PDA

View Full Version : "Why is my setting not the tippyverse?"



nrg89
2016-08-09, 12:39 PM
I'm awful at the movies. Whenever I watch something I think is "meh" I start nitpicking and ruin everything for everyone. When I'm really entertained however I can consciously suspend my disbelief.

But everytime I write on my world and I introduce some form of magic my inner engineer asks me "couldn't you use it that way too?" and I have accidentaly supplied my civilization with something to power an industrial revolution.

Just take teleportation. If you can change an object's potential energy with no work, just a flick of the wrist, you can drop it on a wheel and convert it into kinetic energy. Now that the idea is in my idea I feel like I have to invent a reason for my teleporters to not know about it, or else it's going to drive me nuts. What if my players point it out?

I usually respond in one of three ways; I severely limit the power to something that's far more lame, repeat "rule of cool" to myself and force myself to not think about it or I remove the thing completely.

I have hated on Forgotten Realms a lot in this forum so I'll keep it brief; I don't think it's handled well there. They have so much magic accessible to artisans and peasants they should be producing ridiculous amounts of surplus and be a consumer society. They should have the luxury to take vacations, not have to work all the time to live off of subsistence farming. That's an example of a setting I just can't get over, but people love it. People play it all the time and they do it because it's fantastical. I want my setting to be fantastical and something I won't be annoyed over all the time, anyone with similar problems?

Garimeth
2016-08-09, 12:52 PM
I have a similar problem, and my players are also mostly very rationalistic think it through types.

To me it basically boils down to having the magic have "laws" associated with it. I actually have mathematical equations for my magic system - and I'm not an engineer or anything, just some dude in the military. Additionally if you have controlled access to the energy/power (only certain people can do it, even less of them are capable of great feats, and even though there is a recovery period) and or ban certain things that can be easily abused.

For example, I don't allow anything other than infrequent, line of sight, short distance teleportation. And you're thinking about teleportation, but that's limited use. Imagine something that endlessly produces a liquid, smoke, or fire. All are common tropes, and all could be used as a type of power for some kind of turbine or mill or something.

The other big thing, is to remember that in your setting the NPCs and PCs do not have access to some of what we would consider even very basic math and science. Do they have a concept of gravity? Do they know pi? Do they understand 0 or imaginary numbers? Do they understand algebra? Do they know the laws of thermal dynamics, etc?

Sometimes the best answer is just that nobody has thought of it YET, but then enforce the PCs not bringing in their real world knowledge.

Dienekes
2016-08-09, 12:54 PM
It's not because you say it isn't.

Now admittedly you picked a pretty amazing thing as your example there. Teleportation is right up with instantaneous clean water and food as something that would change a world so thoroughly it would be hard to figure out how it would actually look.

If you don't want your world to be tippy verse and be logical about it you have to severely limit magic. Let's say only 1 person in a billion can teleport anything. Or teleportation requires someone to construct two teleportation gates fill them with runes and sacrifice 100 virgins to get it to work only to move between those two gates then the magic can have a much lower effect on the world.

That's really it. Make meaningful limitations so magic doesn't grow out of control. Just look at the modern world, our tech may as well be magic. And as soon as it pops up in locations the culture, society, politics inevitably change in ways that was difficult to predict. And we dont even have teleportation. But just the quick travel and spread of ideas we do have has changed our world irreversibly.

Kami2awa
2016-08-09, 12:58 PM
Well there's a few ways to go with this.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 12:59 PM
I do the same things. I gripe about bad worldbuilding and failure to follow through with all the obvious implications of something we see on screen or on the page. I try to work out all these effects and have them inform my worldbuilding decisions.

VoxRationis
2016-08-09, 01:02 PM
Possibilities:
Not just anyone can become a magic-user;
There's some sort of high moral, opportunity, or resource cost involved with magic that restricts its use;
Societal issues (such as wizards not working well together owing to mutual distrust) prevent use of magic to its full potential;
It's possible, but it hasn't happened yet;
It has happened, but the infrastructure broke down for one reason or another (lack of repair, civil war, magical disruption event) and no one has fixed it yet;
There's actually a punitive limit on magic in the world, just not at a level where it affects individual PCs; if the PCs tried implementing magic on a large scale, they'd find it quickly runs out.

awa
2016-08-09, 01:20 PM
a way I like to describe this to players

Lets say were playing a James bond rpg that has rules for cars, how fast they go how much damage they can take, how maneuverable they are and so on. Just because it doesn't say they run out of gas or need maintenance doesn't mean its a perpetual motion device of infinite energy. You want to drive away from the bad guy and have a high speed chase that's fine. You want to put your car in a poorly ventilated room hook it to a generator and power a city your going to find some problems real fast.

Magic can work the same way casting a spell a dozen time? no problem, that's like driving the car around, you want to cast it 100,000 times something's going to give maybe you die to mana fumes, maybe you just use up all the ambient energy and now spells don't work, maybe you attract "things" man was not meant to see and they come do unspeakable things.

D&d magic is so abusable in part because its so simple the real world has all sorts of things like friction, overheating, side effects and just plain running out of fuel that the game ignores because describing all the nich interaction would take entire physic books for each spell.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 01:54 PM
a way I like to describe this to players

Lets say were playing a James bond rpg that has rules for cars, how fast they go how much damage they can take, how maneuverable they are and so on. Just because it doesn't say they run out of gas or need maintenance doesn't mean its a perpetual motion device of infinite energy. You want to drive away from the bad guy and have a high speed chase that's fine. You want to put your car in a poorly ventilated room hook it to a generator and power a city your going to find some problems real fast.

Magic can work the same way casting a spell a dozen time? no problem, that's like driving the car around, you want to cast it 100,000 times something's going to give maybe you die to mana fumes, maybe you just use up all the ambient energy and now spells don't work, maybe you attract "things" man was not meant to see and they come do unspeakable things.

D&d magic is so abusable in part because its so simple the real world has all sorts of things like friction, overheating, side effects and just plain running out of fuel that the game ignores because describing all the nich interaction would take entire physic books for each spell.


As mentioned in another thread, D&D magic in general utterly lacks "in setting" flavor or explanation, it's just hollow game rules.

Tiktakkat
2016-08-09, 01:58 PM
The key to controlling this is remembering the effect of 20/20 Hindsight.

Sure, to US such uses are blatantly obvious.
To the people employing them?

If every mechanical advancement was that blatantly obvious, the Romans would have been Steampunk, the Middle Ages in an Industrial Revolution, and the Renaissance our first Singularity.
At worst.
They weren't.

So clearly there must be some reason they couldn't leap ahead "that" easily.


The second, almost as important, controlling factor is The Underpants Gnome Factor.
Step 1: Use Magic
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Tippyverse

Everyone can tell how using magic works, and how the Tippyverse works.
But how many can actually explain how all those spellchuckers survive 1st level and manage to hit 20th level so as to be able to do all those awesome things?
How many can actually explain how after those spellchuckers get to 20th level they eagerly embrace sharing their magic so everyone else can be as powerful as they are, and thus provide an imminent threat to them?

That Step 2 is a killer.

Meanwhile, what are all the anti-social people doing?
Just chilling while the do-gooders bring about a world of peace, harmony, and ice-cream dropping unicorns?
I don't think so!
They have the same resources available to start their own tyrannical utopia, or at least throw a magical monkey wrench into the attempts to create the puppies and kittens alternative.
How many spells are there to mess up portals?
How long will one of those awesome portal networks survive when a few of them start transporting to the Negative Energy Plane via the Far Realms?
Yeah, I thought so.


As a thought experiment, the Tippyverse is easy.
As another thought experiment, the Tippyverse is even easier to destroy.
Maybe that's why so many campaigns, particularly Forgotten Realms, features so many magical cataclysms destroying civilization and world empires time and again.
Hmmm . . .

awa
2016-08-09, 02:09 PM
As mentioned in another thread, D&D magic in general utterly lacks "in setting" flavor or explanation, it's just hollow game rules.

I'm honestly not Shure how this relates to my comment. My comment was about an easy way a dm could shut down industrialized magic if he chose to prevent a tippyverse in a logical way.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 02:26 PM
I'm honestly not Shure how this relates to my comment. My comment was about an easy way a dm could shut down industrialized magic if he chose to prevent a tippyverse in a logical way.

It relates because having no explanation of how the magic actually works (within the world/reality in which the game takes place), we're left with no way to analyze those "mechanisms" and impose the limits that would naturally result from how it works.

Necroticplague
2016-08-09, 02:27 PM
Basically, it's genre tradition. A lot of fantasy, especially of the dnd type branch of heroic fantasy, have been heavily taking themes from Lords of the Rings for years now. Unfortunately, not all of the themes are actually positive things, intentionally or not. One of the more unfortunate themes in LotR was that it's writer was a regressive luddite. Thus, for any good characters, use of magic was restricted by either explicit or presumed pacts, tying their hands to use magic to change the world. In addition, there was a time/place when magic was much more commonplace, but they ended up wiping themselves our for one reason or another (thus, why ancient artifacts are so good, they're from that time). The modern fantasy tends to have results (low magic use, little exploitation of magic as a resource) without including the factors that make it so in the books, or considering the implications of it.

TLDR: LotR writtten by a luddite, copycats rip it off without changing that factor.

SethoMarkus
2016-08-09, 02:39 PM
It relates because having no explanation of how the magic actually works (within the world/reality in which the game takes place), we're left with no way to analyze those "mechanisms" and impose the limits that would naturally result from how it works.

I may be mistaken, but I think that was actually Awa's point? Magic, as presented, allows you to create the fluff for your setting, creating mechanics with limitations to prevent abuse. It really sounds like you both have the same thought about it, you just are approaching it from opposite sides...

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 02:40 PM
I may be mistaken, but I think that was actually Awa's point? Magic, as presented, allows you to create the fluff for your setting, creating mechanics with limitations to prevent abuse. It really sounds like you both have the same thought about it, you just are approaching it from opposite sides...

I wasn't disagreeing with Awa -- I was following up with an expansion on the posted comment.

LaserFace
2016-08-09, 02:49 PM
I think Forgotten Realms is supposed to be something of a silly setting you're not supposed to examine closely. Like, the sort of place that exists for people who wanna grab a beer and say "Let's do cool fantasy junk". I don't really like running games in FR but I don't hate it, I think it has a place.

If you want to avoid a Tippyverse, it's not hard. And, I think OP has a sense of how to do it. You don't let everyone know teleportation, or you find ways to complicate its use or otherwise limit exploitation. You can have any flavor of fantasy with any amount of magic you want, with any kind of explanations you want. You can have any kinds of restrictions at play that you can imagine. The world could be filled with turmoil and people killing each other and nobody has the time to do crazy wizard junk. Basically, just make a setting that prohibits the development of a utopia and...you don't have the utopia problem.

Acanous
2016-08-09, 03:11 PM
I think Forgotten Realms is supposed to be something of a silly setting you're not supposed to examine closely. Like, the sort of place that exists for people who wanna grab a beer and say "Let's do cool fantasy junk". I don't really like running games in FR but I don't hate it, I think it has a place.

FR is srs bsns.
There's a hell of a lot of lore for everything, and pretty much all of it goes into hard fantasy. Dragonlance is the silly setting.

LaserFace
2016-08-09, 03:18 PM
FR is srs bsns.
There's a hell of a lot of lore for everything, and pretty much all of it goes into hard fantasy. Dragonlance is the silly setting.

My mistake. I actually know nothing about any official setting lore apart from that which shows up in core rulebooks and crpgs.

nrg89
2016-08-09, 03:25 PM
The problem of just handwaving is that if you do it too much, or with too glaring problems, you break verisimilitude. If all the pieces for a utopia is there, and you say "it's not a utopia, because..." all the time your players might not be that invested in what's going on because they don't feel like the world is real.

Shinizak
2016-08-09, 03:41 PM
Why not make it a tippyverse in the making? Have mages discovering and testing new abilities and powers. Make experimental armors, magic farms, etc all be a part of this world, have a quest about a mage or 2 inventing something or helping a mage work on their phd Thesis.

awa
2016-08-09, 03:54 PM
Lead pipes sound like a good idea to but long term wide spread use will give you some serious problems. If you just make it clear right from the get go that the stuff written down in the books is a simplified version of reality and the real world is more complex in ways that are hard to detect and not necessarily immediately obvious you can solve a lot of problems.

Let’s go with an easy ones to prohibit magical utopia

Magic does not create

So that create food spell you just cast it took the energy for it out of the earth, and a lot of the energy was wasted into the ether. You want to create lunch for a band of travelers no problem the lands got energy to spare, you want to feed a nation well now you have a giant blight of dead land and all the nature spirits have gone insane and want to get the energy you stole by ripping it out of the villagers, and even if you can drive them off that blights going to keep growing the more you cast the spell until the whole world is dead and it stops working.

Wall of iron makes iron walls but it had to take that iron from somewhere. Cast it once in a while and it will just pull trace iron out of the ground cast it a lot and it will start degrading the quality of all the metal in the region, also not all iron is created equal and iron wall iron could be particularly brittle and difficult to work making inferior tools even when worked with magic.

Cure spell? Cast it occasionally everything fine the world has life energy to spare cast it too much and you start getting magic resistant plagues and spontaneous undead.

Move earth? Cast it occasionally no problem, cast it repeatedly and all that energy you’re drawing out of the earth will causes earth quakes or even release monsters sealed below

Teleport? It punches holes in reality, cast it a little no big deal the holes are small and they heal. But cast it a lot and it can causes rips, and thing from outside reality slither in which is bad.

boomwolf
2016-08-09, 03:57 PM
Well, in my setting, I worked it out that magic is based of the ever classic mana system, on an exponential consumption so a level 0 spell is 1 mana worth, but a 1 is 4, a 2 is already 9, 3 is 16, 4 is 25 all the way to 9th who take a staggering 100. the system is simply (L+1)^2 formula, with spell levels fiddled.
Except, mana is innately poisonous. it is reflected by how the high magic classes has lower saves and HP values, but fluffwise it means that the mere fact of having magic in your body-is bad for your health.

To add another complication, not everyone can learn any spell. people have innate talents, and most people simply can't get spells outside of their natural talents.
Sure, you might be a prodegy of fire magic, but you simply CANT gain any healing magic. its in your "DNA", and whatever natural affinity you are born with, its what you got (naturally, PCs choose their own affinities, but this still applies to the rest of the world)





The system is more complicated than that and includes quite a few homebrew materials (that I might organize and translate at some point), but the core principles are simple:
1-not anyone can access any magic he wants, only a limited pool of options.
2-magic comes at a cost, in my case its your physical health. mages are simple sickly.


There are other possible principles that can exist, the only thing that matters is that you need to find one or two good limits to using magic. they could be anything from a hard-set limitation on using it, to a cost attached, unreliability to whatever other "issue" fits your own world. once there is a good limit or two on wide magic usage, the issue usually balances itself out.

nrg89
2016-08-09, 04:49 PM
Well, in my setting, I worked it out that magic is based of the ever classic mana system, on an exponential consumption so a level 0 spell is 1 mana worth, but a 1 is 4, a 2 is already 9, 3 is 16, 4 is 25 all the way to 9th who take a staggering 100. the system is simply (L+1)^2 formula, with spell levels fiddled.

That's a great idea! But, not to be that guy but that's quadratic growth, not exponential. An exponential function could be 2^L, then a level 0 spell costs 1 mana, level 1 spell 2, level 2 costs 4 and level 9 costs 512. In exponential functions it's the exponent that changes but the base stays the same.

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 05:18 PM
I have hated on Forgotten Realms a lot in this forum so I'll keep it brief; I don't think it's handled well there. They have so much magic accessible to artisans and peasants they should be producing ridiculous amounts of surplus and be a consumer society. They should have the of having luxury to take vacations, not have to work all the time to live off of subsistence farming.

The Forgotten Realms is not a Tippyverse for a very good reason as it does not follow one of the most basic tippyverse rules of having distant silent gods. FR has very powerful, very active gods. And lots and lots of gods, and demi gods, and powerful mortals. And they all work towards the same goal of keeping the world not ''tip''.

