When the Tippyverse goes to War

[Thealtruistorc]

You may want to start playing this right now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_d7wa0cxDU)

This is a scary concept, even for the most potent of Optimizers (in part because so many exist). Suppose a massive war between two very powerful factions began in the Tippyverse, with both sides being stocked with a large number of Clerics, Druids, Psions, and of course Wizards alongside most all of the demented lore that exists on the playground. What would, in the end, be the deciding factors in a war between two groups who have the ability to make the universe bend over backwards to suit their whims?

I envision that the Astral Plane will become an immense battleground, with planar armies stacked across it from all corners of the multiverse. Locate city bombs and perhaps more powerful variations (DMM scrying bombs?) will be commonplace methods of large-scale destruction, and everybody will fear disjunctions around every turn. Nobody will go anywhere without Mind Blank at the ready, and the sheer number of planar binds will eventually drive efreeti to extinction. Finally, almost everyone will be driven from the material plane by shadowcalypse, forcing them to try and rebuild on plane after plane until every last one of them that existed prior to the war is destroyed (wizards can continue to cook up new ones just as fast as they go).

So what do you folks think? What would be the deciding factor in the war? Would anything actually survive to see the end?

[Enran]

People in the Tippyverse (at least, not the optimized ones that everybody cares about) don't go to war. Everybody has everything they could ever want and nobody has anything meaningful to gain. Plus, due to the relatively small area the most powerful defensive spells cover combined with the fact that land isn't especially useful for anything, none of the people controlling the areas that people focus on when referring to the "Tippyverse" would control large tracts of land... After all, if you were a ruler, would you see it fit to waste resources acquiring something which serves no meaningful purpose and which you would probably not be able to keep from getting reclaimed by even the unoptomized marauders?

You may try to tell me not to ruin the fun of your thought experiment by injecting so much boring reality on it, but the thing is, for battles between groups of optimized casters, the ends define the means. There's no reasonable way to predict how a group of Tippy-level optimized casters will go about fighting one another without knowing exactly what they're trying to achieve... And as far as my knowledge of the Tippyverse goes, nobody has anything to fight for.

So this is pretty hard to discuss in any meaningful way.

[IZ42]

People in the Tippyverse (at least, not the optimized ones that everybody cares about) don't go to war. Everybody has everything they could ever want and nobody has anything meaningful to gain. Plus, due to the relatively small area the most powerful defensive spells cover combined with the fact that land isn't especially useful for anything, none of the people controlling the areas that people focus on when referring to the "Tippyverse" would control large tracts of land... After all, if you were a ruler, would you see it fit to waste resources acquiring something which serves no meaningful purpose and which you would probably not be able to keep from getting reclaimed by even the unoptomized marauders?

You may try to tell me not to ruin the fun of your thought experiment by injecting so much boring reality on it, but the thing is, for battles between groups of optimized casters, the ends define the means. There's no reasonable way to predict how a group of Tippy-level optimized casters will go about fighting one another without knowing exactly what they're trying to achieve... And as far as my knowledge of the Tippyverse goes, nobody has anything to fight for.

So this is pretty hard to discuss in any meaningful way.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand it, except with the leader of one of the cities and figure out some way to prevent them from coming back?

[Twurps]

what would happen is that it wouldn't.

Every "Wizard vs...." thread always ends up with the hypthetical wizard traveling back in time and killing the (Grand)parents of his opponent. Preferably in their sleep and whilst never leaving their own demiplane.

This leads to the following:
->wizards (and psions/clerics etc) exist.
-> Therefore all existing wizards parents have not been killed.
-> So: No wizard (cleric/psion etc) poses any threat to any other wizard (Cleric/psion, etc)
-> Conclusion: All wizards get along!!

-> Also: all existing wizards have not been killed in their sleep by future wizard.
-> using above logic: All wizard's baby-wizard ofspring will get along for at least a generation or 2.

And: As none of the above is 'time specific'. It must be true at all times.
Therefore: ALL WIZARDS ALWAYS GET ALONG!

[AvatarVecna]

ALL WIZARDS ALWAYS GET ALONG!

Because any that don't get written out of history in a very literal sense, yes.

[icefractal]

Don't people who get written out of history sometimes become vestiges? That makes me think of someone becoming a Binder in the Tippyverse and suddenly finding out about the hundreds/thousands/millions of people and kingdoms that have been removed from the timeline. :smallbiggrin:

If you removed time travel, then wars would be possible. And maybe resolvable or maybe not, it depends on whether stuff that gives you NI resources in finite time is possible. If so, you might as well flip a coin, either side could have an arbitrarily large and powerful army. If not, then whoever has been around longer since reaching Wish territory probably wins - with storage so easy, there's really no reason to ever stop building up your Ice Assassin army, so it just gets bigger and bigger over time.

