Six Sigma and the problem of world ending threats in D&D/PF

[BowStreetRunner]

Six Sigma is a strategy for process improvement that has as one of its motivating factors the concept that if you produce something in large enough quantities, a failure rate of 1.0%, 0.1%, or even 0.01% can still produce an unacceptably large number of undesirable outcomes. This is particularly problematic when the product in question is of a critical nature - such as automobile airbags. It's always important when planning for success/failure rates to take into consideration 1) how critical is it that success be achieved, and 2) how frequently is this scenario going to be repeated?

Now consider the problem of potentially world-ending threats in a fantasy setting and apply the same principles. Let's assume that it is possible for a monster or NPC in the setting to generate a threat that truly has the potential to either end the world outright, or at the very least end the world as we know it, reducing it to a post-apocalyptic aftermath setting. Obviously, it is absolutely critical that these threats be overcome, presumably by a heroic party of adventurers. If this sort of thing only happens once in a given world, everyone can breath a sigh of relief when disaster is averted and medals can be hung around the necks of the heroes by the princess and everyone turn and smile at the camera as the closing music from Star Wars begins to play and credits roll.

However, when you create a world with 20th level characters and suitable CR challenges for them, and even more so when your world includes Epic level characters and challenges, the frequency of these potentially world-ending threats is going to increase. At some point, particularly in a world that is put in peril with the frequency similar to that of our own world as depicted in the Marvel Universe, the rate of success for heroes overcoming these challenges has to reach levels similar to the goals of Six Sigma (99.99966% successful), because even one failure would result in the end of the world (which, in the defense of the writers behind the Marvel Universe has actually happened numerous times).

Yet are encounters of an appropriate challenge rating really that easy? Is the party really 99.99966% likely to win every single time? Because if the answer is that the challenges are actually harder than this, it would be appropriate to assume that every world with this level of characters and challenges has probably already experienced apocalyptic outcomes several times in the past and had to rebuild from that. This is where I like settings like Krynn (Dragonlance) which has already experienced a major cataclysm, and Athas (Dark Sun) which is a post-apocalyptic world. I think that every world with high-level challenges (Epic 6 settings may be excused here) should have in their back-story at least a couple of ruined civilizations, lost continents, long-extinct races, or other evidence of the very real dangers of failing to achieve a perfect record when facing these kinds of threats.

So what are your thoughts? Is it reasonable to have a world with high-level and epic-level threats where every single threat has always been overcome by the heroes? Or would it make more sense when the challenge ratings get this high, the scars upon the world from past failures would be equally epic?

[TalonOfAnathrax]

"Old ruins populated by monsters where ancient treasure can be found" are a classic dungeon type for a reason.
Forgotten Realms has a whole bunch of destroyed civilisations (Netheril, for example) and cities which have crumbled to dust after some cataclysm.

Good enough?

[The Kool]

Six Sigma

D&D
As an IE student... you have my attention.

I am always fond of worlds with scars of past civilizations, traumas, and wars. Adds depth and a whole new avenue for your players to explore. But even without that, we come across the rule of the Story Worth Telling. Sure, adventurers might not be 99.99966% likely to win. Over the course of many adventures, they may have a probable success rate closer to 20% or lower. But if they lost, would that story be Worth Telling? Sometimes, but usually not. Even if the success rate is abysmally low, even if the world is on the verge of collapse, we're here to tell that story that stands out. The Story Worth Telling.

[exelsisxax]

I think you overestimate the capability of high-level characters to generate doomsdays. The ability to kill specific targets on a whim from a different plane should not be confused with the ability to kill everything on a plane.

Furthermore, I do not accept the claim that the failure of a given party, even of high level, results in an apocalypse. Bad guys win =/= apocalypse. Bad guys win == under new management. That is not a fundamental problem in any setting I can think of - it is a hook for the next campaign.

In Dark Sun, for instance, there has been both a cataclysm and then the bad guys won. That's a lot of the theme of the setting, not a plothole.

[Bronk]

I agree... we rarely game in totally destroyed game worlds for the very reason that they've already been destroyed.

