well.).
Sell whatever possessions you have that crossed over to magicland.
Invent something. Waterwheels and steam engines are too expensive without starting capital, but better candle wicks are pretty close to free.
Roll Survival checks to gather hides or something.

Assuming you are free, should be easy to make enough to buy that first ladder.

[Sam K]

Ah, but to exploit economy, you have to have access to the economy. Where are you getting your first ladder, exactly? I have an answer, but I want to hear yours first.

Villany?

I cant speak for anyone else, but the last few years, I've spent a fair amount of time eating quality food, working out regularly and sleeping in a warm bed. This doesn't exactly make me Conan the Barbarian (if there is ever a "Conan the Management Consultant", though...) but compared to your average commoner who eats meager amounts of low-quality bread, considers protein a luxery, and is taxed to the limit? I'm thinking if I can find a good piece of wood (club) I could probably murderhobo a few of those for a ladder or two. After that? Set up an ambush for that level 1 adventuring party who is bound to show up (if they don't, I'll beat some orphans, that always work). I'm not really a challenging encounter for 4-5 armed people, so game balance dictates that they will likely be a very poorly optimized party. If I'm lucky, they'll bicker and argue and kill eachother. If adventurers are anything like D&D players, it's almost guaranteed!

After that, I'm gathering up evil geniuses and forming an intervention taskforce for failing evil overlords. But we've had that discussion already!

Edit: Assuming I don't want to start towards evil too soon (I know what afterlife I might be facing, after all), then assuming I can speak the language (I claim knowledge of the common tounge based on the fact that I am human!), a modern education does get you decent employment opportunities in a society where most people went to the school of "Skill focus: profession (farmer)". I can write and do basic maths.

[LoyalPaladin]

I think I would just pray I was dumped into the Forgotten Realms... at least I know where things are and could find a way to get to the temple of Torm! Then take all my next levels in a certain class...

[Honest Tiefling]

Actually...I think I will change my answer to 'possibly keel over and die'. Remember what happens to populations where they get reintroduced to populations in contact with Africa, the spawn point of our race? A good chunk dies horribly. So both groups are potentially introduced to new and horrible pathogens. Except theirs still stick around despite having clerics with heal disease. Their diseases make ours look like chumps because their lesser diseases have all been eradicated.

As for the good food and a warm bed idea, I would follow the same logic, but it has just made me chubby. Someone doing hard labor for most of their lives could probably pick me up and toss me around. I mean that a bit literally, too.

[Sam K]

As for the good food and a warm bed idea, I would follow the same logic, but it has just made me chubby. Someone doing hard labor for most of their lives could probably pick me up and toss me around. I mean that a bit literally, too.

Hard labor only builds you up if you get plenty of quality food. If we assume that the commoners live a lifestyles much like dark age pesants, they would probably suffer from stunted growth because of their limited food supply. Basically, murderhobo pesants in LE feudal societies with high taxes, not viking freemen.

Anyway, here's another option:

1. Aquire mysterious clothing (anything modern would likely work).
2. Find tavern frequented by adventurers.
3. Sit in corner until approached by reasonably high level party with full casters.
4. Trade knowledge of a prime material plane ran by technology rather than magic for some training and starting funds.

Don't speak the language? They have comprehend language? They think you're making it up? Zone of truth! Anyway, adventurers have a higher tolerance towards wierdness than most people.

[OldTrees1]

Well we wouldn't appear with anything but knowledge. We might not even be capable of magic having come from a mundane world like earth.

Step 1: Short Term Survival
We need to survive wherever we landed. Hopefully we are on the material plane and there is civilization nearby.

Step 2: Mid Term Survival
We need to gain access to the economy to gain a secure line of shelter, food and water.

Step 3: Exploit Our Sole Advantage
There are many paths here.
a) We could use real world innovations(tech and ideas)
b) We could use canon knowledge. We may not have any ranks in Knowledge[the planes], but we know much more about the planes from reading splatbooks. This also applies to secrets and deities.
c) Hook up with some talent and use optimization for mutual benefit. I would avoid creating a Pun Pun though.

[(Un)Inspired]

Ugh... I've spent entire adult life studying epistemology and metaphysics. Getting dumped into a world where you can directly read someone's thoughts and you can talk to reality's architect directly makes me pretty useless.

I guess I've got pretty desirable loins. I'd go into prostitution to try and pay for wizard college.

Man a magical life would be pretty bleak for me.

[Tohsaka Rin]

And once again, I sadly discover that people have forgotten the old classics.

Clearly, if you're pulled into a magical world, you're the Chosen One.

Trouble, fame, and fortune will find you, my friends.

...Meanwhile, I'd rumor-hunt for the nearest mage, and sell/trade/barter off my plans for a flying island. Apprentice (or sorcerer/psion/Cleric) my way up to Craft Wondrous Item, and introduce everyone to the magical wrist watch.

..What? If creating water from nothing is a 0th level spell, I'll be rollin' out the Rodexes inside a week.

[Baroknik]

Hope I'm LG and...


Pazuzu, Pazuzu, Pazuzu

Now if I can only find a way to become a kobold beforehand...

[Auron3991]

As far as money goes: invent thermite (iron and aluminum/copper can't be that hard to find, especially if you pick up a job helping the local blacksmith), sell in easy to use loads, profit.

As far as getting a character class: find whoever's willing to teach me (hopefully a local cleric or wizard) and dedicate what time I don't spend on earning money (gotta keep that business running) on learning that.

I actually don't think their average diseases would be that much worse for us, at least for those of us who didn't spend our lives constantly sanitizing every spec of dirt (we are better nourished on average and most of us have had vaccines). Even some of their bad ones would be on the level of our rough diseases (not all clerics can cast cure disease). The real problem would be the magical diseases, but those are much rarer.

The real problem would be making sure to not keep the 'typical' gamming mindset.

[Azoth]

Easy start up cash idea. Do you frequently carry a pocket knife in your day to day life? If so, pawn it for 150+gp. Modern machine pressed knives probably count as master work by medieval standards. Do you smoke? Imagine how much your spare lighter is worth to these people. Hell, pawn your cellphone off as a portable minstrel device or instant portrait maker.

Selling random things in your pocket should get you the equivalent to at least a first level PC's starter wealth. This means you should be able to afford room and board as well as apprenticeship fees easily enough.

Actually, this is a rare instance where if it isn't an oppressive society that a female transfered over could start off significantly more wealthy than a male. This is accomplished by selling jewelry and non mercury or lead containing cosmetics.

[Honest Tiefling]

As far as money goes: invent thermite (iron and aluminum/copper can't be that hard to find, especially if you pick up a job helping the local blacksmith), sell in easy to use loads, profit..

If you need aluminium in a pure form, you are out of luck. Various compounds were availble, but it wasn't isolated/refined until the 19th century. And when it was, it was for a time more or equally as valuable as gold.

[ace rooster]

What most of the "get rich quick" ideas fail to take into account is that the existance of 'magic' implies a whole different physics, of which magic is a part. Chemistry could be completely different for a start. Any device from the real world stands a good chance of plain not working when built, so no lighters, steam engines, or thermite. Also, once we are in universe we lose our position outside it. Knowledge of good builds is useless if you have no means of influencing builds, and while a player sorceror can choose the spells they get there is no reason to assume that characters choose their gifts in universe. Wizards to not have access to the whole list of spells in existance and then pick one to 'research', they research an area of magic and might produce a new spell.

The only things of value that you would be taking to the world would be abstract concepts, which can work independent of the particular physics. Because of this my first port of call would be a wizard of high intelligence, and introduce them to my knowledge of computer science. I wouldn't know enough in universe mechanics to build a computer, but chances are that they will. Hopefully they will see the value in it and take me under their wing (They might just because of my strange origin. Hopefully they will not want to do anything too invasive to study how I got there). Tuition on the universe mechanics (including magic) would be exchanged for tuition on mathematics if they know less than me, or grunt work if they know more.

[OldTrees1]

Also, once we are in universe we lose our position outside it. Knowledge of good builds is useless if you have no means of influencing builds, and while a player sorcerer can choose the spells they get there is no reason to assume that characters choose their gifts in universe. Wizards to not have access to the whole list of spells in existence and then pick one to 'research', they research an area of magic and might produce a new spell.

Good point, although teaming up with someone with power would allow us to utilize our knowledge for mutual benefit just like in your abstract concepts example.

[Auron3991]

If you need aluminium in a pure form, you are out of luck. Various compounds were availble, but it wasn't isolated/refined until the 19th century. And when it was, it was for a time more or equally as valuable as gold.