[ExLibrisMortis]

The deciding factor would be computational capacity, for managing the fractal defence layers that high-OP wizards use.

[rockdeworld]

Everybody has everything they could ever want and nobody has anything meaningful to gain.
Welllllll, that's not exactly how things go in reality. People who have everything they could ever want will try to get more, and they'll take from everyone else just to put themselves above others in a way that's meaningful to themselves. And limited resources aren't the only reasons for going to war - fights among noble families from opposite sides of the border can result in war, as can atrocities that other countries won't put up with.

tl/dr: there's always a motivation for war, even if there isn't a means.

Also: obligatory comment on the Tippyverse being a campaign setting where the rules are taken as written, not where characters are optimized.

[IZ42]

^ Also this. Humans (and presumably other sentient, mortal life forms) are greedy jerks, so there will always be someone willing to screw another person over, especially if they get an ounce of benefit out of it.

[Mechalich]

Since it is essentially pointless for Tippyverse factions to go to war over resources (either because they already have enough or because increasing production is simply orders of magnitude easier than trying to take things from other optimized casters) the war has to be conducted for ideological reasons. ie. good tippyverse versus evil tippyverse, probably representing factions that originated on highly dispersed locations - like different planets - and did not have a chance to come into contact until they both made the transition to tippyverse levels of capability.

Ultimately, you probably crack the multiversal ring like an egg and the universe is reduced to demiplane-sized chunks that can be reliably secured against extraplanar intrusion of all kinds.

[Jack_Simth]

Ultimately, you probably crack the multiversal ring like an egg and the universe is reduced to demiplane-sized chunks that can be reliably secured against extraplanar intrusion of all kinds.Little beats Wish's transport travelers clause, although this particular comment reminds me of the Magic Carpet Video Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_%28video_game%29), in which the world had been shattered and you were working on putting it back together....

[Eldan]

Edit: wrong thread.

[Bucky]

Step 1: Scry the strike target
Step 2: Start creating a teleportation circle to the strike target
Step 3: Line up the shadesteel golem strike force for fast deployment and prebuff the caster 'officers' directing them
Step 4: Teleportation circle pops open, the golem strike force piles through in one minute, spends 8 minutes smashing and grabbing, and evacuates in one minute. Optionally, some of them might remain to smash more. The officers can fire off out their favorite mass destruction spells.
Step 5: Teleportation circle expires just as the enemy's reactionary teleportation circle activates. Enemy deploys their own cleanup crew.
Step 6: Repeat on a different target.

Within the first day of the war, everything of value that isn't within a few minutes' travel of a military base has been destroyed.

This is not speculation; it actually happened during one of the original Tippyverse campaigns.

[Yogibear41]

Due to the repeated abuse of magic and disregard for the consequences of using repeated high level magic and psionics without regard to the draining effects they have on the fabric of magic, the early days of a war of this magnitude would be the final straw resulting in the entire tippyverse becoming a dead magic zone, and the creation of lots of high level commoners with good will saves. In this new age of the tippyverse the Barbarian hordes from the outer lands would rise, after years of oppression by the civilized people. The horde would quickly overrun the "civilized" world, which would prove little resistance as all of its magical capabilities had been rendered inert.

A new day is dawning, the sun rises on a mundane world.......

[Aharon]

People in the Tippyverse (at least, not the optimized ones that everybody cares about) don't go to war. Everybody has everything they could ever want and nobody has anything meaningful to gain. Plus, due to the relatively small area the most powerful defensive spells cover combined with the fact that land isn't especially useful for anything, none of the people controlling the areas that people focus on when referring to the "Tippyverse" would control large tracts of land... After all, if you were a ruler, would you see it fit to waste resources acquiring something which serves no meaningful purpose and which you would probably not be able to keep from getting reclaimed by even the unoptomized marauders?

You may try to tell me not to ruin the fun of your thought experiment by injecting so much boring reality on it, but the thing is, for battles between groups of optimized casters, the ends define the means. There's no reasonable way to predict how a group of Tippy-level optimized casters will go about fighting one another without knowing exactly what they're trying to achieve... And as far as my knowledge of the Tippyverse goes, nobody has anything to fight for.

So this is pretty hard to discuss in any meaningful way.

A Helen of Troy scenario is possible - anything where feelings are involved, really. I agree though that war for more mundane, land-grabbing reasons is out.