Most of the current (sorta current in 3.5) game worlds (crystal spheres...) have had plenty of mini apocalypses. The great thing about adventurers are that they scale up and down so what seems terrible everywhere might really only affect one kingdom, or region or what have you, and if they fail for their own area, another, more powerful group might succeed on a large scale.

Those game worlds have their status quos protected by the gods, with an overdeity above them keeping things from blowing up (some of them, like Ao, are specifically there to keep the status quo of their worlds so that they stay interesting for us, the players). However, many or most crystal spheres don't have such a great structure, and Dark Sun is only one example.

Plus, all the game worlds are part of the great wheel, and the planar powers are all in their own post apocalyptic state due to the ongoing Blood War, the remnants of the ancient war between Law and Chaos. Just as most game worlds are stuck in medieval times, so are the planes in their own way. Yet planars can also step in to help even out a conflict on a Prime World, with the right summoning or portal.

So, I guess when you come right down to it, the entire DnD multiverse is in the same boat! Sink or swim guys!

Edit: And whoops! The entire multiverse is just the newest version after at least one previous multiverse was destroyed...

[Caudex Capite]

There are a fair few properly world-ending threats, particularly in Elder Evils, where I think the majority of nasties wipe out life on the Material Plane at a bare minimum if they win.

On a slightly smaller scale, a moderately ambitious high-level evil caster can quite easily murder continents with Apocalypse from the Sky and a bit of CL optimization. A Red Wizard could hit an 1800-mile radius circle of absolute destruction with moderate effort (CL 40 from Red Wizard plus both Consumptive Fields to hit CL 90 plus a Widen effect). That'd kill off most of North America if cast in the central US, for reference. The southern parts of Central America and northern parts of Canada might survive, depending on the exact positioning. Alternatively, you could get the entirety of China plus surrounding nations, or all of India and the Middle East.

I think in the end, it comes down to the game not being designed with these concerns in mind. It's not a simulationist take on fantasy worlds, it's a game where the players are heroes experiencing a grand story. Trying to push things to make sense beyond the bounds of the immediate narrative will only break things.

[Selion]

I have ever thought of a RPG adventure as a cooperative narrative. It should not be realistic, the majority of fiction is not realistic, plot stretches are not uncommon even in the best production.
If you ever read marvel continuity this falls in ridiculousness, the entire multiverse is on the verge of total extinction every few weeks.

[Divine Susuryu]

Heroes failing only equals a true apocalypse in some stories. D&D and its derivatives lack many means of any one individual to cause mass death on the scale of even a single conventional bomber plane, never mind real-world NBC weapons. Yes, high level spellcasters can exert a lot of power over any given individual or small group of them, and have incredibly powerful defensive abilities, but not really anything that could kill a world in the same way nuclear bombardment in real life would.

[Menzath]

On a slightly smaller scale, a moderately ambitious high-level evil caster can quite easily murder continents with Apocalypse from the Sky and a bit of CL optimization. A Red Wizard could hit an 1800-mile radius circle of absolute destruction with moderate effort (CL 40 from Red Wizard plus both Consumptive Fields to hit CL 90 plus a Widen effect).

And that's how in greyhawk the old baklunish empire and ancient suloise empires vanished.
The two empires cast apocalypse from the sky, and rain of colorless fire at each other, and wiped each other off the map. Even then whenever there have been world-ish ending events there was a major artifact to assist (flight of fiends) or other major powers would step in(Mordenkainen and the circle of 8)
And even then a number of nation's have fallen and risen in the meanwhile.

So "world ending" taken non literally has happened numerous times across all the world settings. And the elder evils, while cool story mcguffins, aren't generally written as part of the main story for this reason.

[Caudex Capite]

Heroes failing only equals a true apocalypse in some stories. D&D and its derivatives lack many means of any one individual to cause mass death on the scale of even a single conventional bomber plane, never mind real-world NBC weapons. Yes, high level spellcasters can exert a lot of power over any given individual or small group of them, and have incredibly powerful defensive abilities, but not really anything that could kill a world in the same way nuclear bombardment in real life would.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, there is Apocalypse from the Sky. A motivated level 17 caster could kill most life on a planet over the course of the afternoon, given enough prep time and no intervention from greater powers just from CL optimization (and a little bit of cast-time shenanigans) on that spell. Pretty sure you could break 50% of Earth's population (or another world with similar size and population density distribution) in 3 castings with moderate prep, though 100% would take quite a few more.