I just wasn't tossing the possibility of using aluminum out due to the fact that they might have found an easier way to get it using magic. Any metal that can be used to create an exothermic single-displacement reaction with iron oxide when exposed to sparks works. Of course, this assumes that chemistry works the same way there.

[Solaris]

Actually...I think I will change my answer to 'possibly keel over and die'. Remember what happens to populations where they get reintroduced to populations in contact with Africa, the spawn point of our race? A good chunk dies horribly. So both groups are potentially introduced to new and horrible pathogens. Except theirs still stick around despite having clerics with heal disease. Their diseases make ours look like chumps because their lesser diseases have all been eradicated.

I'd say it'd be the other way around - our diseases, being subjected to the forces of natural selection, would be more virulent, whereas spells that cure disease wouldn't necessarily leave behind microbes resistant to treatment the way our antibiotics do. If anything, that would breed diseases that are less nasty so as to make the host organisms less likely to seek treatment.

On the off chance that's the case, I think one of the first things I'd do is head to the nearest good-aligned temple, explain the situation, and see if I can't get them to nail me with a disease-removal spell so I don't accidentally kick off the world's Spanish Flu outbreak just 'cause I'm carrying the influenza virus or something. I'm less concerned about getting killed; it wouldn't be my first time I've been someplace where everyone wants to kill me. This time, I won't be getting yelled at for acting in self-defense.

Next stop is a wizard's academy (preferably good-aligned, but enlightened self-interest will do in a pinch; I've got a lot of enlightenment to serve their self-interest). I'm carrying in my head knowledge encompassing practical fields ranging from biology to chemistry to economics to basic metallurgy to medicine and warfare (not just read about, have actually done and used). They're people who make a living leveraging knowledge for power. If, between the lot of us we can't manage to drag this world kicking and screaming out of medieval stasis and into the Renaissance (at the least!), I'm not trying very hard.

Adventurers ruin game economies by bringing back tons of gold and jewels. I'll wreck 'em by bringing in the Industrial Revolution. Tyrants try to take over the world by force of arms. I'll take it over by force of science. I'll lift the peasantry into the Jeffersonian ideal of the educated gentleman farmer, expunge superstitious nonsense and replace it with the scientific method, revolutionize farming by the introduction of modern sustainable agricultural practices (the druids can give a hand here; if they don't want to, I'll point out that the world I'm from has lost half its species to the insatiable maw of my species's progress and I will not be denied), eradicate the aristocracy by the introduction of the firearm, and employ economic pressures to ensure that the setting's kings have merely a generation or two of absolute power - at most! - before the monarchists crumble before the Republic.

It only gets worse if I learn magic. If we go by IQ-to-INT conversions (http://simantics.blogspot.com/2011/01/d-and-iq.html), I'm somewhere around a 17-18 (not that I'm trying to brag, though I had an unfortunate acquaintance who was absurdly proud of his IQ of 112). This is supported by other aptitude tests which have placed me in the high nineties on percentiles. That suggests I'm predisposed towards learning arcane magic, though those levels I took in the military mean I might not be casting 9th-level spells pre-Epic.

Thus, on top of leveraging my knowledge for resources and making the world a better place through science, I'm going to be learning to rewrite reality on a fundamental level by multiclassing into Wizard. I will make magitech a thing... or at the very least, be a really neat gunslinging gish.

[YossarianLives]

Ah, but to exploit economy, you have to have access to the economy. Where are you getting your first ladder, exactly? I have an answer, but I want to hear yours first.
If we're taking D&D 3.5 I'll punch a rat in the face and conveniently find 37 gold pieces nearby :smallwink:.

I would then continue stepping on tiny weak creatures until I leveled up.

[Invader]

Ah, but to exploit economy, you have to have access to the economy. Where are you getting your first ladder, exactly? I have an answer, but I want to hear yours first.

Depends on the world im getting thrust into. If it's one I know about (Faerun for example) I could probably live out the rest of my days in relative comfort just by selling the identities of the majority of the lords of waterdeep. There's a ton of other info that you could sell to make a quick profit as well. If it was a brand new unknown world? I guess it would depend on what I was able to bring a long with me.

And patenting simple modern inventions.

Tools - wrenches, pliers, screws/screwdrivers
A simple spring/clamps/suspension
Simple improvements to fire arms like the cartridge
Buttons/zippers/Velcro
Sandwiches
Elevators
Modern irrigation techniques


Really there are just a plethora of simple things you could "invent" that would change a medievil type of fantasy world and make you a rich rich person.

[Blackhawk748]

First off i think i need to point out that most of us would have an Int of 12 or higher. I assume that most of us can do Algebra, which makes us quite well trained actually. Remember that Int represents average IQ and IQ is based off of common knowledge, if the magic world works on similar rules to ours (baring magic obviously) then we are well ahead of the curve. Or we all just have at least half a rank in a bunch of random knowledge skills. That may just be me though.

Honestly im fairly standard stat wise, though i think my Con may be higher than the average commoner, thank you modern medicine and good food. Also i am capable of using several medieval weapons, the bow springs to the forefront of my mind. Am i good with most of these? No, though i am a capable shot and am capable of using a sword without embarrassing myself, so i have several Weapon Proficiencies. Also i know how to make gunpowder (woo!!) so that may help if i can get to some resources. (crappy grenades? yes please.)

Would i survive? Possibly, depends where i get dropped and with what. I can hunt, so i really just need a knife and i can finagle my way for a bit. I will be REALLY cranky when i finally make it to civilization. Hopefully i could then get some help, maybe find a mage that can cast comprehend languages and tongues if they cant understand me. After that i may try to learn magic, or make a gun.....


Depends on the world im getting thrust into. If it's one I know about (Faerun for example) I could probably live out the rest of my days in relative comfort just by selling the identities of the majority of the lords of waterdeep. There's a ton of other info that you could sell to make a quick profit as well. If it was a brand new unknown world? I guess it would depend on what I was able to bring a long with me.

Also this. If i get dropped into KoK i can get by by simply telling people where specific relics are, as i would know where multiple named weapons are as well as the cause of several problems. Its a bit harder in KoK than in other settings as its basically a giant sandbox, so there's less "plot" things to do.

[Sam K]

I would suggest being VERY careful about trying to create an industrial revolution, especially if you're anywhere near a bunch of mages. Mages are the ultimate craftsman guild; they have skills that commoners could never master, and this mystery gives them power and influence. Why would they want an industrial revolution? These things bridge the gap between uneducated pesants and craftsmen skilled in the art of telling the laws of physics to gtfo.

Also, neither the clerics or druids are likely to look kindly on such a thing. The industrial revolution can completely wreck the environment, and promote a more secular lifestyle. Even the gods of good might have doubts about promoting something that could end up killing them. As far as survival strategies go, I would suggest one that is less likely to piss off all the T1 classes.

After some more thinking, I believe I would try to find some druids and learn from them. Druid has the advantage that you have far less micro management than clerics (no god looking over your shoulder) and you are less dependant on equipment (spell books and a place to research) than wizards. You are also far more likely to survive the first few scary levels, and you depend less on being able to join the right order (PRC) at the right time in order to reach peak power. You're slightly less awesome than a batman wizard, but honestly, I can deal with "just" being in the top 1%.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
1) 99% of all initial scientific assumptions are wrong and an even higher percentage of practical applications initially fail. That's why it takes decades of work from thousands of people to understand and develop a new field. And somehow a single person understands a whole field in that brief a time? Riiight. Also, science is research and experimentation, not logic, as evidenced by apparently "illogical" and counter-intuitive modern theories and principles. And yet the OC uses lots of logic and effort to "prove" his theories on the world, not the other way around. He is ultimately never proven wrong, his theories confirmed even when the world initially "resists" them.
2) Every single canon character in that story is out of character more often than not. And look at that, they are always proven wrong ultimately while the OC is proven right.
3) The entire setting has either been considerably altered or *someone* didn't do their research. Magical knowledge isn't being lost for example - new magic is continually being researched and developed. The wizarding wolrd isn't a small, regressing community: it has over thirty million members worldwide and that is just the wizards. Partial transformations are not an impossibility a new merlin is needed to discover - they're both commonplace and the first thing every student accomplishes in their first transfiguration lesson. A wizard's magic doesn't "run out". Magic and advanced technology are incompatible in the Potterverse as enough magic messes with machines, especially electrical ones.