Though, of course, this is only true of the fictional fluff story realms, and not the game rule books. The Realms game setting is just a back drop for players to be heroes, you won't find any logic or reason there....ever.

The story Realms also has the more ''1st edition/2nd edition'' style magic, so the magic is not like the lame 3/4/5 edition safe magic. Realms magic is strange, unknown, unknowable, dangerous, unfair and deadly. Some of this makes it in to ''rulebooks'', but mostly as fluff

With active gods, they can start right at the beginning: they can make sure no one grows up and acts like a ''silly optimizer trying to bend the rules and be super duper all powerful.'' Though education alone, they can stop a good 99% of them before they even start. The 1% they can just get rid of before they cause a problem. So the average person in the Realms wants real food and does not want to ''have a magic box that makes food so they can play video games all day''.

Magic in a real story type world is hard. Not everyone can do it and it takes years of work and study and sacrifice. Game wise, any player can just say ''my character is 18 and 40th level and has a 30 for all abilities and knows all the spells in the books'' in like one second. Also any bad player can look through all the books for loop holes, interpretations and exploits....but a character in the Realms can't do that.

Thrudd
2016-08-09, 06:22 PM
What does your inner engineer say about why our own society has barely explored our own solar system? Why don't we have moon and mars bases and habitats, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing, like the authors in the 1960's imagined we would? The capability has long existed. Why are we still burning fossil fuels when we know how to use more abundant sources of energy?

There could be many reasons that the existence of magic hasn't evolved an industrial society. Maybe it's too hard to use for most people, inefficient, expensive, impractical. Maybe it's use is monopolized by a few people.
The existence of certain knowledge or technology does not automatically mean it will or can be applied to its greatest potential. In 200 hundred years, our society might see everyday exploitation of space resources. But if the game is taking place today, only a handful of people have ever been out of low earth orbit.

Necroticplague
2016-08-09, 06:24 PM
The Forgotten Realms is not a Tippyverse for a very good reason as it does not follow one of the most basic tippyverse rules of having distant silent gods. FR has very powerful, very active gods. And lots and lots of gods, and demi gods, and powerful mortals. And they all work towards the same goal of keeping the world not ''tip''. Logically, wouldn't the efforts of those who benefit from magic not being used to it's fullest potential be vastly overshadowed by those who would benefit from such? I mean, most people benefit from everyone being in a good place.


Though education alone, they can stop a good 99% of them before they even start. The 1% they can just get rid of before they cause a problem. So the average person in the Realms wants real food and does not want to ''have a magic box that makes food so they can play video games all day''.
Er, what kind of education completely undoes rational thinking? It seems like it could be undone by even basic primers on economics, history, or military strategy. Seriously, you're talking about taking away one of the most basic limits on military function ("A military marches on it's belly"), and expecting people aren't jumping the gun to get it for their own military use?

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 07:03 PM
What does your inner engineer say about why our own society has barely explored our own solar system? Why don't we have moon and mars bases and habitats, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing, like the authors in the 1960's imagined we would? The capability has long existed. Why are we still burning fossil fuels when we know how to use more abundant sources of energy?

There could be many reasons that the existence of magic hasn't evolved an industrial society. Maybe it's too hard to use for most people, inefficient, expensive, impractical. Maybe it's use is monopolized by a few people.
The existence of certain knowledge or technology does not automatically mean it will or can be applied to its greatest potential. In 200 hundred years, our society might see everyday exploitation of space resources. But if the game is taking place today, only a handful of people have ever been out of low earth orbit.


More like the "capability" -- we made it to the moon by the skin of our teeth, and it was a miracle that the only deaths of the Apollo program were in a fire during a ground test.

Thrudd
2016-08-09, 07:13 PM
More like the "capability" -- we made it to the moon by the skin of our teeth, and it was a miracle that the only deaths of the Apollo program were in a fire during a ground test.

And that was almost 50 years ago.

ace rooster
2016-08-09, 07:17 PM
There is at least one spell that requires it's focus to be "hand made". From that you can infer that non magical labour does something that magic cannot. If I wanted low magic impact I would run that materials 'touched by magic' are near valueless as trade goods, and that consuming materials touched by magic causes a person to be touched by magic, and renders them unable to produce anything without it already being touched by magic for a while. Even tiny quantities will disrupt magical research and enchantment, while being easy to detect. The mages are aggressive in tracking down sources of contamination, and everyone knows it. Magic can be available, but the use of it in industry would exclude people and those around them from the general economy.

To attempt to use magic more widely would shut down the current uses, so there is no military advantage to being more magic focused. Those outside of the magical industries would avoid it strongly out of self interest.

Ignoring the problems with the Tippyverse, (Why he thinks unlimited range mass transit would make people live in close proximity is beyond me) The silent gods thing is very important. Active gods make a very good explanation for heroic magic use, particularly if they regard magic as belonging to them. A person can be amused and impressed to watch a mouse steal a grain of corn and fight off the cat to get it, but far less amused if their granary gets infested.

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 07:23 PM
Logically, wouldn't the efforts of those who benefit from magic not being used to it's fullest potential be vastly overshadowed by those who would benefit from such? I mean, most people benefit from everyone being in a good place.

No, but it's really a matter of perspective. Some people think natural made things are better some people like artificial stuff.




Er, what kind of education completely undoes rational thinking? It seems like it could be undone by even basic primers on economics, history, or military strategy. Seriously, you're talking about taking away one of the most basic limits on military function ("A military marches on it's belly"), and expecting people aren't jumping the gun to get it for their own military use?

It does not undo rational thinking, it's undoing ''idiot reddit/4chain/internet loser'' type of thinking. The ''basics'' are what whoever is in power says they are.

It is a lot like: a person could do a crime to get what they want...but most are taught that is wrong and they choose not to do it.

And it's the same with ''dumb magic exploits'', a wizard just does not say ''I make boom magic trap thingys and feed the world''. They could...but they don't want too.

Illven
2016-08-09, 07:51 PM
And it's the same with ''dumb magic exploits'', a wizard just does not say ''I make boom magic trap thingys and feed the world''. They could...but they don't want too.

... Yes. Because no one's ever become a scientist to help people. :smallconfused:

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 08:02 PM
... Yes. Because no one's ever become a scientist to help people. :smallconfused:

The point is more that the gods would focus that person to do things like ''make crops grow better'' in some way or such but not go for the ''magiczal boon Tippy trap exploit''. The same way you might choose green energy over other types.

It is just a different way of helping. It is teaching a dwarf how to fish, not giving him a box and saying ''tap this for food''.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 08:07 PM
So a wizard, having access to massive reality-warping powers, is therefore likely to use them for selfish ends; while a deity, having access to massive reality-warping powers, is therefore likely to use them to help people?


Huh.

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 08:13 PM
So a wizard, having access to massive reality-warping powers, is therefore likely to use them for selfish ends; while a deity, having access to massive reality-warping powers, is therefore likely to use them to help people?


Huh.

Hun back at you...

Why are you saying wizards are selfish?

Though, really the basic role of a deity is to help people. That really is a big part about being a deity.

veti
2016-08-09, 08:16 PM
Magic doesn't scale.

Think of it like economics. If you take a random poor person and give them $1 billion, you'll transform them immediately into someone who can afford just about anything (within reason) they are ever likely to want.

But if you give $1 billion to every person in the country, you wouldn't achieve the same thing for all of them, because the money would simply lose its value. It's easy enough to make individuals rich, but making a whole community that rich is much, much harder.

Imagine if everyone used magic, all the time. The physical laws (that you rely on to drive everything that isn't explicitly controlled by magic) simply wouldn't apply any more. Like, consider the example of a never-ending water supply powering a water wheel - that will stop working the moment someone (your commercial rival? your neighbour? a random passing adventurer?) makes your water wheel intangible, or reverses gravity over it, or summons a whale in your millpond, or makes any one of several thousand possible environmental adjustments that cause your millpond to overflow, or the stream to run in the opposite direction, or...

Necroticplague
2016-08-09, 08:18 PM
No, but it's really a matter of perspective. Some people think natural made things are better some people like artificial stuff. Er.....that doesn't really answer my question. Yes, there are going to be two sides to the idea, with a variety of reasons. But what makes you think the regressive luddites would win out any more than they do in real life? It seems like the "powerful figures" only matters if all the powerful figures are unanimously agreeing. If they're divided, then their actions wouldn't do much to stop a further exploitation of magic. The god of farming who actively suppresses all attempts at auto-reset traps of Create Food and Water would be cancelled by those of a God of Artifice who basically gives blueprints to it to some of their clergy (because people who don't have to farm have time to become crafsfolk, increasing the power of their portfolio).




It does not undo rational thinking, it's undoing ''idiot reddit/4chain/internet loser'' type of thinking. The ''basics'' are what whoever is in power says they are.

It is a lot like: a person could do a crime to get what they want...but most are taught that is wrong and they choose not to do it.

And it's the same with ''dumb magic exploits'', a wizard just does not say ''I make boom magic trap thingys and feed the world''. They could...but they don't want too.

Um, the kind of logic that leads to this IS rational thinking. With a goal in mind, trying to find a solution, considering all possible options, including their costs, benefits, and possible downsides. There are quite a many situations in which some aspect of the Tippyverse is a perfectly rational solution to a problem. Let's look at some typical high-level medieval positions:

1.A lord who rules over a certain portion of land, who wants to increase his wealth. Like most lords, he gets his wealth by taxing what his serfs produce. Thus, increasing their welfare directly increases his own welfare. A IFDT* would leave his population open to create more valuable goods than just food, with all the time they don't have to spend farming. It would also mean he can have more serfs to tax, since each serf now needs less area to live in. He has a strong incentive to promote the creation of the IFDT, entirely for selfish reasons. The only reason for him not too would be a lack of knowlege of the possibility of such a device, crippling stupidity, or an inability to acquire a device.
2. A military commander who has a vast army she is campaigning with. There are many problems with running a military as vast as hers, which all fall under the general category 'military logistics'. Among them include: getting wounded soldiers to somewhere with proper medical facilities, supplying the army with food, fresh soldiers, new armaments, and medical supplies, communicating between disparate units, movement of massive amounts of units, ect. However, much of it can be summed up as this: You can't move things around fast enough. As the campaign stretches farther from home, it becomes harder and harder to make sure everyone has what they need. A teleport circle can completely solve this problem, rendering the military one of the most coordinated and well-supplied in the world. Thus, this commander (and whoever the military she's are in charge of fights for) has a strong incentive to develop these teleport circles.

These are rational solutions to actual problems. In the real world, our technological solutions are not nearly as good as these magic ones, and we still leverage heavy use of them to solve similar problems (we may not have teleport circles, but essentially every method of moving things faster has been used to make logistics better in wartime, there have been several green revolutions that left the world much wealthier as a result of blossoming yield-per-acre (to the point where now the only food issue is distribution issues)).

*what I will henceforth call Infinite Food and Drink Traps to save effort

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 08:52 PM
If they're divided, then their actions wouldn't do much to stop a further exploitation of magic.

They are divided and they don't all agree on everything, but that is all part of the balance.








1.A lord who rules over a certain portion of land, who wants to increase his wealth. Like most lords, he gets his wealth by taxing what his serfs produce. Thus, increasing their welfare directly increases his own welfare. A IFDT* would leave his population open to create more valuable goods than just food, with all the time they don't have to spend farming. It would also mean he can have more serfs to tax, since each serf now needs less area to live in. He has a strong incentive to promote the creation of the IFDT, entirely for selfish reasons. The only reason for him not too would be a lack of knowlege of the possibility of such a device, crippling stupidity, or an inability to acquire a device.

In your reasons your forgetting the ones like ''the ruler is not a selfish greedy jerk''.




2. A military commander who has a vast army she is campaigning with. There are many problems with running a military as vast as hers, which all fall under the general category 'military logistics'. Among them include: getting wounded soldiers to somewhere with proper medical facilities, supplying the army with food, fresh soldiers, new armaments, and medical supplies, communicating between disparate units, movement of massive amounts of units, ect. However, much of it can be summed up as this: You can't move things around fast enough. As the campaign stretches farther from home, it becomes harder and harder to make sure everyone has what they need. A teleport circle can completely solve this problem, rendering the military one of the most coordinated and well-supplied in the world. Thus, this commander (and whoever the military she's are in charge of fights for) has a strong incentive to develop these teleport circles.

And again, it is not that they can't do it...it is that the choose not too. Though this one also goes up against the official story fluff that the gods prevent use of mass teleportation and also that teleporting is very dangerous to use. So a teleport circle will both randomly kill a third of the time it is used and will 'weaken the weave' around it so extra planual monsters can slip through to the Prime. Both of them make a teleport circle a lot less likely to be used.

If you knew that stepping onto a teleportation circle might kill you (no save), would you risk it?



These are rational solutions to actual problems. In the real world, our technological solutions are not nearly as good as these magic ones, and we still leverage heavy use of them to solve similar problems (we may not have teleport circles, but essentially every method of moving things faster has been used to make logistics better in wartime, there have been several green revolutions that left the world much wealthier as a result of blossoming yield-per-acre (to the point where now the only food issue is distribution issues)).


Sure on one side you have genetically altered gamma irradiated injected with chemicals and covered in pesticides Frankenfoods. And on the other side you have the farmer that puts the seed in the ground, makes sure it gets enough water and sunlight and waits for the plant to grow. Now some people love Frankenfood and eat them up, and some people like real grown food. It is a matter of taste...literately.

The gods are, more or less, on the side of doing things ''one way''. It is not the ''right way'', just what they like. And Forgotten Realms history does have 10,000 years of super all powerful magic empires that often got close to ''tipping''. So it's not like the gods never let it happen, they just control it. And it's not like the gods destroy near tipping empires either....they just let them fall as nothing mortal lasts forever.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-09, 09:20 PM
Why are you saying wizards are selfish?