There are other methods of causing death on a massive scale available, but I like AFtS for doing it simply with raw damage and massive area.

[AvatarVecna]

Additionally, there is an important distinction between D&D and IRL that makes Six Sigma standards less necessary: magic exists. Yes, I know, that feels reductive, but that reductiveness is particularly relevant in 3.5 because this edition is bonkers and it changes how you approach problem solving.

IRL, if somebody gets injured from an airbag failure, or bad wiring in their house, or mislabeled predator habitats in the wild, we can't fix that - at least not directly, and depending on the severity, no quickly. Lost a limb to something unfortunate? We can maybe hook you up with an expensive replacement limb. What if one of those things killed you? We can give you a nice funeral and give your surviving family some cash if you had life insurance. Trapped in another dimension with no way back? Wish I could help, but the Multiverse Theory just means we know you're probably out there, but our ability to travel to "other universes" isn't exactly available yet, if ever. What if something erased you from existence via temporal shenanigans? Our world has some very sharp physical laws on how matter and time interact, which do not allow for us to play around with time in a way that could even try to fix that (although at least the whole world agrees that time is a thing). Something locked away your soul? Well now you know why I included that parenthetical in the previous statement: not only can we not do anything for your trapped soul, our world doesn't even agree on whether souls even exist or not.

...but in D&D?

In D&D, if you start bleeding out at -1 HP, you have a ~62% chance of stabilizing on your own, or a ~98.5% chance of stabilizing if some untrained passerby tries to use first aid on you, or a ~99.9969% chance if an average apprentice doctor with a healer's kit is the person who attends to you, or a 100% chance of stabilizing if a genius apprentice doctor with a healer's kit attends to you instead. All these attendees are 1st level, just with varying degrees of proficiency with the Heal skill (+0, +7, and +14 respectively).

In D&D, if you contract a disease, but you have a friend to help you, they can just say they're using Heal to treat the disease. If your save bonus is equal to their Heal bonus (+0, for most commoners), that's essentially you getting to roll twice and take the better roll every time you need to save against the disease...but, as is hinted at in the previous paragraph, pumping up skills is much easier than pumping up saves - the genius apprentice doctor mentioned above will almost certainly heal you of any disease you contract unless it explicitly requires magical healing to fix. Should you have contracted such a disease (like Mummy Rot, where a successful save doesn't end the disease, just means no damage today), a skilled physician can greatly extend how long you can survive with the disease while somebody fetches a Cleric 5 or Druid 5 who can deal with this. How common are cleric/druid 5s? For a small city or larger, there's guaranteed to be one somewhere in your community. There's a 35/36 chance that a large town will have at least one of either, a 5/9 chance that a small town will have at least one of either, and an 11/36 chance that a Village will have at least one of either. Even if you live in a Thorp or a Hamlet, there's a 1/20 chance that a powerful druid just happens to live in your town who can deal with the problem, or who can Reincarnate you if you die before he gets to you.

If you live in a metropolis, there is a solid chance that somebody, somewhere in your community, is capable of turning ashes into living people, granting wishes, summoning pact-slinging pit fiends, traveling to other dimensions, teleporting anywhere in the world, asking the gods for knowledge of the future, mind-raping you into being a completely different person, traveling through time...and on, and on, and on.

This is kinda a pattern that continues into the higher levels. Real-world problems are less problematic in a world that can undo anything. Anything. Anything. Oh, you died in the most gruesome, physically-destructive way possible? Trapped in another dimension? Soul sealed in a tiny gem? Got written out of time? We can fix that, with enough magic.