That story fails in both the Potterverse and Science components - big time. It's more wish-fulfilment than anything else. Wouldn't you want not only to enter a world of magic - but also one who proves your every preconception and where you're the only one who understands how magic works, even better than centuries-old wizards?

[Solaris]

I would suggest being VERY careful about trying to create an industrial revolution, especially if you're anywhere near a bunch of mages. Mages are the ultimate craftsman guild; they have skills that commoners could never master, and this mystery gives them power and influence. Why would they want an industrial revolution? These things bridge the gap between uneducated pesants and craftsmen skilled in the art of telling the laws of physics to gtfo.

Hence why I'm not looking for one that's evil and I'm not (at least initially) trying to make magic more common knowledge, just physical science.

However, a guild that's good-aligned or at the very least motivated by enlightened self-interest can enjoy being the industrialists in the Industrial Revolution. If you'll recall your history, it worked out pretty well for the captains of industry. Not only will they enjoy the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, more people being intelligent and wealthy means they'll have better choice of recruits and a broader customer base.


Also, neither the clerics or druids are likely to look kindly on such a thing. The industrial revolution can completely wreck the environment, and promote a more secular lifestyle. Even the gods of good might have doubts about promoting something that could end up killing them. As far as survival strategies go, I would suggest one that is less likely to piss off all the T1 classes.

The environmental reason is why I want to enlist the aid of the druids, actually - to not wreck the environment. If you find a circle who isn't stupid about "Hur, Nature versus Civilization, hurr!", then you can get them to help you repair and alleviate damage done to the environment by industrial processes.

I'm not so sure an Industrial Revolution and general scientific enlightenment would result in people abandoning gods who are demonstrably active in their lives. The real world doesn't have people running around casting cure light wounds and remove disease, after all. If anything, the good-aligned temples would support me on account of my mission being improving the wellbeing of the common man.


After some more thinking, I believe I would try to find some druids and learn from them. Druid has the advantage that you have far less micro management than clerics (no god looking over your shoulder) and you are less dependant on equipment (spell books and a place to research) than wizards. You are also far more likely to survive the first few scary levels, and you depend less on being able to join the right order (PRC) at the right time in order to reach peak power. You're slightly less awesome than a batman wizard, but honestly, I can deal with "just" being in the top 1%.

I have only a middling Wisdom bonus (I mostly make it on perceptiveness and stubbornness, not so much enlightenment); it would be sub-optimal for me to try picking up a divine casting class. I'm less concerned about the first few levels on account of my military experience; I'd be multi-classing over into Wizard from some martial class (Fighter, most likely; I suck at stealth and am kinda average at survival, although Martial Rogue would be a pretty decent option as well given the variety of my skills).

[goto124]

I would try to search for optimum builds, then get frustrated as I realise there's no internet...

[kellbyb]

I have only a middling Wisdom bonus (I mostly make it on perceptiveness and stubbornness, not so much enlightenment); it would be sub-optimal for me to try picking up a divine casting class. I'm less concerned about the first few levels on account of my military experience; I'd be multi-classing over into Wizard from some martial class (Fighter, most likely; I suck at stealth and am kinda average at survival, although Martial Rogue would be a pretty decent option as well given the variety of my skills).

If you're looking at martial classes, how about warblade? It would synergize wonderfully with your intelligence.

[Solaris]

If you're looking at martial classes, how about warblade? It would synergize wonderfully with your intelligence.

The Great DM in the Sky banned ToB. My only hope is to jump over into this other campaign setting we're talking about.

[kellbyb]

The Great DM in the Sky banned ToB. My only hope is to jump over into this other campaign setting we're talking about.

I don't believe that an actual magical world would have a DM-like figure controlling it.

Because of this, I would train in spellcraft start developing as many custom spells as I can in the search of finding weak spells that would normally never exist for the sake of game balance but would totally work in an actual, logical setting.

[goto124]

Which makes me wonder- how exactly would you 'choose' classes if you lived in a magic world? How do I pick up a fighter, or wizard, or thief class? How do I choose which Feats, Professions, Skills, and Spells I learn? What about PrCs? How did my character get those stuff as soon as she met the requirements?

[Troacctid]

Am I the only one who would look for Wizards who could help me get back home? I have friends and family here, the climate is nice, there are no rampaging orc hordes, and I have Wi-Fi.

[Snowbluff]

I mean, if I were to start with a level, I would probably take a level in Cleric and grab Versatile spellcaster and DMM Persist (I have flaws). I'd have a few more HP from... DIVINE PROVIDENCE... or something to help me through my first level. Then I'd cheese my way into Mystic Theurge with a Wizard level and work as a craftsmans healer.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

I would train in...
Reality checks:

1) One skill rank is equivalent to learning a foreign language. Just to have a benchmark on how hard it is to train stuff.


2) Your first level in most PC classes requires years of training.Hiring someone competent to train you requires several GP per day even for a minimum-level teacher. 5 years of training as a wizard would cost of 1.000 GP for tuition.


3) 1.000 GP is twenty pounds of gold, or $40.000. It is also the equivalent of 20.000 ladders, or 2.000 10' poles. Just finding that many ladders or selling that many poles is going to take years - you can't expect to make more than 20 thefts/purchases per day or sell to more than 5-6 customers for a single item only adventurers use.


4) This isn't the modern era of machine tools - everything is handcrafted. By the rules, you can only expect to finish 5-10 very simple items (such as wooden spoons) per day, or a single simple item such as a 10' pole. By realistic crafting, you might take even longer.


5) Gaining a level requires defeating around 13 challenges, ranging from CR-2 to CR+5 based on the encounter tables. You sure you want to risk injury and/or death a dozen times over for that increase in power? Especially without appropriate challenges ensured by a DM?
Having fought an enraged cat when helping my mother the vet, I gotta tell you; fighting inappropriate encounters such as a 16-pound cat that insists he doesn't need no stinky vaccine sucks big time.

[Invader]

Reality checks:

3) 1.000 GP is twenty pounds of gold, or $40.000. It is also the equivalent of 20.000 ladders, or 2.000 10' poles. Just finding that many ladders or selling that many poles is going to take years - you can't expect to make more than 20 thefts/purchases per day or sell to more than 5-6 customers for a single item only adventurers use.



20 pounds of gold would be closer to $400,000 not $40,000

[mvpmack]

1)
That story fails in both the Potterverse and Science components - big time. It's more wish-fulfilment than anything else. Wouldn't you want not only to enter a world of magic - but also one who proves your every preconception and where you're the only one who understands how magic works, even better than centuries-old wizards?

And I thought I was the only person around here that thought that story was only a few steps up from traditional Mary Sue fanworks.

I'm sure that there are plenty of ways the Muggle world could change the Wizarding world of HP, but that fic isn't it.

[OldTrees1]

And I thought I was the only person around here that thought that story was only a few steps up from traditional Mary Sue fanworks.

I'm sure that there are plenty of ways the Muggle world could change the Wizarding world of HP, but that fic isn't it.

The fic isn't about how the muggle world would change Rowling's HP world (such a misconception would tend to create a negative opinion regardless of whether that opinion was accurate or not). So instead I will comment on the topic at hand.


I don't think we should assume that people in a D&D world choose their class advancement with anywhere enough ease that it would take for us to assume our own class advancement. I remain convinced that it is more plausible to find and assist and existent caster than it is to claim we would be a caster.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

The one thing a character from our world would have major advantage over people in the DnD world is knowledge of DnD. Seriously, just how many DnD trivia require astronomical knowledge checks in-game but every player can easily learn by reading the books?


Just writing and selling our knowledge of DnD cosmology would be a major source of income in interested circles.

[Ashtagon]

And patenting simple modern inventions.

Tools - wrenches, pliers, screws/screwdrivers
A simple spring/clamps/suspension
Simple improvements to fire arms like the cartridge
Buttons/zippers/Velcro
Sandwiches
Elevators
Modern irrigation techniques

Patent?

Even if patent law exists at all, you'll probably find that only members in good standing of the guild of engineers would have anything even vaguely resembling a right to patent things, and even then, that right would only extend to the reach of that guild. The idea of government-enforced intellectual property laws isn't a thing in most fantasy settings.

[Invader]

Patent?

Even if patent law exists at all, you'll probably find that only members in good standing of the guild of engineers would have anything even vaguely resembling a right to patent things, and even then, that right would only extend to the reach of that guild. The idea of government-enforced intellectual property laws isn't a thing in most fantasy settings.

In a game setting maybe but we're talking about a real world situation so it's perfectly reasonable to think individual kingdoms at least would have them. Patents in our world go back over 500 years so its it like they're a modern invention either.