I didn't -- you did. Right here:



a wizard just does not say ''I make boom magic trap thingys and feed the world''. They could...but they don't want too.


~~~~



Though, really the basic role of a deity is to help people. That really is a big part about being a deity.



That role fits the actual reported behavior of exactly zero deities I've ever heard of. And yes, I've heard of most of them, including all the big ones.

Meh

Necroticplague
2016-08-09, 09:32 PM
They are divided and they don't all agree on everything, but that is all part of the balance. A balance that favors progress. Those who want to suppress the progress have to succeed every time, those who promote progress only need a few victories. So unless divine luddites vastly outnumber divine progressives, their existence is essentially a null factor.


In your reasons your forgetting the ones like ''the ruler is not a selfish greedy jerk''. If they're selfish, they want this because it can increase their personal wealth when they get more taxes. If they're selfless, they support this, because it helps people live better lives. So whether the ruler is selfish or selfless is, in fact, entirely irrelevant. It's in both their best self interest, and their best community interest.


And again, it is not that they can't do it...it is that the choose not too. Why not? It provides an almost perfect solution to a massive problem. In real life, we've gone with much less perfect solutions simply because they gave us SOME edge. If the railroad, with all it's problems, was used to help with logistics in the Civil War, why wouldn't the Teleport Circle be used to help with all of this?



Though this one also goes up against the official story fluff that the gods prevent use of mass teleportation and also that teleporting is very dangerous to use. So a teleport circle will both randomly kill a third of the time it is used and will 'weaken the weave' around it so extra planual monsters can slip through to the Prime. Both of them make a teleport circle a lot less likely to be used.

If you knew that stepping onto a teleportation circle might kill you (no save), would you risk it?
Yes, because environmental damage and risk to people has completely stopped all real life technological development as well. Meanwhile, divine intervention is irrelevant, because, as you yourself mentioned, there are some gods who would be pro-circle. Again, to go back to the railway example: the trains sometimes derailed, people were sometimes crippled by machines, but we kept right on using it, because they were useful to us. Even if the circle has a good chance of killing people, that doesn't stop it from being useful to send supplies. Sure, it's cost would mean not every military can have them, but I would expect the larger ones to do so.


Sure on one side you have genetically altered gamma irradiated injected with chemicals and covered in pesticides Frankenfoods. And on the other side you have the farmer that puts the seed in the ground, makes sure it gets enough water and sunlight and waits for the plant to grow. Now some people love Frankenfood and eat them up, and some people like real grown food. It is a matter of taste...literately.
That analogy doesn't really work in your favor. After all, the amount of agricultural luddites haven't stopped the more sensible people of the world from going on ahead and quintupling the amount of food produced per acre, increasing food output to the point where everyone, theoretically, can have enough to eat. Our world tips towards technological use, a fantasy world with magic that functions like technology would tip towards magic use as time went on.

Cluedrew
2016-08-09, 09:32 PM
On Actually Helpful Gods: I've seen some , but the tend to be less powerful or were somehow laid low in the past. Because plot. A god who can solve anything and would be happy to kind of does some problems for dramatic tension.

RazorChain
2016-08-09, 09:42 PM
In lot of systems you have to roll to cast magic. Often critical failures can have catastrophic results, this often limits magic.

bulbaquil
2016-08-09, 09:54 PM
Because magic doesn't actually work the way the game mechanics suggest it works. The magic rules and spell descriptions provided in the book are simplifications meant to make it possible for the GM and players to actually resolve a situation involving magic without having to use a supercomputer or spend hours crunching numbers and rolling dice; actual magic in-world has consequences, backlashes, limitations, etc. that are handwaved away for the metagame sake of facilitating gameplay. D&D is meant to be played, not analyzed.

Either that, or they're not so much "handwaved away" as they are discarded as irrelevant at the individual-spellcaster level expected by the game designers, in exactly the same way that most physics courses cover momentum, velocity, and dynamics using Newtonian mechanics rather than Einsteinian relativity. At slow speeds such as those people walk at or most vehicles travel, the equations are written using Newtonian mechanics. Yes, technically, general and special relativity do apply in these slow-speed cases, as do quantum-mechanical effects and the like, but their effects are not relevant at the scale involved. Only when you actually start to go close to the speed of light, or shrink the scale down to subatomic, or need for some reason to be really, really precise, do these effects become relevant enough that the Newtonian approximation breaks down. The magic rules and spell descriptions are "Newtonian approximations" of the real rules, and the real rules may break down at the Tippyverse level of things.

Keep in mind also that there is nothing that says that magic has to follow laws described as mathematical formulas, nor must it obey Occam's Razor. The laws of magic may have byzantine exceptions ("2+2=5 when Mercury is in the 12th house and 3 when it's in the 6th, otherwise 2+2=4"), and may not make sense according to our own understanding of reason and logic, while being completely consistent according to its own. Maybe you actually can't "science" magic, because when you try to set up a magical experiment according to the scientific method, you get different, uncontrollable, and irrepeatable results.

Or, maybe your setting could be the Tippyverse, given enough time, but maybe nobody's discovered e.g. Create Food and Water traps yet. "But how can you not have discovered them? They're a logical outflowing of..." Answer: Same reason nobody discovered Neptune, sunspots, air pressure, nuclear fusion, germs, extrasolar planets, penicillin, radio waves, Maxwell's equations, and so forth... until they were discovered, even though they still existed perfectly well beforehand.

Or you're not playing 3.5e, and magic in the system you're playing can't do some of the things it can in 3.5e.

Darth Ultron
2016-08-09, 10:01 PM
I didn't -- you did. Right here:

Guess you see something in the quote that is not there...



That role fits the actual reported behavior of exactly zero deities I've ever heard of. And yes, I've heard of most of them, including all the big ones.


So....in your extensive study of every deity, you have never heard of one that is about helping people? Not even one?




A balance that favors progress. Those who want to suppress the progress have to succeed every time, those who promote progress only need a few victories. So unless divine luddites vastly outnumber divine progressives, their existence is essentially a null factor.

Well, obviously the ''common sense'' faction of deities out ranks the ''crazy awesome explot'' ones




If they're selfish, they want this because it can increase their personal wealth when they get more taxes. If they're selfless, they support this, because it helps people live better lives. So whether the ruler is selfish or selfless is, in fact, entirely irrelevant. It's in both their best self interest, and their best community interest.

But again, that is only one or two world views. There are others.





Why not? It provides an almost perfect solution to a massive problem. In real life, we've gone with much less perfect solutions simply because they gave us SOME edge. If the railroad, with all it's problems, was used to help with logistics in the Civil War, why wouldn't the Teleport Circle be used to help with all of this?

The negative effects? Death and planual monsters. And again, different view points.




Meanwhile, divine intervention is irrelevant, because, as you yourself mentioned, there are some gods who would be pro-circle. Again, to go back to the railway example: the trains sometimes derailed, people were sometimes crippled by machines, but we kept right on using it, because they were useful to us. Even if the circle has a good chance of killing people, that doesn't stop it from being useful to send supplies. Sure, it's cost would mean not every military can have them, but I would expect the larger ones to do so.

But this is the slippery slope of things like''why not just kill everyone and have all undead'' or ''why not just clear cut and obliterate every forest as we need the wood and space'' or ''why not fix the poor problem by just killing them?''




That analogy doesn't really work in your favor. After all, the amount of agricultural luddites haven't stopped the more sensible people of the world from going on ahead and quintupling the amount of food produced per acre, increasing food output to the point where everyone, theoretically, can have enough to eat. Our world tips towards technological use, a fantasy world with magic that functions like technology would tip towards magic use as time went on.

The tip is possible, but the whole point is that it is stopped dead in it's tracks. That is what the active gods are doing.

It's exactly the ''old school D&D vs new wave D&D. In new wave the player just says ''page 27 of the rules that we all, even the player that we just call the DM but is nothing special, must follow and interpret in only the one way that makes my exploit to do my awesome thing possible...so I do it and take over the world as I'm so awesome.'' And the poor ''player DM'' just sits there and says ''gosh, wow, well that is what the rules say so i'm powerless to do anything, you are the most awesome player ever''. VS Old School of the player that says ''I do this----" and the DM cuts them off and laughs and says ''nope it does not happen'' and the player hangs their head low and says ''ok''.

Active deities are exactly like that.

Necroticplague
2016-08-09, 10:24 PM
But again, that is only one or two world views. There are others. Fortunately, the worldviews of others are largely irrelevant within a lord's lands, so you would expect a small part of the world to move towards tipping, in places where the lords hold one of those two views. Not to mention that several of the other worldviews are gonna be pro-IFDT.


The negative effects? Death and planual monsters. And again, different view points.
And? Real life technologies have caused great danger to people as well. And then were either used when it was figured they were worth it (in this case, improving supply lines for a military could easily save more lives than are lost, due to meaning soldiers are less likely to


But this is the slippery slope of things like''why not just kill everyone and have all undead'' or ''why not just clear cut and obliterate every forest as we need the wood and space'' or ''why not fix the poor problem by just killing them?'' Not if you act rationally. All things have costs and benefits. Some things may be worth it, some won't. All of those three are horrible ideas in the long term.


The tip is possible, but the whole point is that it is stopped dead in it's tracks. That is what the active gods are doing. And the active gods that are promoting the tip are irrelevant because......?


It's exactly the ''old school D&D vs new wave D&D. In new wave the player just says ''page 27 of the rules that we all, even the player that we just call the DM but is nothing special, must follow and interpret in only the one way that makes my exploit to do my awesome thing possible...so I do it and take over the world as I'm so awesome.'' And the poor ''player DM'' just sits there and says ''gosh, wow, well that is what the rules say so i'm powerless to do anything, you are the most awesome player ever''. VS Old School of the player that says ''I do this----" and the DM cuts them off and laughs and says ''nope it does not happen'' and the player hangs their head low and says ''ok''.

Active deities are exactly like that.

Actually, this has nothing to do with playstyle, because we're talking about things that occur before play begins. We're talking about worlds that are built. No players have to be involved for a world to exist. We could just as easily extend this to many forms of non-interactive fiction, wherein one wonders why something is not seeing much wider use, considering obvious utility. So whether "Jedipotter's Way" or "Jedipotter's Strawman's Way" is better is wholly irrelevant.

Illven
2016-08-09, 10:33 PM
Guess you see something in the quote that is not there...

No it's there, because even if 99% of wizards wouldn't care. All it takes is 1 wizard to make a create food and water trap. (Whether for selfish or selfless reasons) And bam you have one.


Well, obviously the ''common sense'' faction of deities out ranks the ''crazy awesome explot'' ones

Yes. I too feel it is common sense to let millions starve instead of aiding this good aligned wizard crafting a create food and water trap.

Any good aligned deity not willing to at least accept this, needs to have their choir of angels removed from them. Any Lawful Evil empires that this knowledge spreads too would probably need to adopt this to make their citizens keep in line. Any deities of magic will love the strengthening of their portfolio, while any neutral deities that are neutral because of bigotry would probably adopt it, and control who has access to it.


It's exactly the ''old school D&D vs new wave D&D. In new wave the player just says ''page 27 of the rules that we all, even the player that we just call the DM but is nothing special, must follow and interpret in only the one way that makes my exploit to do my awesome thing possible...so I do it and take over the world as I'm so awesome.'' And the poor ''player DM'' just sits there and says ''gosh, wow, well that is what the rules say so i'm powerless to do anything, you are the most awesome player ever''. VS Old School of the player that says ''I do this----" and the DM cuts them off and laughs and says ''nope it does not happen'' and the player hangs their head low and says ''ok''.

You are grossly mis-characterizing the new wave D&D.

Are some like that sure. But there's just as many "old school D&D" players where the dm only keeps them around because they aren't good enough to write a novel that people will actually read, or they have a power fetish.

ace rooster
2016-08-10, 05:50 AM
No it's there, because even if 99% of wizards wouldn't care. All it takes is 1 wizard to make a create food and water trap. (Whether for selfish or selfless reasons) And bam you have one.

Except that one wizard has already killed off everybody in the vicinity with a stray enervation setting off a wightpocolypse. :smallsigh:

All the talk of intentions is irrelevant while effects that should cascade infinitely without intention exist unchecked. Presumably similar mechanisms exist to stop deliberate cascades.




Yes. I too feel it is common sense to let millions starve instead of aiding this good aligned wizard crafting a create food and water trap.


Any good aligned deity not willing to at least accept this, needs to have their choir of angels removed from them. Any Lawful Evil empires that this knowledge spreads too would probably need to adopt this to make their citizens keep in line. Any deities of magic will love the strengthening of their portfolio, while any neutral deities that are neutral because of bigotry would probably adopt it, and control who has access to it.


Suppose you work for a charity that feeds the poor, and have access to their credit card. The boss of a charity is going to be pissed off if you order pizza for all of Ethiopia. There are far better ways of achieving their objectives.

You seem to believe that this sort of trap would strengthen the portfolio of magic deities. Have you a particular reason for this? A powerful wizard certainly strengthens the portfolio, but that could easily be because they increase the capabilities of magic, and not because they use it frequently.

The other thing worth mentioning is that IFDTs are homebrew. There are no rules for making custom traps, only guidelines that are meant for the DM and that only cover the parts that players see. Everything else is abstracted away and simplified. The most significant simplification could easily be changes in use rates. For example, changing 10000 uses per century to infinite. Players would have to be doing something odd for this change to be relevant, and it makes book keeping easier.

The DM is free to place traps because they can morph the whole world to make that trap fit, which players cannot. You may require very special circumstances to place a magic trap at all, never mind one that fires every 6 seconds. Creating one that works once a year is quite easy though. It is called a fruit tree. :smalltongue:

Necroticplague
2016-08-10, 06:27 AM
The other thing worth mentioning is that IFDTs are homebrew. There are no rules for making custom traps, only guidelines that are meant for the DM and that only cover the parts that players see.

Spell Clocks, however, do have explicit rules for their creation and working, and can serve much the same purpose.

Lorsa
2016-08-10, 06:45 AM
"My setting is not the tippyverse because this other setting that I envisioned is more fun to play in. Unfortunately, for it to work, we must suspend disbelief on some issues that are not strictly logical. We do this because we end up with more enjoyment."

Basically it's the same as with movies. If you enjoy it, you don't poke holes in it. If it's meh, you do. Make something you (and your players) enjoy, and you'll ignore all the small (or large) issues.

Cluedrew
2016-08-10, 07:30 AM
I have two answers I use, depending on the flavour of magic I am using:

One is "conservation of energy". Essentially magic does not actually break any laws of physics, it just adds extra factors into it. OK so sometimes it breaks the simple laws, but it does so according to another set of rules that force things to align in the end.

The second is "magic is an exception". That it doesn't scale up, it is the weirdness at the edge of reality and you can't spread that out across all of reality, it just doesn't work. The source of magic is finite, it is controlled by something that "thinks", it takes to much effort to use, only a few people can ever learn to use it. And so on.

MrConsideration
2016-08-10, 07:37 AM
In the Gentleman Bastards series by Scott Lynch....


too much magic causes something to pay attention to the world and they ate an entire previous civilization which was a magical utopia. To this ends, the Bondsmagi of Karthain limit wide-scale societal use of magic.

But I think "Wizards hate each other and squabble, and the best way to get more spells it to take someone else's spellbook, so most Wizards spend their time plotting against other Wizards, not birthing a Magitech revolution."

Also this post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21054269&postcount=26) of mine is my argument about why a Tippyverse utopia is pretty unfeasible by standard D&D assumptions.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-10, 08:20 AM
"My setting is not the tippyverse because this other setting that I envisioned is more fun to play in. Unfortunately, for it to work, we must suspend disbelief on some issues that are not strictly logical. We do this because we end up with more enjoyment."

Basically it's the same as with movies. If you enjoy it, you don't poke holes in it. If it's meh, you do. Make something you (and your players) enjoy, and you'll ignore all the small (or large) issues.


My experience is, instead, that my enjoyment of a setting or story is to a large degree inversely proportional to the obviously poke-able holes -- and that the holes cause the lack of enjoyment, rather than the other way around.

However, I am an obsessive world-builder who sometimes agonizes over the smallest details and all their forward and backward implications.

Lorsa
2016-08-10, 08:59 AM
My experience is, instead, that my enjoyment of a setting or story is to a large degree inversely proportional to the obviously poke-able holes -- and that the holes cause the lack of enjoyment, rather than the other way around.