Who cares if you don't have a 1/294000 chance of failing to stop it? Somebody else has a 1/1 chance of undoing it. That person might be a 1st level expert, a low-level cleric, a high-level wizard, an epic monster, or a literal deity. But they exist. Somewhere. The entire multiversal cosmos is a balancing act between those powers. An epic necromancer has unleashed a literal zombie plague upon the world? Eh. Give it a hundred years, then send a legion of angels in to wipe things out, or take a band of plucky heroes and let them go on an undead killing spree for a bit. Or just give it a thousand years and the necromancer will do something stupid, accidentally kill himself, and then it'll just take another few thousand years for everything to get back to the way it was. The civilization that fell to the necromancer will be the ruins to be explored by the adventurers of tomorrow.

This exchange gets the idea summarized well:


Player: "I like this world. I don't want it to end."

Paarthurnax: "Pruzah. As good a reason as any. There are many who feel as you do, although not all. Some would say that all things must end, so that the next can come to pass. Perhaps this world is simply the Egg of the next kalpa? Lein vokiin? Would you stop the next world from being born?"

Player: "The next world will have to take care of itself."

Paarthurnax: "Paaz. A fair answer. Ro fus… maybe you only balance the forces that work to quicken the end of this world. Even we who ride the currents of Time cannot see past Time's end… Wuldsetiid los tahrodiis. Those who try to hasten the end, may delay it. Those who work to delay the end, may bring it closer."

And that's an option that world has. Threats that destabilize D&D-world enough that high-level magic and deities cannot be depended on to fix things after the fact are far rarer than the more run-of-the-mill world-ending apocalypses.

[King of Nowhere]

I wanted to break off from the common archetype of post-apocaliptic world, medieval stasis, and lost ancient civilization. There are way too many of them. Plus, I have faith in progress, and my world reflects that.

So I have a world with a decent size of high level characters, but without any world-ending threat.

now that they are not busy fighting for the world, high level people (those who have the ambition to match their power) have turned to politics. while they are not the ones who officially rule, a powerful wizard giving his allegiance to a nation strenghten it, and can make it collapse by removing it.
The players allied themselves to one of the powerful nations and started to create troubles with enemy powers.
But now the high priest of vecna just tried to ascend to deity by draining the souls of five million people, and this sparked a global war between vecna, and his supporters, and those who oppose him. several powers remained neutral, hoping that the war will weaken both sides so that they can try to take over.

I quite like how the campaign is turning out, but it was, unfortunately, very difficult to find quests at low levels. I mean, this is a world that can take care of itself. if the orcs are raiding a village, the village has likely some magical mean to contact the capitol, from where a 15th level party can teleport in minutes. what's there to do for a bunch of low level guys?
there are also no ancient ruins, at least not fiilled with treasure. no ancient artifacts, modern magiteck is better.

I am able to bring the story in unusual directions, but I can totally understand why the archetype is used more often. it's just much more prone to an adventure-friendly world

[AvatarVecna]

Well, as I mentioned earlier, there is Apocalypse from the Sky. A motivated level 17 caster could kill most life on a planet over the course of the afternoon, given enough prep time and no intervention from greater powers just from CL optimization (and a little bit of cast-time shenanigans) on that spell. Pretty sure you could break 50% of Earth's population (or another world with similar size and population density distribution) in 3 castings with moderate prep, though 100% would take quite a few more.

There are other methods of causing death on a massive scale available, but I like AFtS for doing it simply with raw damage and massive area.

You could also just do it with weather. You could go Incantatrix to make that weather generate a zombie plague, or you could just use it to blanket even more of the world in ice and snow.