As for the engineer guild, you don't think they'd be bending over backwards to recruit someone who has so many amazing inventions? You'd have your pick of which craftsmans guild you'd want to join, though it'd probably be easier and way more profitable to start your own.

[atemu1234]

Become a wizard, optimize the hell out of it, maybe make a (well-written) deal with a devil, proceed to control the world, become a LE Lich, and eventually challenge Vecna.

[Solaris]

I don't believe that an actual magical world would have a DM-like figure controlling it.

Or at the very least, a lot more lenient a DM than the one controlling our world.


Because of this, I would train in spellcraft start developing as many custom spells as I can in the search of finding weak spells that would normally never exist for the sake of game balance but would totally work in an actual, logical setting.

Interesting.
Examples?

[kellbyb]

Interesting.
Examples?

It's too late to give you a good list now, but I'll try to think about it.

3.0 haste comes to mind.

[ninjamaster1991]

1) "Pazuzu Pazuzu Pazuzu" (Or just abuse BoVD sacrifice rules)
2) Wish for a Ring of Three Wishes
3) Go to Step 2
4) ???
5) Take over the world!

Alternatively,

1) Artificer
2) Traps!
3) More traps!
4) Seriously, this is way too many traps!
5) Probably destroy the world in a grey goo scenario

[Yahzi]

We would do pretty well.

We all have a huge advantage over people in fantasy books, or even just the past. We have exposure. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." Now I had to google to see who said that, but the text of the quote I remembered on my own; and more importantly, the idea of it you already heard of.

You don't have to understand the scientific method. The mere knowledge that such a thing can exist is a huge step forward. You have watched TV since you were old enough to walk. You have been exposed to more ideas, situations, cultures, technologies, and philosophies than most ancient geniuses had in their lifetimes. You already know that the stars are suns, like ours; that the natural force that keeps them in orbit is the same thing that makes apples fall; that lightspeed cannot normally be exceeded; but even more importantly, you know that democracy is possible, money doesn't have to be backed by gold, women are essentially equal to men, and so on. The mere knowledge that the rich are not genetically superior to the poor is so explosive it would have gotten you killed a few hundred years ago.

When it comes to combat, you may already know that gunpowder is not that hard to make and that spinning the bullet (rifling) makes it more accurate. Those two ideas alone end the reign of knights. Even D&D knights, who can take several longsword blows before dying - the power of even a moderately advanced black-powder design (say the Civil War era Sharps .50) will drop a freaking buffalo in one shot. Go look up how many hit die a buffalo has. And guns do it at longer ranges than magic; and more to the point, you've seen a WWII movie. You know how combat is supposed to look with guns and artillery and flying strike forces.

It's not just the technological knowledge you need. You can't join a Celtic tribe and start a factory. You need cultural knowledge; you need to know how to share the rewards and labor of the factory in a way that will make everyone buy into it. And you have that knowledge, even if you don't know it, because you've seen it done your whole life.

You have the accumulated wealth of 7,000,000,000 people's stories and 400 years of the Scientific Revolution. The stuff you learned from Bill Nye the Science Guy shows would make Issac Newton green with envy. Yes, translating it into actual practice would be hard; but the fact is you have Knowledge: Technological Culture at 10 skill ranks. And it's a class exclusive skill.

If this is a topic that interests you, and you find my take on it intriguing, then you might enjoy a new fantasy series called "Sword of the Bright Lady." Which is about a mechanical engineer who goes to a world with magic, and classes, and levels. There's a link in my sig. :smallsmile:


(Edit: you might also want to check out Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series)

[NichG]

I'd say that most people would be slow-starters in such an environment. Here's the thing - the magic systems we're so used to manipulating come with huge sets of information that is given directly to us as players as 'the ground truth of the world'. We know that 5ft squares are an important concept, the how-and-why of stats versus derived quantities versus spell slots, the idea of damage, saves, status effects, etc. And these aren't just abstractions for dealing with something complex; when we have the sort of TO discussion which leads to Tippyverse, the standard of the discussion is to take those things as absolutely and literally true. Part of the advantage we have is that the universe of any tabletop game has to be something which is well-suited to being evaluated by the brains of the humans at the table.

On the other hand, any sort of system that underlies a functioning universe is simultaneously not constrained by that, and also is likely to be constrained by a ton of other things which in a tabletop game we can ignore because the humans at the table smooth over the inconsistencies. On top of that, many of the rules of tabletop games are aimed towards making gameplay fun, making the players happy, etc. If I say e.g. "even a microgram of this substance kills you on skin contact with no defense" most people here would have the intuition: that isn't how D&D 3.5 works, I don't think thats a real thing! It feels unfair or broken in a gameplay sense, but a universe which is not a game has no particular bias towards 'fairness' or 'balance' (through the anthropic principle you can maybe make an argument for macroscale stability, but not for balance or fairness)

So, if you took a career scientist with no exposure to D&D or fantasy literature and put them in a magical world, they'd probably have a bit of an advantage due to having a novel view on things and so having a chance to see things that others have missed (thats not to say that a rational approach would always help them if, e.g., magic is of the sort that is granted as favors to people by irrational entities rather than a built-in law of the universe). But if you took a similar scientist but one who has exposure to D&D and fantasy literature biases and put them in a magical world, I think it's likely that they'd come in with a bunch of assumptions that would on average be much more likely to hinder them than to help them.

I see this a lot with players who are very experienced with one system going to another, especially if there are superficial similarities. They import assumptions from the systems they are familiar with, and often that can make them inattentive and less flexible when things differ. Even in the above post for example, there's the implicit assumption that 'my guns can drop a buffalo in one shot, so if I make guns in another world they will do so as well.' But there are rules for guns in D&D, and they can't drop a buffalo in one shot. And that's just going to D&D, not some other universe with its own not-ours, not-D&D laws.

[Yahzi]

But there are rules for guns in D&D, and they can't drop a buffalo in one shot.
Actually, hunting is impossible in D&D, because no missile weapon kills a deer in one shot. A heavy crossbow does 1d10; a deer has on average 15 hps. So either the D&D world has radically different physics, or all hunters are really Thieves who can sneak to within 30 ft. I vote for the other out, which is hunting has to be modeled somehow and any weapon that kills a 5HD animal can kill a 5HD human.

That said, technology does one thing magic doesn't do: scale. If you manage to make a single gun, you can make a hundred. It's just time, effort, and materials. The same is not true of magic items, whose manufacture consumes something intangible (in D&D it's XP but in every fantasy system it's something; there's a reason no fantasy worlds have assembly line magic item production).

Your comments about bad assumptions are good, and I agree they would be slow to start (and might well die before they got their head around the new rules), but I think people tend to overlook just how much social technology we all have incorporated into our mental frameworks.

[goto124]

In a game setting maybe but we're talking about a real world situation

Aaand I'm confused. Are we in a game world, or a real world that somehow resembles DnD?

[NichG]

Actually, hunting is impossible in D&D, because no missile weapon kills a deer in one shot. A heavy crossbow does 1d10; a deer has on average 15 hps. So either the D&D world has radically different physics, or all hunters are really Thieves who can sneak to within 30 ft. I vote for the other out, which is hunting has to be modeled somehow and any weapon that kills a 5HD animal can kill a 5HD human.

Right, you're making a conclusion based on 'what sounds reasonable'. But if we're talking about some sort of universe derived from a different underlying physics, it doesn't really care about what you as a human feel is reasonable. If biochemistry were a little less efficient, it might very well be that hunting and eating other animals would be impossible to beat break-even above some scale without technological intervention (e.g. you'd be using the animal meat to harvest energy from a cooking fire, rather than using the meat itself for energy). Things like that make the world very different from our world, but they aren't excluded either.

In a D&D universe, perhaps everything is so filled with 'positive energy' that hunting as we know it actually is simply impossible. You can't one-shot an animal with a weapon, so you absolutely must use a snare that holds it in place before you can kill it.



That said, technology does one thing magic doesn't do: scale. If you manage to make a single gun, you can make a hundred. It's just time, effort, and materials. The same is not true of magic items, whose manufacture consumes something intangible (in D&D it's XP but in every fantasy system it's something; there's a reason no fantasy worlds have assembly line magic item production).