However, I am an obsessive world-builder who sometimes agonizes over the smallest details and all their forward and backward implications.

Then, naturally, if you want to play D&D "by the rules" (which I know you don't as you dislike D&D), you'd have more fun in Tippyverse as opposed to Forgotten Realms (which only takes the effects of magic into account to some, not the full, extent).

The point is that if you ask yourself why your setting is not the Tippyverse when it would be logical for it to be so, the only real answer is "because I don't find it fun" and "I prefer this other one despite the holes".

If holes in a setting bothers you, and you enjoy ones with fewer holes then obviously you will gravitate towards those settings. Still, you should play in a setting that you enjoy the most, that's the only logical way to play a RPG, even if the setting itself is not logical.

I feel like I am saying the same thing too many times so I best shut up. If patching up the holes creates a setting you enjoy, do it, if it creates one you don't enjoy, don't. Simple!

When I run games (which is most of my roleplaying time), I also agonize over small details in and their implications. I like to have as few holes or logical inconsistencies as possible, even if they'll never be visible to the players and only known by me.

Magic in particular is really hard to incorporate in a setting without holes occurring. Some advanced technology is also difficult (even though I usually do a better job than Star Trek). Some magic systems are easier than others to make a setting for though...

BlueHerring
2016-08-10, 09:16 AM
You could also have magic inherently alter the fabric of reality each time its used. Maybe one, or even a few highly powerful wizards can use their most powerful spells just fine, but it'll eventually weaken the fabric of reality. It could even be like your plane/planet's own extradimensional barrier. Piggybacking off it, and using its power for a few spells is fine, but massive use on a large scale starts to weaken the underlying principles of causality or risk incursion from extradimensional forces.

And, you can also have any powerful wizards/sorcerers be aware of this fact, and explicitly not share their power because they're aware of the consequences.

Arbane
2016-08-10, 11:03 AM
You could also have magic inherently alter the fabric of reality each time its used. Maybe one, or even a few highly powerful wizards can use their most powerful spells just fine, but it'll eventually weaken the fabric of reality. It could even be like your plane/planet's own extradimensional barrier. Piggybacking off it, and using its power for a few spells is fine, but massive use on a large scale starts to weaken the underlying principles of causality or risk incursion from extradimensional forces.

And, you can also have any powerful wizards/sorcerers be aware of this fact, and explicitly not share their power because they're aware of the consequences.

Ah, the Terry Pratchett approach, where a large part of wizards' education is how NOT to use magic.

Another approach: Archetype Depletion. There's an old Exalted adventure where a group of Solar archmages found to their horror that over centuries, conjured food ceased to nourish, and conjured fire didn't warm any more. I see no reason why something similar couldn't happen in a D&D setting. So make those food-manufacturing devices.... they should be good for a generation or ten, then comes the Great Famine and a lot of cool ruins for a new set of adventurers to loot!

Guancyto
2016-08-10, 11:30 AM
When every bartender is a retired 12th-level adventurer? Forgotten Realms is a silly setting, it's just not, you know, on purpose.

Anyway, a lot of fantasy settings have some sort of ultra-magical paradise ruled by the wielders of unfettered magic, but they pretty much all have one thing in common - they fell. That suggests that the mass use of magic to solve all problems is itself problematic, and that people don't try because it's been tried before and it failed horribly.

(Really the biggest thing you can do to forestall the Tippyverse is modify the rules on magic traps, which is fine because they were really never meant to be used like that anyway. A single cleric or brotherhood dedicated to making food for the destitute is miraculous and completely in-genre, without the long-term or societal clusterfluffle of the Tippyverse. Pulling a lever and food coming out is... not.)

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-10, 11:57 AM
Ah, the Terry Pratchett approach, where a large part of wizards' education is how NOT to use magic.

Another approach: Archetype Depletion. There's an old Exalted adventure where a group of Solar archmages found to their horror that over centuries, conjured food ceased to nourish, and conjured fire didn't warm any more. I see no reason why something similar couldn't happen in a D&D setting. So make those food-manufacturing devices.... they should be good for a generation or ten, then comes the Great Famine and a lot of cool ruins for a new set of adventurers to loot!

OK, but... why did that happen?

OldTrees1
2016-08-10, 01:32 PM
OK, but... why did that happen?

1) The processor handling that effect got worn out from use as machines tend to do.
2) The platonic ideal needs to regenerate whenever a part of it is conjured. Regeneration rate is proportional to the fraction remaining.
3) Single points of failure are inevitably targeted. Some villain decided to curse that spell.
4) The olde mana depletion explanation except modern mages learned from the last cataclysm and modern spells are structured to only use specific differentiated subsets of available mana (only mana particles forming a regular dodecahedron for example).
5) Magic is tied to the gods. Each spell takes a minute amount of their attention. If a god dies then so do those spells. Waste too much of a god's attention and they are vulnerable to their rivals.
6) ... etc

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-10, 01:40 PM
1) The processor handling that effect got worn out from use as machines tend to do.
2) The platonic ideal needs to regenerate whenever a part of it is conjured. Regeneration rate is proportional to the fraction remaining.
3) Single points of failure are inevitably targeted. Some villain decided to curse that spell.
4) The olde mana depletion explanation except modern mages learned from the last cataclysm and modern spells are structured to only use specific differentiated subsets of available mana (only mana particles forming a regular dodecahedron for example).
5) Magic is tied to the gods. Each spell takes a minute amount of their attention. If a god dies then so do those spells. Waste too much of a god's attention and they are vulnerable to their rivals.
6) ... etc

Good starting points.

I just know that if I dropped "the archetype got depleted" on my players, they'd want that explained in detail... because that's who they are.

OldTrees1
2016-08-10, 02:58 PM
Good starting points.

I just know that if I dropped "the archetype got depleted" on my players, they'd want that explained in detail... because that's who they are.

Thanks.

I understand that desire and even coming up with an answer is an enjoyable exercise.

Arbane
2016-08-10, 03:44 PM
Good starting points.

I just know that if I dropped "the archetype got depleted" on my players, they'd want that explained in detail... because that's who they are.

Isn't it weird how people are perfectly OK with how vague D&D magic is as long as it works? The second there's any complications though, WHOA! We're gonna need someone with a PhD in Thaumaturgy to make sure this finger-waggling is REALISTIC!

As someone said earlier in the thread, most PC spellcasting (at least in D&D-type games) is a bit like not worrying about whether your car needs the oil filter replaced while in mid-car-chase.

(A similar anecdote I heard of, combined with Player Character Logic - a PC was trying to industrialize animated dead, so the GM said that was a bad idea because too many undead in an area blight the soil, cause sickness, etc. So PC reanimated field mice, with orders to head to an enemy country's farmland and bury themselves...)

Winter_Wolf
2016-08-10, 03:47 PM
Way back when, magic was dangerous, and most practitioners could expect a rather shortened life expectancy. Hence the obsession with undeath to cheat death. If you can kill yourself with a poorly placed fireball, you develop a certain reticence to fling them around willy nilly. Teleportation being higher level, proportionately more potential for mishaps. I'd say fifth level counts as advanced magic, and what self respecting wizard would stoop to menial uses for mastering cosmic powers?

Arbane
2016-08-10, 05:08 PM
Way back when, magic was dangerous, and most practitioners could expect a rather shortened life expectancy. Hence the obsession with undeath to cheat death. If you can kill yourself with a poorly placed fireball, you develop a certain reticence to fling them around willy nilly. Teleportation being higher level, proportionately more potential for mishaps. I'd say fifth level counts as advanced magic, and what self respecting wizard would stoop to menial uses for mastering cosmic powers?

If you're talking about earlier editions, there's also the fact that making magic items back then was so ridiculously difficult that most (PC) spellcasters thought running around in monster-infested ruins in hopes of finding random scrolls seemed like a GOOD idea compared to making their own. Never mind trying to make 'resetting Create Food traps', whatever THOSE are...

nrg89
2016-08-10, 05:08 PM
Way back when, magic was dangerous, and most practitioners could expect a rather shortened life expectancy. Hence the obsession with undeath to cheat death. If you can kill yourself with a poorly placed fireball, you develop a certain reticence to fling them around willy nilly. Teleportation being higher level, proportionately more potential for mishaps. I'd say fifth level counts as advanced magic, and what self respecting wizard would stoop to menial uses for mastering cosmic powers?

I don't see how creating and distributing free energy is a menial use of magic. Is operating a nuclear power plant a menial use of nuclear forces?

Chauncymancer
2016-08-10, 05:36 PM
I get there by just assuming that the rules of the book for NPC's and XP are a description of the world internally, and not just a play abstraction.
To whit: From a world building perspective, everyone is an NPC, meaning your world's stat distribution is 3d6. Meaning 50% of all people can't cast spells at all, and a further 12.5% can cast only cantrips. Only the smartest 37.5% of the world's population can become wizards of any kind. Then we get to the XP tables:
Adventuring is the only way to generate XP, and XP is the only way to level, so all level 2+ characters are adventurers. But in every level's 13 encounters, there is one encounter of EL+4, which means that about once per level you have a single experience with a 50% chance of killing you, and 4 more encounters with a lesser chance of death. So be optimistic: of all 1st level wizards who shoot for level 2, 60% of them die trying. If everyone who could became a wizard, and then went for level 2, 15% would make it to level 2, and only 6% make it to level 3, the first level at which wondrous items can be made. If we assume that production begins in earnest, and the industrialists spend half their xp on items, then only 0.96% of the population is wizards that are still alive.
From here you can slant the deck even farther by pointing out that becoming a wizards takes a lot, a lot of money: spellbooks and component pouches and the cost of the sages to tutor you, not to mention all the wealth lost to years spent studying instead of working: Most people with the Int to become a wizard probably never get the opportunity to study as one, living out their lives as an unusually smart commoner or an expert. Those who do have the backing for this tremendous expense, on the whole, can probably get good paying jobs as first level wizards, so there's very little reason for an ordinary person to even try to become a second level wizard. Anyone crazy enough to even want to try is the kind of person so nuts or so desperate that there may only be 4-6 of them in the entire world, say involved in some sort of party...

TeChameleon
2016-08-10, 08:16 PM
There's one other semi-obvious answer to your original example... actually, two.

The first being, sure, being able to change something's potential energy with the flick of a wrist is amazing and has potentially incredible applications. The difficulty inherent there is, how many people are willing to go out and gain the equivalent of two or three PhDs and possibly the rough equivalent of training for the Olympics at the same time... to spend the rest of their life waving their hand every forty seconds to keep a turbine running? If "poof from point A) to point B)" teleportation is possible, but not permanent open 'doorways', the infinite-energy problem (from that, at least) is handily avoided.

The second being, even if perma-portals are a thing so that you don't need to have an OCD wizard on permanent retainer... what good is infinite energy going to do them? What is a medieval society going to do with waterwheels that run forever without needing a river nearby, aside from the obvious like grinding grain or maybe winding ballistae? Teleportation can have hilariously game-breaking applications, but the 'one-time-poof-you-and/or-someone-and/or-something-else-are-somewhere-else' variety doesn't have near the widespread industrial application that permanent stable portals would.

Limiters are fairly easy to come up with- it takes a ritual to 'poof' things, enchanted items can't do a teleportation spell properly, no portals, whatever. Or you could flip it around and go full non-Euclidean, I suppose... I'm pretty sure that the evil little groupmind of the Playground can out-munchkin your players if the need arose :smallamused:

Aeson
2016-08-10, 09:06 PM
I'll throw another vote to having enchantments have some sort of magic-draining effect. You can require spells and enchantments to get their energy from somewhere and do so in ways which are largely irrelevant to player characters. Maybe permanent enchantments on personal equipment draws magical energy from the user's body (perhaps this is also where the magical energy for a caster's spells come from, in which case you could, if you wanted, implement a mechanical reason for spellcasters to avoid having too many enchanted items on their person, and could perhaps extend that to limit how many magical items any character would want to have on their person, though keeping track of this could be too much busywork to bother with) and limited-use magic items come with the magical equivalent of a battery, while permanent enchantments on locations draw their power from whatever ambient magical energy is in the area. Too great a drain, and bad things start happening.

Possible 'bad things' might be random spontaneous magic (restless dead, fire elementals popping out of camp fires, nymphs all over the place, etc), the fraying of reality, or in drawing the attention of some kind of horror as mentioned above, but another possibility is one or more of a variety of effects which might be broadly described as a 'fading' of magic. Spellcasting in an area with magical drain might require a a concentration check with a difficulty dependent upon the level of drain. You could make spells require higher-level (or more) spell slots or psionic points or mana or whatever else you're using in magically-depleted areas. You could have magically-depleted areas act as though under the effects of an antimagic field (perhaps not necessarily exactly as the spell; maybe lightly-drained environments have no effect on characters above a certain level, and the more drained the environment, the higher level you need to be to ignore the effects). Another possible drain effect would be a penalty on caster level for the spell as cast - maybe it isn't any more difficult to cast a fireball, but in an environment with a high level of magical drain it takes an epic wizard to disintegrate a strand of completely mundane hair. You could make the effects of the magical depletion affect everything equally, or you could make it affect certain things disproportionately if you dislike certain effects or the abundance of certain levels of magic.

One other thing you could do is introduce some sort of conservation law. Maybe, as said earlier, magic cannot create; that food that's been 'created' by your magic was actually stolen from somewhere, whether you know it or not. Maybe in order for someone to be brought back from the dead, at least one other must die (possibly with some kind of 'value' rating - maybe you require a level-equivalent sacrifice to bring back a character, e.g. every sentient and sapient being is worth 1 + [character level] resurrection points and you need to sacrifice at least as many resurrection points of living beings as the character you want to raise is worth), or some kind of opposing force must come into existence - maybe to resurrect a high-level paladin you also need to bring a powerful demon into the world. Maybe healing magic transfers wounds (to another person if you want to go with something a bit dark, or maybe it takes a bit off the patient's maximum lifespan, or maybe using it empowers undead and 'inflict wounds' spells), or maybe healing magic is kind of like a band-aid or stitches and the person healed by the magic is weaker until they've gone through a recovery period. Maybe spellcasters don't actually have any magical energy of their own and are instead manipulating ambient magical energy, and get a 'share' of the ambient energy proportional to and limited by their ability to handle said energy - e.g. a character has [highest spellcasting class level]2 points of magical potential, and an area of a given size has 1000 points of magical energy within it. If the only spellcasters in the area area a pair of level 20 wizards, there's no issue - 2*20^2 = 800 < 1000, so both wizards have no penalties to their spellcasting abilities. A third level 20 wizard moves in, and suddenly there's 1200 points of magical potential in an area with only 1000 points of magical energy, giving each level 20 wizard only 333 1/3 of the 400 points of magical energy that they can handle, which turns them into (effectively) level ~18 wizards instead of level 20. Pick a rule and a limit which is high enough that it's unlikely to come up for an adventurer in the field and you won't have an issue that affects spellcasters on a standard dungeon crawl in a remote region, and maybe won't even come up in normal gameplay even in a highly-populated city, but which limits the potential for wizards' academies or other things like that where large numbers of potentially very powerful wizards congregate and exchange knowledge and ideas.


I don't see how creating and distributing free energy is a menial use of magic. Is operating a nuclear power plant a menial use of nuclear forces?
As with just about anything else, it's a matter of perspective. Providing a service that allows others to make or do something but does not actually create a finished, tangible product can be regarded as 'menial,' from the right point of view. Creating food on a large scale by means of magic when farmers and fishermen are perfectly capable of doing the same can likewise be regarded as 'menial' from the right point of view - after all, provision of food is a large part of what the peasantry and serfs do in a medieval setting, and peasants and serfs of the medieval period are members of relatively servile classes.

Beyond that, though, if you're playing with a system of magic that carries a high risk to the caster, are you really going to take that risk just to create a box that spits out a loaf of bread every time you pull a lever? Especially if the risk isn't just to the creator of the object but also the user (or even the receiver of the end product; maybe 10% of the 'failed' uses creates a loaf of bread that looks alright but will cause anyone who consumes a portion to become seriously ill or die), you have to wonder why you don't just go to the baker who makes bread in a completely mundane way.

awa
2016-08-10, 09:18 PM
you could also have magic make inferior versions
spell made food tastes worse and is worse for you. Sure it can get you by for a few day y it’s got the calories but it has less vitamins minerals.

You can use magic to cure diseases but that rapidly create magic resistant super diseases if you try and use it in anything remotely systematic (and it weakens your peasant immune system if used often enough)