Human Transmuter Wizard 5/Incantatrix 10/Halruaan Elder 5

Feats (strikeout has been Shuffled):
HD 1: Snowcasting
Human 1: Storm Magic
Wizard 1: Scribe Scroll
Flaw 1: Frozen Magic
Flaw 2: Enlarge Spell
HD 3: Earth Sense
Wizard 5: Extend Spell
Otyugh Hole 5: Iron Will
HD 6: Halruaan Adept
Incantatrix 1: City Magic
HD 9: Earth Spell
Incantatrix 4: Heighten Spell
HD 12: Widen Spell
Incantatrix 7: Miser With Magic
HD 15: Spell Thematics
Incantatrix 10: Persistent Spell
Halruaan Elder 2: Signature Spell (Fimbulwinter)
HD 18: Arcane Thesis (Fimbulwinter)
Halruaan Elder 5: Signature Spell Reserves Of Strength


HE1: Heighten Spell
HE2: Persistent Spell

Items:
Orange Prism Ioun Stone +1
Ring Of Arcane Might +1
Prayer Bead Of Karma +4 (UMD'd)
Vest Of The Archmagi
Thought Bottle

I start with base CL 20 (with feats and items that can theoretically increase it, but that's my base).

Step 1 is using Circle Magic with 3-5 helpers who collectively spend an hour adding 20 to my CL for the next 24 hours (bringing me to 40), as well as letting me add Empower, Maximize, and Heighten Spell to my spells for that duration (although not letting me do so if it would make the spell higher than 20th level).

Step 2 is to store my current XP level in a Thought Bottle.

Step 3 is to travel to some settlement that is experiencing a winter storm of some kind, and use Snowcasting/Frozen Magic/Storm Magic/Reserves of Strength to get +6 CL on a casting of Wish mimicking Greater Consumptive Field. After my three rounds of Dazed, I use Metamagic Effect to apply Persistent Spell to Wish-->Greater Consumptive Field to make the effect last all day. I use one of my Vest charges to recover the 9th lvl spell slot spent for this.

Step 4 is to Teleport to some location where I can expect to quickly get 23 people within 30 ft of me with no more than 9 HP who will easily fail any save I can force on them. This is ideally some kind of low-level religious gathering, or perhaps a foodhall for low-level warriors. It doesn't really matter, since I could very well max out my GCF bonus in the surprise round and teleport out before anybody can even try to do anything. (It could be argued that using Reserves Of Strength entirely uncaps the limit and I can just keep adding to my CL for the whole duration, but I'm going to assume that's not the case for the sake of staying as within the intent of the rules as possible for this). So now I have +23 to my CL from GCF.

Step 5 is to teleport back to my settlement/winter storm from step 3 and start casting a super-metamagick'd Fimbulwinter with Snowcasting/Frozen Magic/Storm Magic/Reserves Of Strength/Arcane Thesis. I may need some kind of cold protection for spending 10 minutes casting in a blizzard, but I'm a cold mage, so that's probably pretty easy. I will apply: City Magic (-1), Extend Spell (+0), Empower Spell (+0), Enlarge Spell (+0), Widen Spell (+1), Maximize Spell (+1), and Heighten Spell 13 (+11), which I am casting out of an 8th lvl slot. Earth Spell makes this count as a 21st lvl spell and means I add 13 to my CL, bringing my total CL for this casting to (40+8+23+13) CL 84.

Step 6 is to repeat step 5 in a new settlement/winter storm for every 8th/9th lvl slot remaining (including the extra 2 my vest will give me today, meaning a total of 14), with 5th/6th/7th lvl slots used for Teleports.

Step 7 is to rest for 8 hours than repeat step 6, this time with the extra 9th I spent on that Wish/GCF yesterday (while that Wish's duration is still in effect).

This gives me 29 castings in a 24 hour period, and I can repeat that process as long as my friends continue helping me out with Circle Magic shenanigans. Each casting has a radius of 168 miles, has a duration of [2d12+48, times two] weeks (avg 122 weeks), has at least moderate winds (with chances for strong/very strong, and averaging strong winds), and will average 42.125 inches of snowfall per day.

This covers a total of 2.45 million square miles, or approximately 1.2% of the earth's surface...although because casting Fimbulwinter outside cities means "only" CL 82, it'll take longer to cover the oceans and the great open spaces of the world. Still, even if I take City Magic out of the equation entirely, that still means I can cover the earth in Fimbulwinter in just 80 days, and then the world spends the next 122 weeks (2.34 years) in an endless blizzard.