Actually, I can think of quite a few settings with assembly-line magic item production. Harry Potter is one of them, for example - when you talk about specific 'models' of brooms, society-scale transport networks, etc, then that sounds like a form of mass production to me. In D&D, you have Eberron and Faerun. Going more obscure, in Death Gate Cycle there's all sorts of magi-tech at various scales, and there aren't really any material constraints on it - the Patryn and Sartan can just slap a rune down on anything and make very complex magitech; its like not needing circuit fabrication plants and CAD to make integrated circuits, just your fingertip. In Amber, the idea of even needing to produce something is silly - if you can define it, you can just find a universe where someone else has produced it for you. Of course, if you aren't an Amberite or denizen of the Courts of Chaos you're basically out of luck in terms of having any impact on the setting whatsoever. Black Company is sort of sitting on the threshold. There you get a small number of hyper-powerful individuals who are doing the mass production and disbursement of magic items, to the extent where a single powerful mage can direct 99% of the labor and do the last critical 1% themselves. For example, the Lady personally supplies an entire army with the equivalent of miniaturized rocket-launchers over the course of a year or so. On the other hand, the flying carpets are explained to be extremely costly to create, so the setting has both ends of that spectrum. Xanth, to give an example from even further from D&D-ish roots, doesn't have assembly-line magic but it has extremely common and consistent magical nature - instead of making magic items, people can (and do) farm them.



Your comments about bad assumptions are good, and I agree they would be slow to start (and might well die before they got their head around the new rules), but I think people tend to overlook just how much social technology we all have incorporated into our mental frameworks.

I think its an interesting question to ask what the timescale of social technology nucleation would be, if it were introduced in another system. The systems that were used historically weren't pointless - there were particular constraints and situations which made them local optima for that time period. You can maybe make more efficient set-ups, but you have to get over the energy required to re-arrange enough of the existing society so that the new thing isn't just horrible. For example, a feudal government with inheritance is more unstable on long timescales because the new king might be an idiot or whatever, but if the current king is good then it's going to take a few decades for the benefit of something more meritocratic to really become obvious. Before then, saying 'hey, you should give your power up to the people!' to the king is just not going to work very well.

So it's not just about having the better ideas, its also about knowing how to manipulate the situation into one that really shows the advantage of those ideas to the extent that they catch on. And getting into a position where you can exert that influence. And the modern skills we have for doing that can actually work against us in the context of a different culture, which is structured to have a different kind of internal advancement. For example, imagine if you're thrown into a fantasy China where the worth of a scholar was measured by their ability to memorize and quote from historical literature (which isn't an uncommon trope).

[Belial_the_Leveler]

You already know that the stars are suns, like ours;
This is not always true in a DnD world. Also, it's largely irrelevant, unless you're a wizard with either Gate or Interplanetary Teleport spells - in which case going to other solar systems takes all of twenty seconds.


that the natural force that keeps them in orbit is the same thing that makes apples fall
DnD casters know of gravity just fine. They've even learned to manipulate it.


that lightspeed cannot normally be exceeded;
Irrelevant. Modern engineering of an entire nation still needs years and hundreds of billions of dollars to send someone to the moon. A single spellcaster of middle level can do so in only a few minutes of personal effort - or take a few hours to build a spaceship to take other people there that is much faster than anything we have currently.


you know that democracy is possible
No it isn't. In no government anywhere on the planet do the people take decisions of state or vote upon laws. They vote upon representatives - but the pool those representatives come from is effectively controlled by the rich and powerful. And the accountability of those representatives is practically nonexistent, since the only way the public can "punish" them for anything they do against it is not to elect them in the following term.


money doesn't have to be backed by gold
Yes it does. If it isn't backed by intrinsic value, spellcasters can copy it, conjure it or otherwise fabricate it in vast amounts. And if you have banks and ATM, you're just begging someone to magically persuade the bank workers to do what he says, or animate the ATM and have it give up all money it contains.


women are essentially equal to men
The DnD world is a place where women can and do fight eldritch horrors and dragons, they become clerics and wizards and empresses. Our world is a place where women rarely ever see the frontlines of even moderately dangerous battlegrounds, where they have secondary roles at best in most major religions, where they make up less than 20% of well-known scientists and less than 5% of successful high-level politicians.



The mere knowledge that the rich are not genetically superior to the poor
But they are! Rich people, at the cost of 25.000 gp per improvement, can directly increase their ability scores with inherent bonuses. They can pay major sums to an elf so their children will be born with a lifespan three times that of the average human, or planar-bind an outsider and have their children be born with the half-celestial template and thus even longer lifespans and far superior physical and mental ability scores.




will drop a freaking buffalo in one shot.
Buffalo has AC 13 (touch 9) and 37 HP. An 8th level DnD knight has 90 HP and AC 30 (touch 20). If you can hit a charging buffalo 19 times out of 20, you'll only be hitting the knight 2 times out of 20. So the knight will be 30 times harder to kill than a buffalo - assuming he doesn't have any sort of protection vs firearms.


You know how combat is supposed to look with guns and artillery and flying strike forces.
About as ugly as with created undead and summoned demons. Except demons can teleport up to your face and have a bazillion immunities and all it takes is a few seconds of effort to summon one with a spell, whereas it takes millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to build a tank, let alone drive and fuel it.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

That said, technology does one thing magic doesn't do: scale
Whaaat? Let's say you got a factory with 3000 workers in 3 shifts and assembly lines and whatnot and I got a 10th level sorceress with Fabricate. We're making MG 42 machineguns. Each one takes 75 man-hours to make in said assembly line and takes up 1/10 of a cubic foot in volume. So the factory can make 318 guns per work day. The sorceror can make 100 guns in one minute with a single casting of Fabricate - and she has 5 spell slots of 10th level for every 8 hours she is in restful calm, such as reading her favorite novel, sunbathing or sleeping. She can thus make 1500 guns per day and work all of 15 minutes.


But wait, this is totally inefficient. Our sorceress doesn't want to spend her whole life making more guns than 5 factories at once. She thus does the following every day for 3 months - the same 3 months your engineers will be building said factory;

1) Resting for 8 hours/day.
2) Lesser Planar Binding 5 outsiders per day, then killing them for the XP and potential treasure.
3) Working 8 hours/day on her Rod of Fabrication.

After 90 days, our sorceress has completed her Rod of Fabrication, which allows its wielder to Fabricate at-will. She now can, in a single hour, fabricate 6000 cubic feet (a thousand tons) of metal goods or 60.000 cubic feet of nonmetal goods, provided she has the skill.


She can literally build a mansion in one hour, or the Empire State Building in a couple of months, on her own.

[aspekt]

They'd best come back and get the rest of us.

[Solaris]

We would do pretty well.

We all have a huge advantage over people in fantasy books, or even just the past. We have exposure. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." Now I had to google to see who said that, but the text of the quote I remembered on my own; and more importantly, the idea of it you already heard of.

You don't have to understand the scientific method. The mere knowledge that such a thing can exist is a huge step forward. You have watched TV since you were old enough to walk. You have been exposed to more ideas, situations, cultures, technologies, and philosophies than most ancient geniuses had in their lifetimes. You already know that the stars are suns, like ours; that the natural force that keeps them in orbit is the same thing that makes apples fall; that lightspeed cannot normally be exceeded; but even more importantly, you know that democracy is possible, money doesn't have to be backed by gold, women are essentially equal to men, and so on. The mere knowledge that the rich are not genetically superior to the poor is so explosive it would have gotten you killed a few hundred years ago.

When it comes to combat, you may already know that gunpowder is not that hard to make and that spinning the bullet (rifling) makes it more accurate. Those two ideas alone end the reign of knights. Even D&D knights, who can take several longsword blows before dying - the power of even a moderately advanced black-powder design (say the Civil War era Sharps .50) will drop a freaking buffalo in one shot. Go look up how many hit die a buffalo has. And guns do it at longer ranges than magic; and more to the point, you've seen a WWII movie. You know how combat is supposed to look with guns and artillery and flying strike forces.

It's not just the technological knowledge you need. You can't join a Celtic tribe and start a factory. You need cultural knowledge; you need to know how to share the rewards and labor of the factory in a way that will make everyone buy into it. And you have that knowledge, even if you don't know it, because you've seen it done your whole life.

You have the accumulated wealth of 7,000,000,000 people's stories and 400 years of the Scientific Revolution. The stuff you learned from Bill Nye the Science Guy shows would make Issac Newton green with envy. Yes, translating it into actual practice would be hard; but the fact is you have Knowledge: Technological Culture at 10 skill ranks. And it's a class exclusive skill.

This. This right here is probably the single best point anybody in this thread has made.
It's not that we're smarter than those wizards with their 18+ Intelligence scores, it's that we've seen, lived with, and done things that those guys have never even dreamed of. We do things on a daily basis that were impossible a hundred years ago.