Walls created with magic work for a few hours maybe even a few days but after a few weeks they start to sag and then collapse they just aren’t built to the standard of a decently skilled craftsmen

The big thing is just to disallow traps and cause magic items to wear down if used continuously

an ox cart had a permanent duration to but you cant run it forever. Once permanent magic items can wear down then it often becomes impractical to spend thousands of gold to make food becuase the farmer is more efficient.

This also works for things like zombie miners if the zombie eventually suffers enough wear and tear to collapse then that material component you spent is more efficient to just hire untrained laborers there still better at the job then zombies.

A lot of the magic item problem assume that permanent duration is literally permanent no matter how much you use it rather then just not having a set duration. Going back to my example of the car if a player asked whats the duration of the car was you would say its permanent its not going to wink out of exsistance and in the middle of your car chase but its still not going to break down eventually if you try and use it as a perpetual motion device.

bulbaquil
2016-08-10, 09:39 PM
A lot of the magic item problem assume that permanent duration is literally permanent no matter how much you use it rather then just not having a set duration. Going back to my example of the car if a player asked whats the duration of the car was you would say its permanent its not going to wink out of exsistance and in the middle of your car chase but its still not going to break down eventually if you try and use it as a perpetual motion device.

Consider also that in many fantasy stories, magic items either (1.) are consumable, (2.) have not been used for a very long time, and/or (3.) need to be recharged before they can reach their full potential, implying that over either time or past use (or both) they had LOST their "charge".

Milo v3
2016-08-10, 09:45 PM
If you use Pathfinder, immensely frequent use of magic can result in "Magical Scars" which could be detrimental to the society through the rules rather than requiring houserules.

Kamai
2016-08-11, 12:28 AM
For a setting that's willing to embrace a bit of the Tippyverse, something that I toyed with is that permanent spell effects either needed large amounts of land or needed to be tied to an intelligent creature with a soul. The goal was to leave a tactical weakness for relying on these spells instead of the laws of magic biting back.

Kami2awa
2016-08-11, 02:13 AM
There's many ways to deal with this:

- Ignore it. Suspend your disbelief. It can be done.

- Embrace it. So, your world runs on magitech and has changed from a quasi-medieval setting to something completely different. It's still likely to be an interesting world, and very different from our own as magic can accomplish things unattainable with our technology such as teleportation. The existence of fantasy creatures will also make it wildly different.

- Find a reason why not. Magic might be too difficult, unreliable, dangerous, limited or otherwise not widely usable. Wizards might be distrusted or too aloof to use their abilities for mundane matters like grinding corn or turning waterwheels.

- It hasn't happened yet. For most of human history technological progress was slow. It may be that no one has yet managed to apply magic widely yet. If the players want to, then that can be the focus of the game.

- It's happening. Your world is going through an industrial revolution. That in itself makes for an interesting setting - are the people really happy in their livelihoods being stolen by wizards? Are non-spellcasters an underclass now? What does the paladin in the party think of the Dark Satanic Mills? And what happens when evil spellcasters start building machines that further their agendas?

As an additional point, there is nothing stopping a fantasy world from going through a "mundane" industrial revolution. A clever Dwarvish smith could invent a practical steam engine that runs without dangerous, unreliable magic. A charismatic bard could start a revolution against the king. It wouldn't necessarily need to be propelled by magic at all.

- It happened, but something reversed it. Magitech existed in a lost "Golden Age", but that age ended and the secrets were lost. This is actually implied a little bit in D&D in general; someone had to make all those Artefacts, after all.

TheCountAlucard
2016-08-11, 06:03 AM
The point is that if you ask yourself why your setting is not the Tippyverse when it would be logical for it to be so, the only real answer is "because I don't find it fun" and "I prefer this other one despite the holes".…well, no. Like others said earlier, there's always "The game rules are not the in-universe physics and metaphysics of the setting, merely rules to facilitate gameplay and telling fun stories." It's a pretty solid answer.

Braininthejar2
2016-08-11, 06:16 AM
Wizards purposefully keep applications of magic limited, to prevent fools from messing with it.

Because if Tippiverse is real, so is Wightocalypse.

Nightcanon
2016-08-11, 08:38 AM
There's one other semi-obvious answer to your original example... actually, two.

The first being, sure, being able to change something's potential energy with the flick of a wrist is amazing and has potentially incredible applications. The difficulty inherent there is, how many people are willing to go out and gain the equivalent of two or three PhDs and possibly the rough equivalent of training for the Olympics at the same time... to spend the rest of their life waving their hand every forty seconds to keep a turbine running? If "poof from point A) to point B)" teleportation is possible, but not permanent open 'doorways', the infinite-energy problem (from that, at least) is handily avoided.

The second being, even if perma-portals are a thing so that you don't need to have an OCD wizard on permanent retainer... what good is infinite energy going to do them? What is a medieval society going to do with waterwheels that run forever without needing a river nearby, aside from the obvious like grinding grain or maybe winding ballistae? Teleportation can have hilariously game-breaking applications, but the 'one-time-poof-you-and/or-someone-and/or-something-else-are-somewhere-else' variety doesn't have near the widespread industrial application that permanent stable portals would.

Limiters are fairly easy to come up with- it takes a ritual to 'poof' things, enchanted items can't do a teleportation spell properly, no portals, whatever. Or you could flip it around and go full non-Euclidean, I suppose... I'm pretty sure that the evil little groupmind of the Playground can out-munchkin your players if the need arose :smallamused:
Even so, some bright spark with the equivalent of 2 or 3 PhDs is going to industrialise magical food production and transportation (probably for military purposes as per NecroticPlague's example on the previous page), unless there are hard limitations in the world which aren't mentioned in the rules because the rules are shorthand written for playing dungeon crawls, not running economies.

Necroticplague
2016-08-11, 09:21 AM
Even so, some bright spark with the equivalent of 2 or 3 PhDs is going to industrialise magical food production and transportation (probably for military purposes as per NecroticPlague's example on the previous page), unless there are hard limitations in the world which aren't mentioned in the rules because the rules are shorthand written for playing dungeon crawls, not running economies.

Why say "is" like it's some theoretical constructs? Green Revolutions that used transgenic crops to massively inflate the food supply were people with two or three PHDs working to solve hunger. And, at the production level, they've actually succeeded (there is indeed enough food to go around. distributing it fairly enough so it actually does so, however, is a whole other problem).

wumpus
2016-08-11, 09:22 AM
Note that if you are playing in 5e, note "rule 0.4" (or thereabouts, past "rule 0" and before the start of the "rules"): specific trumps general. If your campaign has any sort of social structure, that social structure actually exists and wizards aren't able to undermine it with a known set of spells (scry and die for one, but general tippy society as well).

My preference for "a wizard did it" would be that the "wizard" in the Players Handbook would typically called a "battle wizard" and specialize in vancian casting. "Normal" wizards specialize in ritual magic: it is more powerful if somewhat longer (but typically useless in the dungeon as they tend to carefully locate their towers and then schedule rituals along astrological significance). This might get a bit sticky when the "ritual specialist" can somehow cast exactly like a "battle wizard" in combat (to keep things balanced) but should mostly work.



You are grossly mis-characterizing the new wave D&D.

Are some like that sure. But there's just as many "old school D&D" players where the dm only keeps them around because they aren't good enough to write a novel that people will actually read, or they have a power fetish.

You also completely don't get "old school D&D". Grognards have seen the words "rules as written" but have trouble understanding why anyone would bother to care what they say. Rules are seen as suggestions. Often bad suggestions that need to be ignored in order to play (typically old games weren't so much "broken" as "incomplete*" and "having plenty of rules that just didn't work"). It isn't just about power gaming (which always existed), it is completely about the rules overriding the campaign.

* I remember a fan of "Gamma World" insisting that it was pretty good, but you needed a copy of D&D for all the missing rules. Since the game probably predated 1e (or at least the DMG) I suspect that wasn't so much intended for sales but to simply get the thing shipped.

nrg89
2016-08-11, 09:25 AM
The second being, even if perma-portals are a thing so that you don't need to have an OCD wizard on permanent retainer... what good is infinite energy going to do them? What is a medieval society going to do with waterwheels that run forever without needing a river nearby, aside from the obvious like grinding grain or maybe winding ballistae?
Since you can spawn a gate near the production facility and the other one on the bottom of the ocean, what couldn't they do? You could spin yarn, weave clothes, power multiple aerial lifts (to avoid one gate becoming congested of travelers we use it as a power source instead), pump water, mechanize agriculture (not just grind grains into flour but you could also wind up a lot lot of potential energy in springs and power stuff that harvest), power heavy tools in shipyards (drills, saws, belt sanders etc.) and many other things I can't think of off the top of my head. Basically, it would be like the modern power grid except instead of electricity that can leak this would theoretically be far more efficient. Now, scaling however is where the real problem comes because a factory requires far more power than a household and I'm just a computer engineer so I guess diverting more power to the factories would be fairly straight forward (someone who knows electricity better, please correct me otherwise) but it's not impossible to do the same with this "water grid"; you would just open up more gates at the factory who turn an even bigger wheel together than at the house.


Teleportation can have hilariously game-breaking applications, but the 'one-time-poof-you-and/or-someone-and/or-something-else-are-somewhere-else' variety doesn't have near the widespread industrial application that permanent stable portals would.


Agreed. I just think the uses or these portals are more than you thought of.

The Great Wyrm
2016-08-11, 09:40 AM
Why say "is" like it's some theoretical constructs? Green Revolutions that used transgenic crops to massively inflate the food supply were people with two or three PHDs working to solve hunger. And, at the production level, they've actually succeeded (there is indeed enough food to go around. distributing it fairly enough so it actually does so, however, is a whole other problem).

The Green Revolution did not involve transgenic crops. Mutagenesis and selective breeding, yes, but not modern genetic engineering. It was also facilitated by the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Also, although there were a few very influential leaders (such as Norman Borlaug), there were considerably more than two or three contributors.

nrg89
2016-08-11, 10:06 AM
The Green Revolution did not involve transgenic crops. Mutagenesis and selective breeding, yes, but not modern genetic engineering. It was also facilitated by the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

Also, although there were a few very influential leaders (such as Norman Borlaug), there were considerably more than two or three contributors.

One could say that the Green Revolution is still happening and that GMOs are just a continuation. The Industrial revolution is still ongoing, it didn't just stop when combustion engines came along and took away some of the steam engine's applications (although the steam engine, by far, still supplies us with most of the power we consume). In this day and age people are still moving away from subsistence farming to jobs in industry and new technology is still being applied to increase food production so I would say that both revolutions are very much still ongoing.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-11, 10:08 AM
Wizards purposefully keep applications of magic limited, to prevent fools from messing with it.

Because if Tippiverse is real, so is Wightocalypse.

Why do people keep bringing up wights?

Joe the Rat
2016-08-11, 10:44 AM
Also keep in mind that while it takes a few informed and industrious geniuses to come up with the innovations behind crazy world-transforming technologies, they didn't have to build every satellite or go around and plant every GMO crop with their own hands.


Why do people keep bringing up wights?When (in certain editions) a wight kills someone through drain, they will rise as another wight. It's the Zombie Apocalypse for D&D.

---

I'm for cheap and easy explanations: Divine Intervention. The various deities of the world sort of like it the way it is, and post-scarcity-immortal-Culture 'verse shenanigans will mess up whatever it is they're playing at. Maybe the rewrite the rules, or kludge a patch (Jack Chalker style). Maybe the get their smite on. Maybe they put the pebble in the right spot to put someone on track to stop it from happening. Isn't "stopping the mad genius from breaking the world in his quest for power" a standard theme for heroes? You think it's just chance?


Then there's Paradise/The Spell, aka the Magic Cold War approach. The world-breakers are fairly rare, and not necessarily on the same page in terms of interests. Resources devoted to developing free energy for the masses are resources not spent keeping your neighbor from turning the whole world into crystal scarab powered pseudonatural undead. Countering one another's shenanigans eats up time and energy; best to not start something, and devote resources to other interests.

awa
2016-08-11, 10:48 AM
wights are intelligent stealthy hate all life and every one they kill becomes a wight. Wights get brought up because barring a specific exception any one killed by negative levels becomes a wight. It’s a zombie apocalypse except the "zombies" only need to touch you, have a +16 to stealth are as fast and smart as an average human and much more durable.

In a common town the vast majority of the population are level 1 commoners and since it takes less than a minute to turn a human there is a strong chance that the wight can gather overwhelming numbers.

So it is entirely possible for a level 1 character with the right meta magic feat/ and meta magic reducers to start of the end of the world with a single fell drain spell, because he does not have enough ranks of knowledge religion to know where wights come from.

falcon1
2016-08-11, 11:06 AM
They can create more of their own with limitations in RAW. Any they kill becomes one, and they are powerful enough to kill most characters, meaning they would probably get enough numbes to overwhelm more powerful ones quickly.

Braininthejar2
2016-08-11, 11:12 AM
That was just an example. Imagine someone calling a succubus and accidently letting her lose in a big city. The ways magic can backfire horribly are many and varied.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-11, 11:58 AM
OK, some of the comments made it sound like the wights would be the direct result of a magi-industrial setting.

awa
2016-08-11, 12:02 PM
no its more a consequence of wide spread experimenting with magic

Its sometimes presented as an alternative to tippyverse, tippyverse is often presented as inevitable consequence in a raw only setting. Wightacolypse is then presented as a counter argument because it can occur at a much lower level with far less investment. For utopia people have to think of a way to abuse the magic, build the intuitions to make use of it and so on. For the wights all you need is someone capable of causing one negative level and not destroying the body afterwards and then the undead take care of the rest.

Ceiling_Squid
2016-08-11, 04:03 PM
"My setting is not the tippyverse because this other setting that I envisioned is more fun to play in. Unfortunately, for it to work, we must suspend disbelief on some issues that are not strictly logical. We do this because we end up with more enjoyment."

Basically it's the same as with movies. If you enjoy it, you don't poke holes in it. If it's meh, you do. Make something you (and your players) enjoy, and you'll ignore all the small (or large) issues.

Seriously, this. Suspension of disbelief is essential.

I don't try to explain away the Tippyverse, because the Tippyverse is, in my mind, the result of an incredibly-exhausting degree of nitpicking and cheese. It is not a setting I would enjoy, from a DM or player standpoint.

The fact that so many cling to it as "the only logical result of RAW" grates on me to no end. They say "logical worldbuilding", I say "pedantry".

Braininthejar2
2016-08-11, 04:43 PM
Alternatively, magic doesn't want to be used that way.

http://www.egscomics.com/

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-11, 04:48 PM
meh
See signature regarding suspension of disbelief.
meh

Ceiling_Squid
2016-08-11, 06:09 PM
meh
See signature regarding suspension of disbelief.
meh

And?

That's your personal threshold for suspension, regarding these particular circumstances.

One person's "hung until dead" is another person's "acceptable handwave", depending on priorities.

bulbaquil
2016-08-11, 06:29 PM
And?

That's your personal threshold for suspension, regarding these particular circumstances.

One person's "hung until dead" is another person's "acceptable handwave", depending on priorities.

Exactly.

I find magic without inherent large-scale limitations, including much of RAW 3.5e D&D, to break my suspension of disbelief.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-11, 06:35 PM
And?

That's your personal threshold for suspension, regarding these particular circumstances.

One person's "hung until dead" is another person's "acceptable handwave", depending on priorities.


If by "handwave", you mean "acceptance of internal inconsistency and incoherence", then personally, I don't DO handwaves, and that's the sort of thing that gets into "hung by the neck" territory.




Exactly.

I find magic without inherent large-scale limitations, including much of RAW 3.5e D&D, to break my suspension of disbelief.


Your statement here would seem to fall closer to the sentiment expressed in my sig, than not.

meh

OldTrees1
2016-08-11, 06:38 PM
Your statement here would seem to fall closer to the sentiment expressed in my sig, than not.

I just noticed you had verisimilitude defined in your sig. I find that most appropriate.

Frozen_Feet
2016-08-11, 08:00 PM
Tippyverse is far more specific than people think. I don't remember the exact list, but the major points were:

1) Gods are silent.
2) Permanent teleportation circles exist.
3) Epic rules aren't uses.
4) Logical contradictions aren't allowed.
5) Rest is D&D 3.5 RAW.

Just having active gods prevents Tippyverse. Just lacking permanent teleportation circles (or equivalent) prevents Tippyverse. There are many other possible post-scarcity magitech settings creatable by abusing various magic systems, but they're not Tippyverse.