ETA:
The war might look more like the Cold War, despite it's emotional start. No side goes all-out, they are just locked in proxy wars.
And that is how the Blood War really started.

[5ColouredWalker]

The blood war only works because Chaotic Evil.

The Helen of Troy doesn't work because of spells like Polymorph and Simulacrum. Think about it:
'I'm the most beautiful person in the world.'
*Everyone of note immediately transforms into said person*
'Well damn. Now I'm just plain Jane...'

[Aharon]

The blood war only works because Chaotic Evil.

The Helen of Troy doesn't work because of spells like Polymorph and Simulacrum. Think about it:
'I'm the most beautiful person in the world.'
*Everyone of note immediately transforms into said person*
'Well damn. Now I'm just plain Jane...'

@1) That's what they tell their soldier's so they keep fighting :smallbiggrin:
@2) Well, figuratively speaking. So a bunch of people fell in love with her because of her looks, and this doesn't matter because polymorph, true. You can also love/hate people because of other characteristics. For example, maybe somebody came into possession of the Rosebud that is very important to another wizard. He didn't care for forever, but now that some other wizard has it, he wants it back - and not a trap-wish-created copy or something, but exactly his Rosebud.

[Ruethgar]

Due to the repeated abuse of magic and disregard for the consequences of using repeated high level magic and psionics without regard to the draining effects they have on the fabric of magic, the early days of a war of this magnitude would be the final straw resulting in the entire tippyverse becoming a dead magic zone, and the creation of lots of high level commoners with good will saves. In this new age of the tippyverse the Barbarian hordes from the outer lands would rise, after years of oppression by the civilized people. The horde would quickly overrun the "civilized" world, which would prove little resistance as all of its magical capabilities had been rendered inert.

A new day is dawning, the sun rises on a mundane world.......

Except that it does not require magic to be able to make the weave, only some XP and a CL 7 caster and the trap XP generators can be crafted without magic.

[Eldan]

@1) That's what they tell their soldier's so they keep fighting :smallbiggrin:
@2) Well, figuratively speaking. So a bunch of people fell in love with her because of her looks, and this doesn't matter because polymorph, true. You can also love/hate people because of other characteristics. For example, maybe somebody came into possession of the Rosebud that is very important to another wizard. He didn't care for forever, but now that some other wizard has it, he wants it back - and not a trap-wish-created copy or something, but exactly his Rosebud.

Well, for that, we have Mindrape. "This is the Rosebud you are looking for."

[Uniquoi]

The blood war only works because Chaotic Evil.

The Helen of Troy doesn't work because of spells like Polymorph and Simulacrum. Think about it:
'I'm the most beautiful person in the world.'
*Everyone of note immediately transforms into said person*
'Well damn. Now I'm just plain Jane...'

This exemplifies the reason that the Tippyverse is perhaps the saddest universe to live in, and if anyone were to declare war on one another, it would probably be out of spite if they weren't mindraped first to think otherwise.

[Ezekiul]

Step 1: Scry the strike target
Step 2: Start creating a teleportation circle to the strike target
Step 3: Line up the shadesteel golem strike force for fast deployment and prebuff the caster 'officers' directing them
Step 4: Teleportation circle pops open, the golem strike force piles through in one minute, spends 8 minutes smashing and grabbing, and evacuates in one minute. Optionally, some of them might remain to smash more. The officers can fire off out their favorite mass destruction spells.
Step 5: Teleportation circle expires just as the enemy's reactionary teleportation circle activates. Enemy deploys their own cleanup crew.
Step 6: Repeat on a different target.

Within the first day of the war, everything of value that isn't within a few minutes' travel of a military base has been destroyed.

This is not speculation; it actually happened during one of the original Tippyverse campaigns.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesPrivateSanctum.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dimensionalLock.htm

Are you sure? Seems like a pretty simple stop to that plan.

I feel like there would be enough counter-measures against magic in Tippyverse that the side with the strongest non-magical force would be the victor. Contingent Greater-Dispels/MJDs and the like to back up a mundane army of fighters/rogues/monks/rangers.

[Aharon]

Well, for that, we have Mindrape. "This is the Rosebud you are looking for."

Yes, as an end-result, that works. However, assuming the usual borderline-TO protections Tippyverse wizards have, you're still going to have conflict of some kind before the loser gets mindraped.
Unless you were talking about the guy who's unhappy undergoing voluntary mindrape. Which is a possibility - but opens up the question why anybody sentient is around at all and they don't just all wirehead themselves.

[Bucky]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesPrivateSanctum.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dimensionalLock.htm

Are you sure? Seems like a pretty simple stop to that plan.