(Edit: you might also want to check out Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series)

Where do you think I got the idea of how to introduce an Industrial Revolution?
I really liked the first half of the series. I think it kind of petered out after that.


Yes it does. If it isn't backed by intrinsic value, spellcasters can copy it, conjure it or otherwise fabricate it in vast amounts. And if you have banks and ATM, you're just begging someone to magically persuade the bank workers to do what he says, or animate the ATM and have it give up all money it contains.

Debt-based fiat currency and gold-based currency aren't the only possible forms of currency, nor are counterfeiters unique to a realm with spellcasting.

We already have bank workers vulnerable to persuasion and ATMs vulnerable to various forms of molestation. That's not a new problem.


About as ugly as with created undead and summoned demons. Except demons can teleport up to your face and have a bazillion immunities and all it takes is a few seconds of effort to summon one with a spell, whereas it takes millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to build a tank, let alone drive and fuel it.

Just because an anti-tank rocket is cheaper and easier to make than a tank hasn't obsoleted the tank... especially if anti-demon warding spells are a thing.

Created undead, especially of the mindless sort, are pikers compared to clever troops armed with cartridge firearms.

[Invader]

Aaand I'm confused. Are we in a game world, or a real world that somehow resembles DnD?

I was under the impression we were in a real world fantasy type setting where magic and monsters existed but we got there from our actual world.

Think a "magic Kingdom for Sale" scenario by Terry Brooks

[Invader]

Whaaat? Let's say you got a factory with 3000 workers in 3 shifts and assembly lines and whatnot and I got a 10th level sorceress with Fabricate. We're making MG 42 machineguns. Each one takes 75 man-hours to make in said assembly line and takes up 1/10 of a cubic foot in volume. So the factory can make 318 guns per work day. The sorceror can make 100 guns in one minute with a single casting of Fabricate - and she has 5 spell slots of 10th level for every 8 hours she is in restful calm, such as reading her favorite novel, sunbathing or sleeping. She can thus make 1500 guns per day and work all of 15 minutes.


But wait, this is totally inefficient. Our sorceress doesn't want to spend her whole life making more guns than 5 factories at once. She thus does the following every day for 3 months - the same 3 months your engineers will be building said factory;

1) Resting for 8 hours/day.
2) Lesser Planar Binding 5 outsiders per day, then killing them for the XP and potential treasure.
3) Working 8 hours/day on her Rod of Fabrication.

After 90 days, our sorceress has completed her Rod of Fabrication, which allows its wielder to Fabricate at-will. She now can, in a single hour, fabricate 6000 cubic feet (a thousand tons) of metal goods or 60.000 cubic feet of nonmetal goods, provided she has the skill.


She can literally build a mansion in one hour, or the Empire State Building in a couple of months, on her own.

Fabricate is going to make the individual components of a rifle, it's not going to make it completely assembled so you're still going to need an assembly line of people to put them together. Admittedly it's still faster but not as much as you're estimating.

I doubt you're going to find many spell casters willing to risk the wrath of a small army of outsiders to make mundane weapons for someone when there's much easier safer ways to make more money.

The example about the mansion is also wrong. It's going to take much longer than that.

Also you can't prepare spells three times in one day

If a wizard has cast spells recently, the drain on her resources reduces her capacity to prepare new spells. When she prepares spells for the coming day, all the spells she has cast within the last 8 hours count against her daily limit.

It's going to have to be a pretty high level caster as well. An exotic weapon has a craft check of 18, a modern mechanical rifle is going to at least be in the mid 20s. Of course there are ways to to get around this but then you're using up more of your resources as a caster decreasing even further the amount of rifles you can actually make and the time in which you can make them.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

OK, let's see what a company of well-trained troops with modern firearms could do vs a company of disposable minions by a competent wizard;

Well-trained nonelite troops are ~lvl3. They got around 20 hp, AC 18 that works vs bullets. Armed with an assault rifle, they can attack in 5 round bursts dealing 2d6 piercing at +7 attack roll, assuming weapon focus and masterwork assault rifles. They also got binoculars, survival gear and a few grenades dealing 5d6 piercing damage or forcing DC 17 fortitude saves vs blindness/deafness. They cost ~500 gp to train and ~3000 gp to equip each.

The competent wizard Lesser Planar Binds a few Shadow Demons then Geases them to work for him. It takes him half an hour of work to do it and can call 5 demons/day. Shadow Demons are invulnerable to all nonmagical attacks thanks to their incorporeality; no amount of modern weaponry will ever harm them. The wizard sets the demons to hunt down enemy troops. Some hours later, hundreds of enemy troops are horribly slain or rounded up and sacrificed to the demon lord of your choice.


@Invader:
Assembling a modern assault rifle takes a few minutes and every trained soldier knows how to do it - it's the medieval equivalent of knowing how to put on your armor. As for the mansion, the time is for the house itself, not the interior decorations and furniture. Those are up to the owner.
Do note that frabricate's casting time isn't affected by how difficult an object is to make - you only need to be able to make it in the first place. For a 10th level caster, we got +13 skill ranks, +5 ability modifier, plus taking 10 for a total result of 28. That kind of result is more than capable of making most any item that isn't electronics - the highest Craft DCs are around 25.

And yes, you can prepare spells multiple times/day. You will notice that the limit is 8 hours, not 24 hours. So you can regain them every 8 hours.

[GreyBlack]

What would happen? Well, how good are you at scrounging for food in a medieval system? Most of us would likely starve. Those of us with some form of marketable skill would live long enough to die happy. Those of us with a 14+ int could get accepted to a university and learn magical powers, provided we had some way to pay. Overall though? Not much,most likely. Very few of us would have the skill or actual intellect to master even the most basic spells, and even fewer would be able to survive long enough to find a mentor. Hell, even for myself, I would only likely have a 14 int (I speak 5 languages and put ranks in linguistics, my college major), so my confidence in most people's ability to master magic is low.

[atemu1234]

What would happen? Well, how good are you at scrounging for food in a medieval system? Most of us would likely starve. Those of us with some form of marketable skill would live long enough to die happy. Those of us with a 14+ int could get accepted to a university and learn magical powers, provided we had some way to pay. Overall though? Not much,most likely. Very few of us would have the skill or actual intellect to master even the most basic spells, and even fewer would be able to survive long enough to find a mentor. Hell, even for myself, I would only likely have a 14 int (I speak 5 languages and put ranks in linguistics, my college major), so my confidence in most people's ability to master magic is low.

With fourteen intelligence, you could become a wizard. Hell, a good enough one. By twentieth level you'd be able to cast 9ths, even without magic boosts.

[hamishspence]

The hard part is surviving until you've found a Wizard Mentor who's willing to take you in.

And then surviving the apprenticeship (going by some of the fluff, especially in Forgotten Realms, being an apprentice is harsh at best and downright horrible at worst).

[atemu1234]

The hard part is surviving until you've found a Wizard Mentor who's willing to take you in.

And then surviving the apprenticeship (going by some of the fluff, especially in Forgotten Realms, being an apprentice is harsh at best and downright horrible at worst).

Summon Pazuzu. Get your wishes there, folks. And spendin' money.

[hamishspence]

You don't know what your alignment is when you arrive in the D&D-verse though.

[atemu1234]

You don't know what your alignment is when you arrive in the D&D-verse though.

Definitely not chaotic evil.

[Invader]

OK, let's see what a company of well-trained troops with modern firearms could do vs a company of disposable minions by a competent wizard;

Well-trained nonelite troops are ~lvl3. They got around 20 hp, AC 18 that works vs bullets. Armed with an assault rifle, they can attack in 5 round bursts dealing 2d6 piercing at +7 attack roll, assuming weapon focus and masterwork assault rifles. They also got binoculars, survival gear and a few grenades dealing 5d6 piercing damage or forcing DC 17 fortitude saves vs blindness/deafness. They cost ~500 gp to train and ~3000 gp to equip each.

The competent wizard Lesser Planar Binds a few Shadow Demons then Geases them to work for him. It takes him half an hour of work to do it and can call 5 demons/day. Shadow Demons are invulnerable to all nonmagical attacks thanks to their incorporeality; no amount of modern weaponry will ever harm them. The wizard sets the demons to hunt down enemy troops. Some hours later, hundreds of enemy troops are horribly slain or rounded up and sacrificed to the demon lord of your choice.