As for why Tippyverse would happen instead of Wight apocalypse, Tippyverse presumes existence of other magical creatures as well and wights have no priority to be the first in line. Sure, human commoners fall tl wights, but many other species don't, so the Tippyverse builds off from there. It's good to remember that while magitech cities are the defining feature of Tippyverse, it also proposes vast stretches of unused wilderness between them where wight apocalypses might as well be going on at the same time.

awa
2016-08-11, 08:34 PM
Oh there are definitely tons of raw rule set ups where the Wight apocalypse is unlikely but there are tons of raw rule set ups where a tippy verse is unlikely.

Some people claim that if you have raw d&d magic you will logically get a tippy verse while others suggest that with raw d&d magic it is far easier to break the world then it is to make any kind of civilization much less a magical utopia. Wight is just the one that can be pulled off at very low level.

Cluedrew
2016-08-11, 08:36 PM
Tippyverse is far more specific than people think.Is there an actual document that defines what Tippyverse means exactly?

awa
2016-08-11, 09:15 PM
I think so

like a previous poster said earlier the original tippy verse is pretty specific with heavy emphasis on teleport circles.

The thing is people use it to describe any setting that uses magic exploits to break the default assumptions of a typical fantasy setting. The number of times ive seen it used to describe any magic exploit setting far exceeds the number of times I have seen it refer to the original setting

Cluedrew
2016-08-11, 09:29 PM
I actually thought that Tippyverse referred to any setting where imbalanced (and not very constrained) magic was brought to its logical, over-the-top yet internally consistent, conclusion.

BlueHerring
2016-08-11, 10:30 PM
I actually thought that Tippyverse referred to any setting where imbalanced (and not very constrained) magic was brought to its logical, over-the-top yet internally consistent, conclusion.

It actually refers to this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy), as written by Emperor Tippy. It's kind of used as a catch-all term by some people, but actually it's pretty specific.

2D8HP
2016-08-11, 11:20 PM
Have no other playgrounders read the 1969 Larry Niven short story "Not Long Before the End", or his 1976 Novel The Magic Goes Away (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Goes_Away)?


The Trope Namer, Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away stories, tell of an ancient civilization based on Functional Magic powered by "Mana", but there's only a finite amount present on Earth. That nobody seems to be aware of or acknowledge this fact causes the magi, magical creatures and gods that use mana to eventually "go mythical" (a very obvious allegory aimed at modern civilization's reliance on fixed resources

Or the 1991 Dark Sun campaign setting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Sun)?

Or saw the Magic Lost and Reborn thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?487606-Magic-Lost-and-Reborn)?

D&Dland was a "Tippyverse" (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy). That's why the realms are littered with ancient ruins filled with magical artifacts that no one currently makes.

There was a grand Magic based civilization once.

Then the magic stopped.


The ruins of the Ancients all around, in the wastelands and underground shows the truth!
Long ago the Elves
used up all the magic causing the fall of their civilization! (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?487606-Magic-Lost-and-Reborn)

Over-use of Magic in one place leeches the Mana from the Earh, leaving desolate wastelands in it's absence!
The ancestors of the Elves having squandered all the magic fled underground burrowing deeper and deeper to find usable Mana, settling the Underdark as they went.
A few remnants stayed on the surface learning to survive in a world without magic. Yes humans and orcs! The Orcs who infest the ruins are the savage descendents of the Elves too stupid to leave. We humans are the descendents of those who didn't hide underground, or stupidly stay amongst the ruins, but instead pioneered new lands and made new tools.
Why else would it be humans who invented the crossbow, the plow, sailing ships, and windmills? Only in times without Magic would anyone bother to build such things! That's why so many of us still toil on the land and in our smithies, instead of just learning Wizardry, were not too stupid to learn Spellcraft! Nay, deep in our souls we feel the warning that it can't last!

That is why these tomb robbing Adventurer's have lately been finding magic items littering the ruins. For centuries there was insufficient environmental Mana for those items to be worth picking up!
That is why there are Sorcerers now born among us when previous generations had none!
The return of Magic to the wastelands is why suddenly all these magicsl monsters now infect our lands! Do you think our ancestors could have survived long if they'd always existed?

We have forgotten and grown soft!
We must conserve what Magic is left and learn from the Gnomes ways to make wonders without the Arcane arts. Too much reliance on and use of Wizardry will doom us!

We must learn to grow our on food and distill water, without relying on Create Food and Water Spells, and if these Magic-User's continue to waste the Magic away in trivial goals, we must learn to fight off without spells, the bears, wolves and other beasts that threaten us, else we fall to claws and fangs!

The truth is out there!
Heed the warnings!
Take these pamphlets and spread the word before it's too late!

vasilidor
2016-08-12, 03:35 AM
I often have a "when to much magic is concentrated in one locale, weird stuff happens" clause whenever someone tries this in one of my games. sometimes i will preempt it with an example, such as that local over there that just so happens to be crawling with living spells, spontaneously created undead and other monsters. oh and your own magic may go wonky there, maybe.

Solophoenix
2016-08-12, 06:29 AM
Conservative estimates put the development of clothing at around 107,000 years ago. Pockets as we know them were developed in the 13th century. Humans walked around carrying stuff, and then tying bags of stuff to themselves, for tens of thousands of years.

Innovations always seem a lot more obvious after they've happened. A perfectly acceptable reason for a world not being a Tippyverse is "Nobody has thought to do that yet."

Frozen_Feet
2016-08-12, 08:00 AM
Have no other playgrounders read the 1969 Larry Niven short story "Not Long Before the End", or his 1976 Novel The Magic Goes Away (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Goes_Away)?



Or the 1991 Dark Sun campaign setting (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Sun)?

Or saw the Magic Lost and Reborn thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?487606-Magic-Lost-and-Reborn)?

D&Dland was a "Tippyverse" (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy). That's why the realms are littered with ancient ruins filled with magical artifacts that no one currently makes.

There was a grand Magic based civilization once.

Then the magic stopped.

Another setting eeriely similar to a post-apocalyptic Tippyverse is Jaconia of the Finnish Praedor RPG, comics and novels.

It's a circular plot of land surrounded by the ruins of a post-scarcity magocracy. When the wizards were at their peak, immortality elixir was handed around like candy and dimensional gates were used to bring in wonders from other worlds and to build impossible things.

But they used too many gates, and several dimensions collapsed together, leaving Borvaria in ruins and riddled with wild magic.

Only Jaconia, where Wizard-Kings who had foreseen the disaster had retreated to and made it safe with magic crystals, normal life continues. The Wizard-Kings built great walled of cities where they continued their decadence. Rest of Jaconia was wilderness populated by barbarians descended from escaped slaves.

Eventually, the Wizard-Kings began succumbing to madness, and a clique of saner wizards allied with mortals to take them down, in the end leaving just one fortress-city of Wizards standing with rest of Jaconia left in hands of mortals.

Really, it always amazes me how maligned Tippyverse and similar concepts have become on these boards, because fantasy is full of similar ideas and many great settings include a sophisticated magocracy in their history.

awa
2016-08-12, 08:10 AM
I think part of the problem is people who argue that tippyverse is the only possible logical outcome of a d&d setting which gives every thing else a bad name.

Arbane
2016-08-12, 10:35 AM
Really, it always amazes me how maligned Tippyverse and similar concepts have become on these boards, because fantasy is full of similar ideas and many great settings include a sophisticated magocracy in their history.

In their history, yes. The ruins of an advanced civilization is a great adventure setting.
An ongoing one? Not so much.

awa
2016-08-12, 10:41 AM
Not necessarily

It just looks different, it might look more like a scifi game then a typical fantasy game but its very doable. In fact the original tippyverse left lots of room for adventure because the nature of his magocracy meant it tended to be very localized with lots of room for stuff in between.

wumpus
2016-08-12, 01:01 PM
Seriously, this. Suspension of disbelief is essential.

I don't try to explain away the Tippyverse, because the Tippyverse is, in my mind, the result of an incredibly-exhausting degree of nitpicking and cheese. It is not a setting I would enjoy, from a DM or player standpoint.

The fact that so many cling to it as "the only logical result of RAW" grates on me to no end. They say "logical worldbuilding", I say "pedantry".

The social structure given in 3.x (outside of Eberron) assumes [and somewhat works with] a mostly medieval-level tech. The catch is that the magic system described completely overwhelms the tech. The other "requirement" is assuming that the setting doesn't count as "rules" (a *huge* game design failure, and after hearing that Pendragon went through 5 editions makes me want to track down a copy) and only accurately describes the setting at the exact start of the campaign (while simultaneously ignoring why in the world it was like that to begin with, or simply declaring them "not RAW").

I like the bit in 5e that says "specific trumps general". Suddenly RAW [crunch] doesn't trump RAW [setting].


I think part of the problem is people who argue that tippyverse is the only possible logical outcome of a d&d setting which gives every thing else a bad name.

Sounds like the people who 100 years ago who insisted that international communism was "the only possible outcome" of industrialism. Not only that, such claims strongly make me believe that "Emperor Tippy" was either a child/not born by 1989: anyone from that era would know that there was a distinct chance of the world being a radioactive wasteland populated by neolithic scavengers of 20th century tech. The "tippyverse" includes some provably wrong (as in multiple times historical people had similar choices and *never* made the "tippyverse" option) assumptions, typically about classes/guilds working together instead of hanging on to a tiny personal advantage (to put it in modern terms: we are virtually in a post-scarcity world limited largely by energy and its pollution, yet our economy is largely defined by scarcity defined by IP laws*. Imagine where such would fit in the "tippyverse").

* nope, really. IP isn't just downloads: consider the difference in price between legal goods and "knockoffs" built at the same factory but not officially licensed. The "knockoffs" are drastically cheaper regardless of having to go build a relatively tiny and much more expensive distribution channel. Now simply assume an entire economy made up of such goods that can engineer the next generation by using all the knowledge learned in the previous gen. Just don't ask me to explain how all the "free" IP gets paid for, I'm guessing a socialist system might work but you might get something like "soviet style". The country that figures this out (more than just "add socialism", but it is even possible that is enough to get ahead) and puts it in place will lead the 21st century, you read it here (followed by a much bigger country copying them and getting ahead. Think the Netherlands developing capitalism and rushing ahead, followed by England following her example and dominating the planet).

Yora
2016-08-12, 01:11 PM
My setting has a custom spell list and no magic item crafting. All magic items are made from remains of legendary beings and you don't know what you might get if you manage to find and slay one. The spell list is all about effects that are either impermanent or could be done by manual labor over a few hours of work.
There isn't really any way to industrialize magic.

Ceiling_Squid
2016-08-12, 01:17 PM
As for why Tippyverse-like concepts are divisive, I've got my own thoughts on that.

I tend to think that it depends on how mechanistic and reliable one wants their magic to be. The Tippyverse (and similar concepts) rely upon magic-as-science, which is not always an appealing trope for every single player/DM.

I always looked at D&D's magical rules as a necessary meta-abstraction for the sake of gameplay ease, so exploiting those mechanics with a relentlessly *industrial* mindset just doesn't do anything for me.

Extrapolating those laid-bare guts into worldbuilding just isn't all that palatable to me. No knock against the concept, but it just isn't to my taste.

Then again, it may also be a case of me preferring "rules serve the setting", rather than "setting emergent from rules". I don't care enough about the intricate technicalities of "create food traps" and teleportation to create an entire setting based around it. It's a fine thought experiment, but not something I feel the need to explain away.

If I had to make every setting explicitly Tippy-proof, I'd be forced to wade too deeply into the mechanics in a vain effort to patch every possible exploit. That, to me, does not a fun time make.

It might also be why I've gradually moved away from D&D, and started playing looser systems, where handwaving is more acceptable.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-12, 01:20 PM
I'm of the opinion that the setting, "genre feel", rules, characters, fiction, etc, all need to support each other and be compatible -- coherence and consistency.

If the text shows me one setting, the fiction shows me a different setting, and the rules show me a third setting... something went very wrong.

The Fury
2016-08-12, 05:03 PM
I've talked with a friend regarding Tippyverse-like shenanigans in fantasy settings a few times. One point that we both seem to agree on is that a setting like that isn't something that either of us would find fun. So there's at least an external reason why we wouldn't do it. Another is the idea that a Tippyverse-like setting is not necessarily an end-state condition.

As others have brought up, how viable a Tippyverse is depends greatly on how many people can cast high-level magic. The higher the number, the less likely it is that nobody's interested in building portal networks and whatnot. As a setting exists for longer, the more common high-level magic becomes, the more magic users start to make themselves into liches, the more likely it is to become a Tippyverse. But what happens afterward? As my friend pointed out, after helping create and run a post-scarcity utopia for centuries or even millennia would get pretty boring. So what if the ruling class of nigh-immortal liches developed extraplanar travel for the expressed purpose of exploring the multiverse? After all, the one resource a post-scarcity utopia lacks for is novelty.

With that in mind, after nearly all the high-level magic-user leave, what happens to the rest of the setting? Some of the systems they put in place might stay around, but others might break down. After all, as magic stuff starts to break through either carelessness or deliberate destruction, people that know how to fix it get rarer and rarer. Ironically, the miraculous devices that were meant to end scarcity are becoming scarce themselves. Then you start to get a post-Tippyverse setting with an interesting precursor backstory.

TheCountAlucard
2016-08-13, 06:51 AM
You know, for a setting so dedicated to RAW, the Tippyverse premise of, "The setting looks like this because there's basically nothing that can stop a wizard just teleporting in, likely with an army," well, it sure seems to have forgotten about Forbiddance.

(Not only is it permanent-duration, it's more accessible than Teleportation Circle is!)

Frozen_Feet
2016-08-13, 09:02 AM
Forbiddance is extensively discussed in the linked thread where Tippy explains the premises.

In short, it's not sufficient. It doesn't even block all forms of non-epic teleportation and it's too easy to create holes in the forbidden volume. A guy with a shovel can dig down to the limit of the spell and a create a non-forbidden pocket, then any caster with ability to spam Dispell or Disjoin can teleport in to create a much larger non-forbidden volume, and things snowball from there.

OldTrees1
2016-08-13, 09:06 AM
You know, for a setting so dedicated to RAW, the Tippyverse premise of, "The setting looks like this because there's basically nothing that can stop a wizard just teleporting in, likely with an army," well, it sure seems to have forgotten about Forbiddance.

(Not only is it permanent-duration, it's more accessible than Teleportation Circle is!)

It is not as flawed as that.

Consider a kingdom. As the king you can dictate how your population is dispersed across your land. You are also in charge of defending that population from invading armies. We will consider 3 cases: Even distribution of the population, Lots of clumps of the population, & only a very small number of megacities.

In our world the edges that need to be defended are the perimeter of the nation. However with teleportation circle the enemy could pop up anywhere that we have not cast Forbiddance and do not routinely patrol.
Case 1: We routinely patrol everywhere (albeit with vanilla civilians) and thus only our nation's perimeter is at threat.
Case 2: We need to either cover all uninhabited land with Forbiddance (which gets prohibitive very quickly with the amount of land we are talking about), or we can Forbiddance some and fund patrols for the rest (still very prohibitive), or we can defend the perimeter of every village/town/city.
Case 3: We routinely patrol the megacities. Since it is less land than case 1 we can man our patrols with law enforcement rather than civilians. Furthermore since we abandoned preventing the enemy from teleporting into the uninhabited land, we only need to defend the perimeter of our small number of megacities.

With teleporting invading armies on the table, both cases 1 & 3 look much better than case 2.

Kami2awa
2016-08-13, 09:37 AM
One thing that's not often considered is that D&D has rules for creating completely new spells. So, if teleporting wizards are a common issue, much research will be put into spells that block teleportation. The result would perhaps be a magical arms race between wizards on opposing sides trying to counter the other sides' spells, then counter the counterspells. And then counter the counter-counterspells.

This would not prevent a world from using magitech for everything but it would be an interesting consequence. For one thing, it might lead to magical espionage, with both sides constantly sending agents (Ethereal Filchers, perhaps) to steal other mages' spellbooks and items for research and reverse engineering. Individual mages might be abducted for interrogation and there might be commando raids aimed at disrupting spell research.

awa
2016-08-13, 11:07 AM
It has epic rules which are so nonfunctional they typically don't get discussed
And it says spells can be developed pre epic but their are no rules its pure dm fiat and thus useless to discuss.

OldTrees1
2016-08-13, 11:54 AM
One thing that's not often considered is that D&D has rules for creating completely new spells. So, if teleporting wizards are a common issue, much research will be put into spells that block teleportation. The result would perhaps be a magical arms race between wizards on opposing sides trying to counter the other sides' spells, then counter the counterspells. And then counter the counter-counterspells.

This would not prevent a world from using magitech for everything but it would be an interesting consequence. For one thing, it might lead to magical espionage, with both sides constantly sending agents (Ethereal Filchers, perhaps) to steal other mages' spellbooks and items for research and reverse engineering. Individual mages might be abducted for interrogation and there might be commando raids aimed at disrupting spell research.