[Cosi]

Having civilization collapse periodically is honestly not that weird, historically speaking. Even today, nations collapse fairly regularly, and going back it only gets more common. Living in the ruins of a civilization that had performed feats of engineering beyond your comprehension isn't some fantastical premise, it's just being in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. Having your cities torched and your people enslaved by demons is probably worse than what happened to the natives of South and Central America and the hands of the Spanish, but it's not fundamentally different. If anything, the fact that the plague is coming from an evil necromancer you can stab in the face, rather than being spread by a mechanism that won't even be theorized for a thousand years makes civilization more stable than it was historically.

The effects of magic are interesting and complicated, and depend heavily on what premises you assume. D&D tends to assume that power is very concentrated, which would make society more vulnerable to instability. In real societies, knowledge of how to make stuff is distributed. If you killed the guy in charge of building aqueducts for Rome, that might cause some issues, but it wouldn't stop Rome from building aqueducts. In D&D, a society that relied on Decanters of Endless Water for its water supply might collapse because Dave -- the only guy who can make a Decanter of Endless Water -- died and they could no longer produce enough infrastructure to meet demand. Which touches on another aspect of D&D: magic items are permanent. A Decanter of Endless Water is endless. You can't drain it, you can't use it up, it will continue to make water forever. Which makes looting the ruins of ancient civilizations incredibly profitable for your civilization.

Barring some outliers that could genuinely cause global extinction (the most notable of these are spawn-creating undead), it's fairly easy to sketch a version of D&D-land history that's not too different from our own. Civilizations rise and fall, just for reasons like "woke up angry dragon" instead of "climate slightly shifted and the grain harvest collapsed". And a much stronger tradition of archeology.

[magic9mushroom]

There are a fair few properly world-ending threats, particularly in Elder Evils, where I think the majority of nasties wipe out life on the Material Plane at a bare minimum if they win.

Nah. The only scenarios that are that big in scope are Pandorym (if it can't find a way back to its home after killing all the gods, it destroys the entire Great Wheel) and Kyuss (the Sphere of Annihilation placed in the Well of Many Worlds creates a black hole, though this was actually not intended).

Atropus and Ragnorra kill one planet at a time, and have indeed done this many times in the past, so they're definitively not planar threats.

Leviathan is the essence of the planet's excess chaos, and therefore its full awakening shatters the planet. Other planets have their own Leviathan-equivalents and are not affected.

Sertrous just wants to re-ascend as a demon lord by getting enough petitioners. The only real thing compelling action in his case is his sign filling the world with snakes.

Father Llymic, the Hulks of Zoretha and Zargon all represent some kind of invasion. Father Llymic isn't likely to continue his conquest beyond the campaign planet, as his sign only appears to extinguish the star of the planet he's trapped on. The Hulks of Zoretha are from Zoretha, which seems to be another planet rather than another plane; while presumably after some large number of generations the planet would become overpopulated enough with Hulks to send out more to other planets, that's a long way off. Zargon is the most likely to actually go a-conquering.

EDIT: Dragon 362 has Shothragot, an eleventh Elder Evil. It's an avatar of Tharizdun that wants to free him - and Tharizdun wants to shatter the planes. So that one does threaten planar catastrophe.

[ezekielraiden]

Even beyond recent national collapse issues (see, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 80s/early 90s), humanity has gone through several periods of boom-and-bust at the civilization scale. The Bronze Age collapse, for example, pretty thoroughly eradicated the Mycenaean Greek culture--even writing itself was lost to them for a time, which is why Homer's epics were passed down as oral tradition before being written down centuries later.

So society falling apart? Not really that weird. Common enough in human history for it to have affected the modern day a few times over.

Magic does potentially enable the total destruction of a biosphere, but that's a lot less of a barrier than it seems. D&D explicitly allows spontaneous generation. It explicitly allows the growth of new abstract/spiritual beings with the power to create new physical ones. So even total biosphere annihilation, as bad as that would be, wouldn't be unrecoverable. Nuking the planet down to its mantle would not, in fact, guarantee sterilization--just a long, long road to re-development.