@Invader:
Assembling a modern assault rifle takes a few minutes and every trained soldier knows how to do it - it's the medieval equivalent of knowing how to put on your armor. As for the mansion, the time is for the house itself, not the interior decorations and furniture. Those are up to the owner.
Do note that frabricate's casting time isn't affected by how difficult an object is to make - you only need to be able to make it in the first place. For a 10th level caster, we got +13 skill ranks, +5 ability modifier, plus taking 10 for a total result of 28. That kind of result is more than capable of making most any item that isn't electronics - the highest Craft DCs are around 25.

And yes, you can prepare spells multiple times/day. You will notice that the limit is 8 hours, not 24 hours. So you can regain them every 8 hours.

At most you can prepare and cast spells once a day, I posted the rule that explains it.

There's not a rifle in the world that you can simply assemble from raw parts in a few minutes. Yes there are components that you can assemble/disasemble yourself for cleaning etc. but there are many more than require rivits, welding, specialty tools and machines to actually put together.

You're still just producing the raw materials for the mansion. You're producing boards not assembled walls for example. It's going to still take a long time.

My point about the skills is, it seems unlikely that you're going to find a high level caster that spent his whole life as a spell caster pumping up a mundane crafting skill that he was going to use for years and years. Thats how a PC works but we're assuming it's a real world situation and that's not how it works in the real world.

[GreyBlack]

You don't know what your alignment is when you arrive in the D&D-verse though.

True neutral. You haven't performed enough actions when you arrive to dictate any alignment, much like a baby would be considered TN.

Personally, TN, bordering NG. More and more, I'm becoming less inclined to help people and instead study the fabric of life, the universe, and everything, but still posers possess the desire to help others.

[hamishspence]

True neutral. You haven't performed enough actions when you arrive to dictate any alignment, much like a baby would be considered TN.

There might also be an element of "judge by personality rather than actions" for new introductees.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

At most you can prepare and cast spells once a day, I posted the rule that explains it.
No, the rule you quoted specifies once per 8 hours, not once per day.



You're still just producing the raw materials for the mansion.
Nope! Fabricate turns raw materials into finished product. No assembly required.

[Invader]

No, the rule you quoted specifies once per 8 hours, not once per day.



Nope! Fabricate turns raw materials into finished product. No assembly required.

And it says any spells cast within the last 8 hours count towards that days spells and every other table and list in the PHB states spells per day, not 8 hours. 8 hours is not a day.

A board is a finished product, cut stone is a finished prodect, fabricate doesn't assemble anything.

[Belial_the_Leveler]

1) You cast some spells. Then you rest for 8 hours. After that rest you prepare spells - spells cast in the "last 8 hours" will be exactly zero because "the last 8 hours" will be said rest. Then cast spells again, rest for another 8 hours and so on and so forth.
Wizard spell preparation and sorceror spell slot recovery only need said 8 hours of rest. Only divine casters like clerics are limited to recovering spells a single time per 24 hours.


2) I choose to fabricate guns. Fabricate turns raw materials into guns. I choose to fabricate a house. Fabricate turns raw materials into a house. Unless you claim that neither the gun nor the house are products or that crafting skills can't build a gun or a house, I don't see a problem - Fabricate mentions no limitations on how complex the product can be, the number of its parts, or whether assembly is required or not.

[Invader]

1) You cast some spells. Then you rest for 8 hours. After that rest you prepare spells - spells cast in the "last 8 hours" will be exactly zero because "the last 8 hours" will be said rest. Then cast spells again, rest for another 8 hours and so on and so forth.
Wizard spell preparation and sorceror spell slot recovery only need said 8 hours of rest. Only divine casters like clerics are limited to recovering spells a single time per 24 hours.

If you can cast 10 spells a day and you cast all of them, just because you can prepare them after 8 hours of rest doesn't excuse the fact that youve already cast your allotment of spells for that day.


2) I choose to fabricate guns. Fabricate turns raw materials into guns. I choose to fabricate a house. Fabricate turns raw materials into a house. Unless you claim that neither the gun nor the house are products or that crafting skills can't build a gun or a house, I don't see a problem - Fabricate mentions no limitations on how complex the product can be, the number of its parts, or whether assembly is required or not.

You can only cast a certain amount of spells per day that number is listed with the description of the spell caster. there's a difference between how long it takes to prepare spells and and how long it takes before you can cast them. You can't cast more than your daily allotment of spells regardless of how long it takes to prepare them.

We'll just agree to disagree in how fabricate works since its not definitive either way.

[Troacctid]

I think fabricate is the logical way to do an assembly line. I once had my players assault a weapons factory; when they got inside, they found a single high-level Dwarf Psion with a pile of raw materials on one side and a pile of finished products on the other, flanked by two mid-level Penguin Warlocks firing hellrime blasts into the dweomer of transference produced by the magic chair he was sitting on. (I thought it was a pretty nice setup, since it also spiced up the ensuing combat encounter by giving him minions and making him immune to magic. They eventually beat him by bull rushing him off the chair so the party's blaster could burst him down.)

[balegar]

As for myself, I have nowhere near as much courage as my most cowardly PC's. If I were to see something so much as a small monstrous spider, I would be in tears and would want to come back home.

[Alent]

This is kind of what I think would happen:

1) A playgrounder ends up in a fantasy world.
2) The Playgrounder starts attempting to reshape the world TO style..
3) The Playgrounder offends the local powers, madness ensues.
4) ???
5) The powers of the fantasy world come to our world for revenge.

[goto124]

Penguin Warlocks

I should get one.

[GreyBlack]

With fourteen intelligence, you could become a wizard. Hell, a good enough one. By twentieth level you'd be able to cast 9ths, even without magic boosts.


There might also be an element of "judge by personality rather than actions" for new introductees.

Eughhhh.... judging by personality indicates that we can map personality traits on a good/evil axis, and could potentially limit access to tropes like the heroic sociopath. Additionally, it's a nature vs nurture debate there that gets hairy, because it leads to "always chaotic evil" stuff. Better to just say actions speak to it and not touch it again.

[Solaris]

OK, let's see what a company of well-trained troops with modern firearms could do vs a company of disposable minions by a competent wizard;

Well-trained nonelite troops are ~lvl3. They got around 20 hp, AC 18 that works vs bullets. Armed with an assault rifle, they can attack in 5 round bursts dealing 2d6 piercing at +7 attack roll, assuming weapon focus and masterwork assault rifles. They also got binoculars, survival gear and a few grenades dealing 5d6 piercing damage or forcing DC 17 fortitude saves vs blindness/deafness. They cost ~500 gp to train and ~3000 gp to equip each.

The competent wizard Lesser Planar Binds a few Shadow Demons then Geases them to work for him. It takes him half an hour of work to do it and can call 5 demons/day. Shadow Demons are invulnerable to all nonmagical attacks thanks to their incorporeality; no amount of modern weaponry will ever harm them. The wizard sets the demons to hunt down enemy troops. Some hours later, hundreds of enemy troops are horribly slain or rounded up and sacrificed to the demon lord of your choice.

Congratulations, you've established that... a character of at least ninth level can probably beat a group of third-level characters. That's not impressive. He could likely have done that at fifth level with fireballs, assuming he won initiative. "Level-inappropriate encounter" is the term here... especially when you're assuming set-piece battles with everyone standing around waiting on the wizard to do something.

You're also lowballing the assault rifle damage by quite a bit (d20 Modern assault rifles deal 2d8 on the regular shot, and with Burst Fire are dealing twice that), but that's besides the point. The point is that you're not winning an argument by massively stacking the deck against the other side in so blatantly transparent a way that precludes anybody's suggested course of action - or indeed, any reasonable and intelligent method of operating in the setting, up to and including the idea that the soldiers would have some manner of operational intelligence (including possibly divinations).

Let's take mine, for example. Sure, your demon-summoner might win a fight against some unsupported line troops - but what happens when he comes up against those troops supported by another mid-level wizard from the guild masterminding the Industrial Revolution? A simple greater magic weapon makes your demons go 'poof' under a hail of now-magical bullets. Heck, hand all of the troops a 50-gp oil of magic weapon and go to town on the demons.

This is without even getting into the different numbers of characters at different levels. It's swell your mid-to-high level wizard can outperform fifty people - too bad regular people outnumber her thousands to one.


This is kind of what I think would happen:

1) A playgrounder ends up in a fantasy world.
2) The Playgrounder starts attempting to reshape the world TO style..
3) The Playgrounder offends the local powers, madness ensues.
4) ???
5) The powers of the fantasy world come to our world for revenge.