While this would usually be a factor (If not for it being a rules lite portion and thus ignored by the RAW crowd), the counter spell to teleportation circle already exists (Forbiddance). It is the logistical issues that make it so even if the spells are of the same raw power, in the 2 specific circumstances Teleportation Circle is more efficient than its counter. Those 2 specific circumstances being teleporting between areas you completely control and teleporting into an area way too large for your enemy to control.

Where the counter counter spell arms race would probably emerge is in trying to break into cities directly. Cites are small enough to defend their area with forbiddance and designated heavily patrolled teleport capable areas. So an invader might try to develop a teleport spell that can teleport into a forbiddance'd area. This would lead to the development of a better forbiddance spell.


It has epic rules which are so nonfunctional they typically don't get discussed
And it says spells can be developed pre epic but their are no rules its pure dm fiat and thus useless to discuss.

"Useless to discuss", or "useless to discuss with you"? I think my first half of my post is a suitable counterexample to the first possibility.

awa
2016-08-13, 12:06 PM
in a discussion about how magic works in a raw world something that can’t function by raw at all is not worth discussing, in other contexts it has some value but not in this one, because it’s hard enough agreeing on how things work when its written out right in front of you, once it becomes nothing but dm fiat then there can be no shared ground work to discuss and the entire conversation effectively breaks down.

At best your just changing the topic

Necroticplague
2016-08-13, 12:08 PM
This stuff about teleporting in is, to the best of my knowledge, why the world makes a transition to small, easy-to-ward/defend cities. No farmland needed+need for defense against magic threats mean that the population both can and should pack itself into much less space.

OldTrees1
2016-08-13, 03:29 PM
in a discussion about how magic works in a raw world something that can’t function by raw at all is not worth discussing, in other contexts it has some value but not in this one, because it’s hard enough agreeing on how things work when its written out right in front of you, once it becomes nothing but dm fiat then there can be no shared ground work to discuss and the entire conversation effectively breaks down.

At best your just changing the topic

Good to know. Next time I see such a discussion I will keep that in mind. However that is of little relevance to this "DMs interested in verisimilitude asking how to not end up with the tippyverse" discussion.

The "lack" of shared ground claim is a good point but not necessarily as strong as you make it sound. Take my discussion with Kami2awa as an experimental case study. We both have hypotheses, now to see the outcome of the experiment.

TeChameleon
2016-08-13, 08:23 PM
Even so, some bright spark with the equivalent of 2 or 3 PhDs is going to industrialise magical food production and transportation (probably for military purposes as per NecroticPlague's example on the previous page), unless there are hard limitations in the world which aren't mentioned in the rules because the rules are shorthand written for playing dungeon crawls, not running economies.
Forgive my rustiness, but isn't 'Create Food and Water' a divine spell? If there's an equivalent arcane spell, I'm not aware of it. So while you might be able to get away with Create Food and Water for a while, sooner or later Pelor is going to notice that you're calling on him sixty thousand times a day because King Bob the Forty-Second is still miffed that his brother got great-aunt Myrtle's good china set and third-favourite castle and has decided to reclaim both the flatware and the fortress.


Since you can spawn a gate near the production facility and the other one on the bottom of the ocean, what couldn't they do? You could spin yarn, weave clothes, power multiple aerial lifts (to avoid one gate becoming congested of travelers we use it as a power source instead), pump water, mechanize agriculture (not just grind grains into flour but you could also wind up a lot lot of potential energy in springs and power stuff that harvest), power heavy tools in shipyards (drills, saws, belt sanders etc.) and many other things I can't think of off the top of my head. Basically, it would be like the modern power grid except instead of electricity that can leak this would theoretically be far more efficient. Now, scaling however is where the real problem comes because a factory requires far more power than a household and I'm just a computer engineer so I guess diverting more power to the factories would be fairly straight forward (someone who knows electricity better, please correct me otherwise) but it's not impossible to do the same with this "water grid"; you would just open up more gates at the factory who turn an even bigger wheel together than at the house.

Agreed. I just think the uses or these portals are more than you thought of.
Something that a lot of people seem to forget is that even though the theoretical foundation of the Steam Engine was understood well enough to build a working model sometime in the first half of the first century A.D., the materials sciences to actually have one on a useful scale didn't come along until roughly seventeen hundred years later. You could get horrific jets of hyper-pressured seawater through portals, but to be able to do anything with it other than using it as a devastating weapon would take structural knowledge and materials centuries beyond anything a medieval-starting-point-wizard could manage.

As far as the suggestion that the potential energy be stored in springs... there's also a reason that clockpunk isn't a thing in the real world; clockwork simply has too many points of failure for it to be practical on a large scale. I can't imagine many farmers (who tend to be practical-minded to a fault even in the best of times) putting their trust in Gnomish-esque wagons or clockwork robots or whatever that have a frighteningly high chance of turning into something more closely resembling a post-detonation frag grenade than a piece of farm equipment. (And why would you use aerial lifts or pump water when you could just portal the people or the water from one point to another?)

Anyhow, the whole 'power a turbine via portal' thing is potentially amazing, but I'm not sure it would see that widespread an application until some means of turning the mechanical energy generated into a more portable form (like, say, electricity) was developed.

Telok
2016-08-13, 08:32 PM
It depends on how you approach magic in your setting.

Emperor Tippy took the approach that what was printed in the books (not including epic brokeness) was the sum of how everything worked. CR and xp were how people gained levels, the restrictions about who could take levels in which classes were enforced, wealth by level was a physical law, etc. etc. Then he worked with that to build a setting for his games where he could have various adventures, including both traditional wilderness and dungeon crawls, and big city noir adventures or other stuff that 3.5 D&D didn't normally try. One benefit of his rigor in applying the game rules across the whole setting is that the entire setting has an internal consistency that isn't found in some others.

My personal setting (one of two, which is part of why sections are unfinished) takes the written magic rules as a sort of functional but imprecise guide of common magical effects. So stuff like Fireball and Invisibility are sort of like saying "a pints' a pound" and rounding pi to 3.14, working but imprecise and ignoring the underlying complexity and physical laws that make it real. So downtime spell effects in line with but not constrained to written spells are possible with enough time, skill, and materials. Then I threw in a "botch on three consecutive 1s rolled" mechanic that explains the magic-apocalypse a thousand years ago that wiped out the proto-tippy emipre.

Then there's AD&D which had things like apprentice wizards with a single spell start out in their 30s (or higher depending on the starting age rolls, humans of course) and fully capable of killing themselves with a poorly placed Fireball. Without any gaurenteed way to get access to any particular spell (and limits on how many they could learn) they were often paranoid competitive jerks. Public works magic didn't happen because it made wizards vulnerable and gave competitors an edge against you.

Then you can have Forgotten Realms. The peasants are stuck in a Monty Python style dark ages, half your tavern keepers are retired 8 to 12th level adventurers, lawful good mage guilds are sponsored by one government, necromancers capable of fielding armies of wights can barely keep one country conquered, 8th level adventurers are "heroes of the land" while countries field squadrons of 7th level knights and 6th and 7th level casters open spell shops to barely eek out a lower middle class living. Basically zero internal consistency.

Eh, and water mills running trip hammers and ore crushing date back two thousand years. You don't need steam engines for powered technology, just a river.

Lord Raziere
2016-08-13, 10:32 PM
It is not Tippyverse simply because of the same reason nerds don't rule the world and people with social skills do. No matter how much you cry "but I'm super-smart and logical and blah blah blah" people are not going to listen to you unless you can actually sell them on stuff like an actual politician. and just being a guy with a big stick but no ability to speak softly means people will just hate you and try to kill you.

I mean a bunch of wizards getting together to try and overthrow everything and change the world for their own liking? That sounds scary to everyone else. That sounds like a threat to call the gods to destroy. and given that in most settings gods exist unlike the required Tippyverse rules, Tippyverse can't happen as long as you have deities willing to go "lolno wizards, WE rule the world, you don't." or "I'm not gonna stand for your tyranny, no matter how good your bread and circuses are." so both Evil and Good deities have reason to oppose the wizards on this. as well as any Chaotic Deities, I can't imagine them liking the Tippyverse either.

awa
2016-08-14, 08:10 AM
I would point out that wizards don't fit a real world nich very well certainly not scientists

on earth scientists needs other people to actual put any of his plans into operation, a wizard for the most part does not. The wizard can just make the magical infrastructure by himself witch dramatically reduces the need for the local people to do anything.

a high level wizard is a military in its own right, either through personal power or constructs and summons this is very unlike a scientist and it means ignoring the wizard is much harder.

He can just make his magic city with his personal wealth and power and expand as like minded people come to him to work and get rich. They actually don't need to overthrow anything if the rules of reality allow them to make infinite resources or instantaneously transport goods the system will have to change in some manner to accommodate it or anyone who doesn't adapt will be left so far in the dust as to be rendered irrelevant. Now it possible their might be a world wide luddite alliance they makes any innovation so costly as to be ineffective but it should not be assumed.


For gods yheah some gods are going to be against it but some will be for it so you cant assume gods just because gods exist they will be a meaningful impediment on the creation of a mageocracy. Even in settings where gods exist they may be hands off or to limited to have a meaningful impact.


And finally no reason to assume the wizards have bad charisma at all not to mention we say wizard but no reason the group can't have some sorcerers in it as well.

Jay R
2016-08-14, 01:46 PM
Most of the ideas to use magic to change the world assume that somebody who can use magic will spend all his time doing so for tawdry, money-making purposes.

Like in the guns thread going on right now, people are making the modern assumption that if something can be done at all, it will be soon be extremely common. That works with many forms of modern tech, but assuming it always works is like assuming everybody must have an Apollo rocket today, since that's fifty-year-old technology.

In original D&D, the assumption was the wizards were extremely rare, and that magic items were rarely sold. Also, with feudal attitudes, nobody would use high-level power to merely make money, like those peasant merchants.

Over time, many modern attitudes and assumptions have crept into gaming. Once high-level magic items are bought and sold in many cities, and there are assumed to be many extremely high level wizards who aren't adventurers, and a career making money isn't deemed to be a low-class thing to do, then magic items have been reduced to high-tech commodities.

So the questions have to be asked. And the only answers that make sense to me are the old ones. There are no teleportation devices for sale, and any wizard high enough to teleport is high enough level to refuse to sell the service.

1of3
2016-08-14, 03:58 PM
I think a major problem is the preconception that magic must be universal, untyped, effortless.

A really great fantasy world in my opinion is Greg Stolze's Reign, specifically Heluso&Milonda.

Sure there is Healing Magic. It is tremendously powerful, but to do it you need and from that one desert place and also you must blind yourself by starting into the sun. The neighboring city state of course provides other leaders with Healers and regular supply of little sand.

There are other types of magic in the world like the Smoke Formers. As long as you wave you can make smoke solid. Nothing else. - Oooo, great. Thought the generals of the Empire and henceforth employed these mages as engineers.

There might be a teleporting school in the world. But that would be the only thing they could do and it would be unique to their culture and probably the only magic in their culture. It probably is costly.

These limitations, in my opinion, make the world more colorful, unusual and makes are still cool.

bulbaquil
2016-08-14, 10:12 PM
Like in the guns thread going on right now, people are making the modern assumption that if something can be done at all, it will be soon be extremely common. That works with many forms of modern tech, but assuming it always works is like assuming everybody must have an Apollo rocket today, since that's fifty-year-old technology.

Right. There are a lot of modern assumptions at play in the Tippyverse discussion that might not necessarily apply in the setting in question. The modern ethos presumes that technological advancement is inevitable; that innovation, education, and knowledge are generally good, and scientific inquiry and experimentation are laudable in almost all circumstances except where human and animal dignities (the scopes of which are also part of the modern ethos) dictate otherwise; and that "wealthy" and "upper-class" are synonyms. Note that I am not referring here to "values", but rather to underlying core assumptions of modern Western civilization that most people don't recognize as such because they've internalized them to such an extent that they are treated as fact. These assumptions are not shared by everyone in every culture at every time.

This is not necessarily the case across the board. The problem, however, is that differences in core assumptions between what we consider so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned and what the setting considers such... is a matter of fluff, not crunch. As such, it is beyond the purview of RAW. A setting that uses strictly RAW only for D&D 3.5e+, with no countervailing fluff (e.g. "the gods won't let it") or house-rules (e.g. "magic does work that way, but not at large scales"), interpreted by players with the above-described prevailing modern ethos, is likely to become the Tippyverse for the exact reasons that the industrial revolution did what it did in the real world.

Kami2awa
2016-08-15, 02:31 AM
I mean a bunch of wizards getting together to try and overthrow everything and change the world for their own liking? That sounds scary to everyone else.

In fact, that sounds exactly like the plot that the PCs must foil. Evil wizards are always trying to rule the world. That's what evil wizards do! However, every time one gets close, a bunch of heroes coincidentally just strong enough to defeat him/her puts a stop to it.

Slayn82
2016-08-15, 09:09 AM
In D&D, magical thinking is very different from the scientific method.

First, because there's hardly any kind of unified principles for a wizard to base his work. The closest thing to those must be metamagical feats. Material components aren't interchangeable, I can't create a weaker fireball if I only have sulfur but no guano, even if other higher leveled fire spells that work perfectly well require only a pinch of sulfur.

Second, because the focus of spell research aims is effect oriented, not mechanism oriented. This means a wizard trying to create a new spell thinks on solving specific scenarios, not on generalizations. As such, if you have a trouble, you create a spell to solve the trouble, they are developed less like tools and more like apps. A spell to create a fireball can't create a Wall of Fire, and neither you can cast a Wall of Fire to create a Fireball.

And that takes me to a third point - Vancian Magic in Dying Earth was the bits and preserved remains of a large body of knowledge from a previously more advanced, scientific era. Those spells were developed for specific goals, and were being improvised for other uses.

My personal explanation is that traditional D&D magic approaches are the kind of thing you would see when a Tippyverse civilization falls. The broad principles for Magic lost, and only some purpose built, simplified applications were preserved by the survivors and their descendants, passed in master - disciple tradition because Mages were deeply wary of each other after the collapse of their civilization.

2D8HP
2016-08-15, 10:39 AM
My personal explanation is that traditional D&D magic approaches are the kind of thing you would see when a Tippyverse civilization falls. The broad principles for Magic lost, and only some purpose built, simplified applications were preserved by the survivors and their descendants, passed in master - disciple tradition because Mages were deeply wary of each other after the collapse of their civilization.This (well your whole post really).
Most D&D settings are consistent with a fallen Tippyverse. Even Eberron (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberron) which comes close to a "Tippyverse" is
"set in a period after a vast destructive war on the continent of Khorvaire".
So the question of "Why is my setting not the tippyverse?", turns on:
1) Does a "Tippyverse" have more or less room for adventures than other settings?
and,
2) Is a "Tippyverse" setting somehow so stable that once created it would continue in perpetuity?

A lot of the fiction that inspired D&D was itself inspired by the myths and legends that grew out of the Greek (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages) and European (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Middle_Ages) Dark Ages, so it's consistent to have D&Dland be a "Dark Age" setting despite the late medieval/early renaissance plate armor and rapiers (why would a "Tippyverse" even bother with crossbows?).

Would a "Tippyverse" continue in perpetuity?
Well I suppose it could be possible in the same way that someone alive today could live forever, despite all the precedents for mortality, maybe Tippyverse's just wouldn't fall like other civilizations do, but if they don't does that mean they can't? And if they can't, what kind of stories happen in them?

The Insanity
2016-08-15, 12:52 PM
Because you're not Tippy.

Segev
2016-08-15, 03:27 PM
As mentioned earlier, Tippy runs on the assumptions that Order of the Stick makes fun of. Things like getting a discount on your ruby dust means you now don't have enough gp worth of ruby dust to do your spell.

If you instead assume that, yes, the rule work as they say they do, but certain concepts are abstracted/measured imprecisely (but "good enough", all else being equal), then you can say that the "loopholes" and "exploits" actually cause the RAW to change because they shift the underlying truths that produced them.

This isn't some arcane, GM-as-malicious-god maneuver, either.