You really do have to achieve something especially damaging--something that fundamentally alters the nature of D&D's epistemology and metaphysics--in order to achieve true, irrevocable destruction. That's...hard. Damn hard, actually. Particularly when it means going up against an awful lot of beings, including some that truly exist entirely outside the universe's rules (overdeities, like Ao), who have a vested interest in making sure you can't do that.

From a Doylist perspective though? We don't read (or much care about) the statistically-likely swathe of world-stories that include such total, complete apocalypse. They aren't interesting, or worth paying attention to. In this case, the anthropic principle applies because people are telling the story. Or, to put it differently, your statistical assumption is faulty; you have assumed that apocalypse-success is well-modelled as an independent, random variable, and that's just false. We artificially select from all possible fictional universes, and that artificial selection includes paying attention to that alleged variable.

It doesn't matter that apocalypse will eventually succeed if you experience enough of them, when we specifically filter for worlds that avoided it, or at least sufficiently blunted it as to continue having stuff. The reason there is something and not nothing in a D&D universe is because a universe of nothing is really boring.

[Jack_Simth]

This gives me 29 castings in a 24 hour period, and I can repeat that process as long as my friends continue helping me out with Circle Magic shenanigans. Each casting has a radius of 168 miles, has a duration of [2d12+48, times two] weeks (avg 122 weeks), has at least moderate winds (with chances for strong/very strong, and averaging strong winds), and will average 42.125 inches of snowfall per day.

This covers a total of 2.45 million square miles, or approximately 1.2% of the earth's surface...although because casting Fimbulwinter outside cities means "only" CL 82, it'll take longer to cover the oceans and the great open spaces of the world. Still, even if I take City Magic out of the equation entirely, that still means I can cover the earth in Fimbulwinter in just 80 days, and then the world spends the next 122 weeks (2.34 years) in an endless blizzard.

Does Fimbulwinter have any particular defense against Disjunction? If we make the assumption that there are many other folks of comperable power to the character doing this, and that most of them want the world to not end in ice (from a practical perspective, the muggles are the ones doing craft checks to make the stuff they don't want to bother creating magically), are you confident you can keep up with the disjunctions until such time as there's a suitable showdown when a few of the folks who want the world to not end and are of comperable power to yourself happen to be in the same place at the same time as you?

[AvatarVecna]

Does Fimbulwinter have any particular defense against Disjunction? If we make the assumption that there are many other folks of comperable power to the character doing this, and that most of them want the world to not end in ice (from a practical perspective, the muggles are the ones doing craft checks to make the stuff they don't want to bother creating magically), are you confident you can keep up with the disjunctions until such time as there's a suitable showdown when a few of the folks who want the world to not end and are of comperable power to yourself happen to be in the same place at the same time as you?

It was more as a point of general comparison to real-world weaponry like nukes, about how mages don't really have large AoEs that will matter to the planet. A single mage with a few helpers could do what I did, blanketing the world in blizzards, or a larger group could do it in less time with less cheese - which I feel is comparable to nuclear winter like we humans could make IRL. AftS was another good example given of such a thing, as is the Erupt spell to a degree.

As part of my previous point about spells in general, nothing you do can really matter hecause anything you do can be undone. In this case, there are two ways these Fimbulwinters are "protected" from Disjunction. The first is that I think to dispel it you have to have the storm's origin point within your Disjunction area, which may be difficult to find through normal means (though obviously not hard via divinations). The second way is simply one of logistics: Disjunction is 9th lvl, and this build's super-Fimbulwinter (or most mage's regular Fimbulwinter) is an 8th lvl spellb so there'l would jeed to be at least as many mages turning back the clock on this doomsday as there are turning it forward, and probably you'd actually need more.

Of course, Reserves Of Strength/GCF RAW abuse could mean every Fimbulwinter covers the whole planet with no other cheeseb making these problems even worse, but at that point it may well be easier to call upon a weather deity via Miravles to shut that **** down, stopping the apocalypse that way.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by AvatarVecna
Each casting…will average 42.125 inches of snowfall per day.

…it'll take longer to cover the oceans….