These can be avoided by placing the circle just outside the protected area and walking in.

[The Vagabond]

Here- For the purpose of providing a goal, here is one:

A beutiful woman appeared in a flowing pink dress one day- And she functions outside of this reality. She cannot be affected by spells of any type- Effect, targeted, mindrape- unless she actually desires it. You cannot make a simalcrum of her- She doesn't have hit dice to price, so it ends up costing a literally infinite ammount of rubies to make. You cannot polymorph into her, since she doesn't actually exist. A thousand men and women desire to make her love them, and just as many desire to kill her, and just as many desire to experiment on her.

The goal: Destroy her suitors, her murderers, and secure her heart- Without either magic or game mechanics. Though killing everyone else ought to work.

[rockdeworld]

These can be avoided by placing the circle just outside the protected area and walking in.
Mage's Private Sanctum blocks the scrying part, provided the target stays 10 ft. away from the walls at all times, so the scrying sensor doesn't pick up anything outside the sanctum.


Here- For the purpose of providing a goal
"I wouldn't marry you if you were the last person in the multiverse!"

Also apparently this woman is the Lady of Pain :smallamused:

[Hrugner]

Courting the lady of pain would be one hell of a reason for war.

Does tippy verse account for the huge deflation of value in natural resources making casting many spells a matter of moving planetoids worth of spell components just to get your 100 gold worth of diamond dust?

[dascarletm]

Courting the lady of pain would be one hell of a reason for war.

Does tippy verse account for the huge deflation of value in natural resources making casting many spells a matter of moving planetoids worth of spell components just to get your 100 gold worth of diamond dust?

No, because it assumes complete RAW.


EDIT:

What Tippyverse is (or at lease my understanding correct me if I am wrong Mr. Tippy)

It takes DnD by strict RAW, and develops a world working solely off those assumptions as to how Emperor Tippy would imagine it.

I think it also assumes that characters within said world experience their universe as the game plays it out. They understand the world runs turn-based during combat, and I believe they understand build choices/classes or whatnot. A little on the meta-game side of things, but that is my conjecture.

[Bucky]

Does tippy verse account for the huge deflation of value in natural resources making casting many spells a matter of moving planetoids worth of spell components just to get your 100 gold worth of diamond dust?

I don't think it needs to. Because gold pieces can be mass produced like the other resources, they also inflate.

Gold pieces are also bad holders of value if they're used as a currency while being mass produced, so the logical conclusion is to have a small ceremonial 'gold market' for price-fixing spell components while actual trade uses something else as a currency.

[Orderic]

Short answer: They don't.

Long answer: These wizards are intelligent enough to know that the consequences of any war would be too terrible to imagine. So instead they create mathematical abstractions of themselves and their empires, with a predefined set of rules and use these to fight their battles without harming anyone. They might even use animated miniatures.

[TheThan]

Little beats Wish's transport travelers clause, although this particular comment reminds me of the Magic Carpet Video Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_%28video_game%29), in which the world had been shattered and you were working on putting it back together....

I remember that game, it was pretty awesome.

[Xar Zarath]

The tattered journal is singed, crusted with old blood but is still somewhat legible:

"It's been three days since the last red rain. The damned water was blood or something like it and my wife and kids became something inhuman. Curse the wizards of evil tippyverse! I hope our own wizards get them back. They said the hole in the Far Realm would be patched up soon and maybe after that, they'll get to killing those bastards!"
Another entry:

"Food's running low and there's more undead now...can't believe it but the traps aren't working. Big Brother says the evil tippys are doing it and I'm sure that's true. I know it's true...oh how I miss my boys and my wife...need to stay strong for them and for my country. After what happened to Celestia and Elysium we're all gonna have to be on our guard"

The last pages are ripped but some parts are still legible:

"Gods, but what have we done?! Hell's gone and Asmodeus died screaming, I heard, everyone heard all across the cosmos...the Far Realm's bleeding into the Abyss and Gehenna and the rest of the lower planes have been smashed together into cosmic pulp! Wizards say they're gonna put things right...gonna work out a new cosmos to live in...I hope so...gods I pray to you...please..."

[Thealtruistorc]

"Gods, but what have we done?! Hell's gone and Asmodeus died screaming, I heard, everyone heard all across the cosmos...the Far Realm's bleeding into the Abyss and Gehenna and the rest of the lower planes have been smashed together into cosmic pulp! Wizards say they're gonna put things right...gonna work out a new cosmos to live in...I hope so...gods I pray to you...please..."

I've got to make this into a campaign setting.