So what you're saying is that this is a win-win situation.
Through my actions I will either save their world... or destroy this one's established order. Either way, I get what I want.

[russdm]

Fabricate allows for converting one sort of material into another of the same sort. It says nothing about making different sorts. So you could use a block of stone and Fabricate it into a throne or something made of stone. So, a Fabricated mansion gives you a mansion made of one material with nothing else in it. With a high craft result, you can make a really nice stone throne, but you can't make a wooden door. Given what is required for guns (both wood and different kinds of metal) that wizard/caster isn't Fabricating any firearms ever. To do that, they need either Major Creation or Wish. Nothing else can cut it. You would closer to 4 or 5 wizards to make a firearm's parts then somebody to assemble it. One makes the wood parts, another makes the steel metal parts, another makes the copper metal parts, another makes another of the metal parts. I don't actually what different metals are used with wood to make early muskets and rifles, but I am thinking something like 3-4 of them. So the wizards are limited here.

Using magic to make magical bullets or magical firearms is easier since you could treat the firearm like a bow and the bullets like arrows. So you should be able to enchant the firearm to fire magical fire bullets. There is already precendent in the game with magical arrows plus magic sling bullets. They would hurt stuff now.

A main point when guns trumped knights and Longbowmen: Guns required less skill and training to use and became more accurate. Plus the amount of force being delivered was stronger than average what most armors could deflect. A bunch of peasants with decent accuracy could mow down knights with firearms. Until Kevler, standard armor disappeared for a while.

I don't think a wizard that takes a shogun blast to the face is really going to be casting a bit now.

[Ermanti]

I have no opinion on the effectiveness of a shotgun blast to a wizards face, but...

Www.paultwister.com is a story about a guy stuck in a fantasy type world. The author brings up a lot of these ideas over the course of his 3 books. He's amateur, but writes a good, and believable story

[Ashtagon]

Fabricate allows for converting one sort of material into another of the same sort. It says nothing about making different sorts. So you could use a block of stone and Fabricate it into a throne or something made of stone. So, a Fabricated mansion gives you a mansion made of one material with nothing else in it. With a high craft result, you can make a really nice stone throne, but you can't make a wooden door. ...

Using magic to make magical bullets or magical firearms is easier since you could treat the firearm like a bow and the bullets like arrows. So you should be able to enchant the firearm to fire magical fire bullets. There is already precendent in the game with magical arrows plus magic sling bullets. They would hurt stuff now.

If fabricate can't make guns because multiple materials, it equally can't make bullets more advanced than the powder-and-shot musket-ball variety, and can't even attempt gunpowder.

[aspekt]

I would try to search for optimum builds, then get frustrated as I realise there's no internet...

This is truth.

[mvpmack]

re: many people's gun arguments, not going to quote them all

Gunpowder already exists in D&D, or an equivalent at least (tindertwigs). Problem solved. If a person in the real world can handload a cartridge that will cycle an autoloading pistol with strike-anywhere matches or snap caps, you can be very certain that a sufficiently skilled alchemist will be able to reproduce at least that with alchemy checks and some time. If you put the idea in the head of an alchemist who can manage a DC25 craft check you'll be producing smokeless powder via alchemical means in a year or two (given time for experiments and such). If you happen to know about the interactions between nitric acid and cellulose, you can probably cut that down to a few months. Once the process is known, you can outsource it to other alchemists.

Firearms don't contain copper parts generally. Literally all the components of a gun can be made out of steel. Wood furniture is not needed to make a gun; skeletal stocks made of steel have been around since mass production was invented. If you want to be extremely technical, yes you do need different kinds of steel; specifically spring steel for the sear and buffer/slide springs, hardened steel for the parts of the action subject to wear (slide rails, bolt face, firing pin, hammer, barrel, etc.) and any cheap steel for the frame and the other parts. In practice you could still do it in one cast though, since you could use fabricate to replicate the process used to make different kinds of steel (since most of it is heat treatment and different kinds of forging).

Cartridge cases you need brass (a copper/tin alloy), but bronze has already been discovered if steel objects exist, so just buy the bronze and fabricate it to make the cases. You can make steel cases too if that's a problem, Russia already does that and steel is more common than bronze.

Bullets you just need lead alloy, ideally lead + bismuth or lead + antimony. You could make them with pure lead, but that's really soft and not super ideal. You'll probably create a market for lead overnight, since it's much more common than the other metals you want and not useful for much. Have the lead alloyed before it gets to you and fabricate it into bullets once you get it. Better yet: make steel bullet molds and have someone else do it. Make sure that you discuss the issues of working lead with any potential workers, and have some form of toxin resistance available to smiths who are smelting it.

Loading simple cartridges is something you could mass produce with unseen servants or animated skeletons. It's pretty simple stuff; fit a primer (made by alchemists, essentially a tindertwig) into the cartridge case, put (measured) gunpowder in the case, double check the powder charge to make sure it's the right amount, then seat the bullet into the case mouth and crimp the case (which would require you to make a case crimping device, also not a very hard task). If anyone reading this thread wanted to learn to do it, it would take less than a minute of explanation at each step to show someone how. It's really that easy to do.

Fabricating Sten guns or an equivalent would not require a very difficult Craft check (with Fabricate), and producing rudimentary cartridge-fed breechloading smoothbore guns would be even easier. Combine that with oils of magic weapon or a custom spell similar to Flame Arrows (sor/wiz3) that worked on bullets...

[Necrovosh]

After spending the majority of my free time over the last two years building a metal shop from the ground up, I'd hope to the Host that I end up in Eberron, or at least somewhere with Artificer training. I'm fairly certain that the steel lathe, steam force, and basic electrical engines would be of interest to the Cannith, and I'd love to trade mass production/interchangeable parts ideas for levels in Artificer. Not because I want to break the world (the House can do that just fine by itself) but because I want to be a robot, (always have, always will) and renegade mastermaker is the best way to get there.

If it turns out that I'm the Chosen One, or that I'm not in a world with access to the Artificer class... well, I've been hunting and fishing all my life. I suppose I could make a good Scout, especially with the aforementioned Gingery shop experience allowing me to build basic firearms easily, though I can handle a bow well enough (I've never harvested anything with one, but I have built and fired them.) I'd prefer to be a Wizard, but something tells me that magic is a bit different than the dissociative process, so that would be a start from scratch kind of thing.

As for the "survive a few days" bit, I suppose Survival is a trained skill for me, and I carry a multitool with me everywhere. A multitool is a pretty bad weapon, but it can build an atlatl in minutes. Getting the throwing arc down might take a few sticks, but even a fire hardened spear tip will get a bunny. If I'm in a city, I hope that someone has the decency to get a cleric with comprehend languages around instead of braining me with a mace, or I just pretend to be mute till I pick up the language. If I'm in a small town, furs and skins probably sell alright. My only worry is being attacked by something bigger than a possum, as my spear fighting skills are rudimentary at best (the pointy end goes in the bad thing, right?)

One thing I haven't touched upon is psionics. If there's even a hint that psychic power is available, I'd prostitute myself to the nearest psion/psy-artificer in a hot second. Magic from thoughts is basically what I do, but literal magical thoughts? The second I get a chance to literally see an aspect of my personality embodied as a psicrystal? You can bet your sweet bippy I'm jumping on that.

[Talothorn]

If Greyhawk is any indication, we already speak common. Saint Cuthbert is (cannon) from our world.

[Svata]

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/new.png?

[griffinpup]

Umm... Anyone read Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? It's different, of course, as he's not transported to a magical world, but merely back in time. However, I think it's still an excellent read with good ideas still in it to peruse. And to answer this thread's original question, I would do exactly what the dude in this book does, and win :smallbiggrin:

[Troacctid]

Umm... Anyone read Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? It's different, of course, as he's not transported to a magical world, but merely back in time. However, I think it's still an excellent read with good ideas still in it to peruse. And to answer this thread's original question, I would do exactly what the dude in this book does, and win :smallbiggrin:

If I recall correctly, he saved himself from being burned at the stake by having memorized the exact date of a centuries-old solar eclipse in a foreign country? Hmm, I'm not sure I like that plan. :smalltongue:

[Solaris]

Umm... Anyone read Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court? It's different, of course, as he's not transported to a magical world, but merely back in time. However, I think it's still an excellent read with good ideas still in it to peruse. And to answer this thread's original question, I would do exactly what the dude in this book does, and win :smallbiggrin:

The Guardians of the Flame series might be a bit more relevant for our purposes (ie: world-optimization).