Consider that ruby dust. You need 1500 gp worth of it to cast forcecage. That's like saying you need $1500 worth of diamond dust to properly make your diamond saw: potentially true, but only while diamond dust is stable in price-in-dollars. The truth is that you need so much mass/weight/volume/whatever-real-quantity of ruby dust, and it's just easiest to measure it, in the RAW, by how many gp will buy that much ruby dust. It's an ease of conversion for the players of the game, because that's really all the players ultimately care about: how much do they have to pay to cast their spell?

Now, one thing Tippy does rely on that would require a deeper consideration of things is the notion that spell energy just comes from nowhere. A caster has it when he wakes up, and magic items produce it from nothing (or regain it at specified rates), no matter what. This is little different than somebody else's example of the "spys with cool cars" game with extensive vehicle rules...that doesn't cover how much fuel they take nor how often they must be fueled.

Where the spellcaster gets this energy from is never answered, because it's assumed that they're tapping a reservoir that won't empty under "normal use." Same for magic items. You can keep that assumption, or you can make a finite but enormous reservoir, possibly spread out over large space, time, or what-have-you, so that industrializing it starts to make it harder to "mine."

Oil is a theoretically finite resource, but for practical purposes we have yet to reach its limits IRL. (And if you disagree, that's fine; I'm not going to argue an essentially political issue. Accept my assertion for this argument, please, and I'll be happy to accept your assertion later when you want to treat magic "going out" as a metaphor for running out of oil to mine in your fantasy setting.) But we do need new technologies, and we can only mine it so quickly. Tippyverse's magic resetting traps might work beautifully in small quantities, but start interfering with each other as they all tap the same well when in close proximity or in large numbers. Or maybe magic comes from tapping spirits to get them to work for you; tap them too often and they become harder to find, exhausted, or otherwise difficult to get more work out of.

Even teleportation circles, which are perfectly safe and useful when used in a game and in the frequency of a game, might turn out to have long-term deleterious effects. Perhaps leaving them open too long starts to let Things through from the astral plane. Or maybe it wears down the barriers and starts to bring two places closer together in less desirable ways. Or maybe they simply wear out; the permanent magic item just runs out of juice, somehow.

Because again, the RAW are written to model "normal" use, as expected in a game.


All of this, of course, is house ruling. But hopefully it provides some idea of how you might explain the disconnect between the RAW and where their logical (but overly-literal) application could take your setting.

Why hasn't this thing been industrialized? Because the apparent ease of it is diminished when you try to do it in scales that large. You may have to come up with your hand-wavium, but just treat it as such unless players want to really explore it.

Necroticplague
2016-08-15, 05:59 PM
Just to make a point, it's also entirely possible that widespread use could be stopped by horrific misconceptions, just like they are in real life. So while the rules could be accurately respresenting reality (Magic is an infinifte resource, possibly because it draws from the Planes, a great many of which are infinitely big, at some abstract level), but the population at large doesn't believe so. So the high-leveled archmages who know better have whatever toys they can make, but most others believe there's a downside that isn't there that prevents them from spreading to the masses. Tto make analogies, various radiophobic groups who seems to drastically misunderstand how nuclear power works have stopped mass use of nuclear power stateside, despite the advantages it offers compared to other power sources we have available.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-15, 06:14 PM
Just to make a point, it's also entirely possible that widespread use could be stopped by horrific misconceptions, just like they are in real life. So while the rules could be accurately respresenting reality (Magic is an infinifte resource, possibly because it draws from the Planes, a great many of which are infinitely big, at some abstract level), but the population at large doesn't believe so. So the high-leveled archmages who know better have whatever toys they can make, but most others believe there's a downside that isn't there that prevents them from spreading to the masses. Tto make analogies, various radiophobic groups who seems to drastically misunderstand how nuclear power works have stopped mass use of nuclear power stateside, despite the advantages it offers compared to other power sources we have available.

See also, "it will make my food radioactive!" in opposition to irradiation as a preservation technique.

Historically and at present, many people who believe magic IRL also greatly mistrust it.

Combine that with magic even in D&D being pretty dangerous if used carelessly, let alone maliciously, and thus even perfectly benevolent uses are viewed with suspicion (see first sentence above), we have a recipe for exactly what you describe in your post.

Cluedrew
2016-08-15, 08:16 PM
Combine that with magic even in D&D being pretty dangerous if used carelessly, let alone maliciously, and thus even perfectly benevolent uses are viewed with suspicion (see first sentence above), we have a recipe for exactly what you describe in your post.Actually that is also true of nuclear power. Sure major incidents involving nuclear power generation are rare, but when they do happen they are bad.

Max_Killjoy
2016-08-15, 08:32 PM
Actually that is also true of nuclear power. Sure major incidents involving nuclear power generation are rare, but when they do happen they are bad.


On the flip side, just the extraction of coal has killed FAR more people than anything that's ever happened with nuclear power:
http://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Creek_flood
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/americas/07iht-sludge.4.19164565.html


For comparison:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_t oll


To take us back to the topic of the thread, it's all about perception. It doesn't even matter if magic is more dangerous than other ways of doing things, as long as the public perceives it as more dangerous.

In that sort of setting, the wizard doesn't build his tower miles from nearest villages and farms because he's anti-social, as much as much the locals want nothing to do with him. He has a servant to go to the nearest markets and buy supplies because the servant is not known as a meddler in dangerous ideas.

2D8HP
2016-08-15, 10:05 PM
In that sort of setting, the wizard doesn't build his tower miles from nearest villages and farms because he's anti-social, as much as much the locals want nothing to do with him. He has a servant to go to the nearest markets and buy supplies because the servant is not known as a meddler in dangerous ideas.The isolated Wizards tower (or the Mad Scientist castle) fits genre.
I like it!
:biggrin:

PairO'Dice Lost
2016-08-15, 11:58 PM
Now, one thing Tippy does rely on that would require a deeper consideration of things is the notion that spell energy just comes from nowhere. A caster has it when he wakes up, and magic items produce it from nothing (or regain it at specified rates), no matter what.
[...]
Where the spellcaster gets this energy from is never answered, because it's assumed that they're tapping a reservoir that won't empty under "normal use." Same for magic items.


So while the rules could be accurately respresenting reality (Magic is an infinifte resource, possibly because it draws from the Planes, a great many of which are infinitely big, at some abstract level), but the population at large doesn't believe so.

I don't think it's ever explicitly spelled out (so to speak) in 3e, but the 1e DMG explains that magical energy does, indeed, come from the Positive and Negative Energy Planes which are an infinite and literally inexhaustible source of energy:


SPELL CASTING
All magic and cleric spells are similar in that the word sounds, when combined into whatever patterns are applicable, are charged with energy from the Positive or Negative Material Plane. When uttered, these sounds cause the release of this energy, which in turn triggers a set reaction.

The triggering action draws power from some plane of the multiverse. Whether the spell is an abjuration, conjuration, alteration, enchantment, or whatever, there is a flow of energy — first from the spell caster, then from some plane to the area magicked or enspelled by the caster. The energy flow is not from the caster per se, it is from the utterance of the sounds, each of which is charged with energy which is loosed when the proper formula and/or ritual is completed with their utterance. This power then taps the desired plane (whether or not the spell user has any idea of what or where it is) to cause the spell to function. It is much like plugging in o heater; the electrical outlet does not hold all of the electrical energy to cause the heater to function, but the wires leading from it, ultimately to the power station, bring the electricity to the desired location.

Many spells also require somatic motions in conjunction with words. The spoken words trigger the release of the magical energy, and the hand movements are usually required in order to control and specify the direction, target, area, etc., of the spell effects. When spell energy is released, it usually flows to the Prime Material from the Positive or Negative Material Plane. To replace it, something must flow back in reverse. The dissolution and destruction of material components provides the energy that balances out this flow, through the principle of similarity. Sometimes this destruction is very slow, as is the case with druids‘ mistletoe. Those spells without apparent material components are actually utilizing the air exhaled by the magic-user in the utterance of the spell.

Fri
2016-08-16, 12:27 AM
Two reasons.

1. Because man is not rational economic actor. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_rationality)

I don't mean man is not rational/logical, but it's just man are not robots who will do everything the perfectly rational way. It's like assuming all cows are frictionless and sphere. It's useful for mathematical calculation, but not completely perfect simulation of real world. It's the same reason why we have economic theory, but no economic theory can perfectly simulate real world.

Just read smbc-comics if you want to know more about this, honestly.

Just random example to illustrate my point that I got from clicking the random comic button from smbc.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-solution-for-social-media

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-05-17

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/office-work


2. Because, magic-rules-as-written are, using the previous example, equivalent of physics equation using spherical cow.

Like an example, in Exalted, you use magic using units called "motes." And mote are somewhat quantifiable, for example you maybe able to use one mote to light up a magic lantern for a day, you can conjure fire with two motes. But in the actual world, if you live in the setting is one mote the smallest possible unit of magic? Probably not. It's just simplificiation for gameplay. Same reason why various people keep telling for hundreds of years they can make perpetual motion machine, but we still don't see a successful one now.

Anyway, these are not saying your setting can't be a magitek setting. It's just that tippyverse is, an over-the-top theoritical-continuation of magitek line of thought where everyone are rational economic actors and all objects are sphere and frictionless.

Example of what I thought would is the equivalent of tippyverse-version of our world.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-driving-car-ethics

Segev
2016-08-16, 11:50 AM
I tend to think, based on experiments in game theory using computational intelligence which I will hide under a spoiler block to avoid boring people who don't care, that the fact that man is not a "rational economic actor" because he won't behave the way the defined "rational actor" would according to most game/economic theory models is a revelation not that Man is somehow failing to be (perfectly) rational, but that the models are not actually accurate.


This is most clearly illustrated in the centipeded game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_game) (as opposed to, say, the prisoner's dilemma, where the traditionally-defined rational actor really is the optimal solution). In a quick rundown, the centipede game has each player have a "pot" of money. The player who's turn it is has 4x as much in his pot as the other player. The player whose turn it is chooses to "take" or "pass." If he "takes," the game ends and both players keep their pots. If he "passes," the players trade pots, the pots are doubled in value, and it becomes the other player's turn. On the 100th turn (player 2's 50th), player 2 doesn't get a choice; he must "take."

Because both players know the rules, it makes 0 sense, according to rational decision theory, for player 1 to pass on his 50th turn. He will get half as much as he has now, if he does so. Thus, he should always "take" on his last turn. Since player 2 knows this, he knows he'll get 2x as much if he "takes" on his 49th turn as he will if he passes, because he knows there's no way that player 1 will pass back to him to give him that 50th turn.

By induction, this means it never makes rational sense to pass the pot, since the incentive is to beat the other guy to passing to avoid losing half of what you could have if you take right now.

This counter-intuitively means that the perfectly rational actor will always wind up with the barest minimum possible reward.

Meanwhile, I developed a simple genetic algorithm for defining strategy based on moves and their end-state rewards.

The basic premise here is that the "genome" of a particular agent is, essentially, on what turn he'll "take," based on whether he's the first or second player. He's then pitted against an opponent chosen at random from all the other agents. Rewards are calculated for each player based on the turn in which the first one of them "takes."

So if Player A "takes" on turn 20, and Player B "takes" on turn 10, rewards are calculated for each player having "passed" 9 times. And, since Player B was the 'taker,' his reward is 4x the size of Player A's. But if Player B was instead going to "take" on turn 20 or later, BOTH players have significantly larger rewards...but Player A's is 4x what Player B's would have been, since Player A "took" on turn 20.

The genetic algorithm pits the agents against two opponents chosen randomly. Against the first, the agent is the first player. Against the second, the agent is the second player. The "fitness score" of an agent is his summed reward from both games.

The genetic algorithm then breeds a new generation by cross-breeding the genome of "moves" between two agents for each member of the new generation. They play against the whole population, and then the lowest-fitness half of this entire population is eliminated.

A new round of breeding is performed, and this process iterates until the highest fitness score seems stable from generation to generation.

In practice, the winning strategy tended to be to pass at every opportunity, even knowing that it will get you half what you could have had if you passed a turn early when you're the first player.

Given that the intuitive answer from a human perspective tends to be to pass until quite late in the game to get the growth rewards, even if it might (or WILL) get you half what you could have had when you passed, and that the winning strategies agree with this, while the so-called "rational actor" always gets a comparative pittance, it seems to indicate that there is a flaw in calling that model "rational." It misses key elements that humans intuitively understand.

I posit that, no, humans still aren't perfectly rational actors by any definition; we are too prone to shortcuts and guesswork. It's part of our learning mechanism as a species as a whole. But what we have is already better than the supposedly rational-acting solution. Our traditionally-accepted model of what is a "rational actor" is not a very good one, right now.

wumpus
2016-08-16, 02:17 PM
Eh, and water mills running trip hammers and ore crushing date back two thousand years. You don't need steam engines for powered technology, just a river.

2000 years ago there was a reason to crush ore (roman concrete). After that, not so much (although I imagine iron or got tiring). Also not that while the Romans had some massive river mills, they were the exception not the rule. It took an emperor's capital to build them and such didn't exist afterward for centuries. Also they required a ton of available labor to do what slaves could simply be ordered to do.

In England, the 1100s were a huge time for building smaller water mills (the Domesday book records plenty being built). Production of watermills kept increasing until there was both a shortage of lumber and a simultaneous drop in demand due to the black plague. Once the people wanted more mills, the trees had regrown. So if you want to automate a Victorian England sized population, you will need coal. A British Columbian-sized population (in rugged terrain) can likely get by on rivers.

Note: I had a book from a college course on a historical overview of science and technology. Once it hit me that this was an expensive outlay of capital to automate "women's work", I searched high and low for that book. Alas, it appears to be gone.

BeerMug Paladin
2016-08-17, 07:01 PM
I once ran a game in a post-Tippyverse setting. "Tipped", as I call it. Essentially, all the infrastructure for the Tippyverse was set up. Without scarcity, incentive to participate in constructing the infrastructure the society relied on faded away to nothing. After that, those with magical talent who would have (in past ages) been responsible for building/maintaining the infrastructure the society relies on did not study the required fields and instead pursued art, philosophy, etc...

Without strife, people grew complacent and content with the rules that had been set up, and likewise, grew averse to danger and exploration. You could even use divination devices to discover far-away locales, so there was little reason to actually travel to explore. The common folk could enjoy all life has to offer without leaving their mega-city, which was so cultivated and docile that most people will never be capable of gaining the XP to level and survive in the outside world. People are still trained in the martial, magical, godly and deftly arts, but the aversion to risk means people are unable to progress past very low levels. These classes are largely not careers so much as they are hobbyist skills untested by real strife.

All the people who were responsible for creating the society's current shape grew bored and left. They left the infrastructure in place to maintain a Tippyverse, but without a class of people raised to maintain it properly, artifacts eventually break down. Eventually, there's strains beginning to appear in society around the seams where current demand is beginning to exceed supply. Nobody can adequately solve the problems the society is facing because they lack the tools, so conflict is beginning to worm its way back into society. Going out into the world and clearing out some wilderness area to establish farmland could be an early quest.

Academic schools teaching magical arts mostly focus on illusion magics and evocation in order to supply the arts (special effects for plays, fireworks, and the like). Spell selection is fairly limited because of the focus that schools engage in, IE, certain spells would have to be personally researched and created by a PC. Maybe one day, the old order will return, but the established political order has no interest in bringing that about, so will likely attempt to resist such things.

The monstrous races were left out of this society when it was created, and powerful epic wards keep them out. So apart from them being unable to directly threaten the crumbling Tippyverse-era cities, they could provide higher-class-level challenges down the line for the player party attempting to reclaim wilderness or exploring the unknown.

It's why my setting is not the Tippyverse, and I like it enough that it's going to be my standard setting for D&D-ish games I run.