The majority (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SST_20131220_blended_Global.png) of the Earth’s ocean area is above 14-16 °C in surface temperature (57-60 °F) so a few feet of snow every day will melt as fast as it falls. You’ll inconvenience a few seagulls, but you won’t be covering the ocean in snow, just quickly melting slush.

[Jack_Simth]

It was more as a point of general comparison to real-world weaponry like nukes, about how mages don't really have large AoEs that will matter to the planet. A single mage with a few helpers could do what I did, blanketing the world in blizzards, or a larger group could do it in less time with less cheese - which I feel is comparable to nuclear winter like we humans could make IRL. AftS was another good example given of such a thing, as is the Erupt spell to a degree.

As part of my previous point about spells in general, nothing you do can really matter hecause anything you do can be undone. In this case, there are two ways these Fimbulwinters are "protected" from Disjunction. The first is that I think to dispel it you have to have the storm's origin point within your Disjunction area, which may be difficult to find through normal means
Hmm... checking... reply hazy, ask the DM in question.

Disjunction (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesDisjunction.htm) says "All magical effects and magic items within the radius of the spell, except for those that you carry or touch, are disjoined. That is, spells and spell-like effects are separated into their individual components (ending the effect as a dispel magic spell does)" plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't seem immediately relevant.

However... it's not clear which form of dispel magic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dispelMagic.htm) is referenced. If it's an area dispel, then you have:
"For each ongoing area or effect spell whose point of origin is within the area of the dispel magic spell, you can make a dispel check to dispel the spell" and "For each ongoing spell whose area overlaps that of the dispel magic spell, you can make a dispel check to end the effect, but only within the overlapping area" (and other things not of immediate relevance). However, if it's a targeted dispel, there is no mention of origins, you just target the spell, and it falls back to the same logic of targeting as for other things - if any bit of it is in range, it can be affected.

However, as you say:

(though obviously not hard via divinations).
... and I'm assuming you'll get a fair number of casters opposing you, so this aspect is fairly moot, regardless of which way the DM in question rules.

The second way is simply one of logistics: Disjunction is 9th lvl, and this build's super-Fimbulwinter (or most mage's regular Fimbulwinter) is an 8th lvl spellb so there'l would jeed to be at least as many mages turning back the clock on this doomsday as there are turning it forward, and probably you'd actually need more.

Sure. I'm assuming you'll be outnumbered six or eight to one, assuming an even distribution of alignments. Do you think an equally well-optimized 20th level Wizard build will have at least one-sixth as many 9th level spell slots to expend as you have eighth and ninth level spell slots to expend? The (admittedly, rather loose) logic is as follows:

The desire to destroy everything is CE. The other eight spots on the alignment spectrum, though?
The good row wants folks to survive, so will be against you (about the only things that will vary are approach and how much cooperation they do... also hem-hawing and such, but they're all liable to act in fairly short order for something that's that obvious of an attack).
The entire Neutral (g-e axis) row likely understands that if other folks are all dead, there's nobody to make stuff for them and/or trade with. Also, it tends to cause issues for their plans when everything is buried under umpteen zillion feet of ice.

As for the Evil row:
LE wants to rule it all, but there's little point if there's nothing left to rule.
NE just wants to enjoy the suffering of others in peace, and that's hard to do when everyone's dead. These folks may or may not oppose you.
CE maybe wants to go along with your plan... but many of them will want to go along with their own plans.

So I figure you'll be outnumbered roughly six or eight to one.


Of course, Reserves Of Strength/GCF RAW abuse could mean every Fimbulwinter covers the whole planet with no other cheeseb making these problems even worse, but at that point it may well be easier to call upon a weather deity via Miravles to shut that **** down, stopping the apocalypse that way.

At the upper limits of optimization, everyone's pun-pun. So ... yeah, I suppose. Lots of things can be done, and then mostly undone, too. Hmm. So... world likely keeps turning, I imagine, although you may reset a few continents that way.

[Mechalich]

Magic does potentially enable the total destruction of a biosphere, but that's a lot less of a barrier than it seems. D&D explicitly allows spontaneous generation. It explicitly allows the growth of new abstract/spiritual beings with the power to create new physical ones. So even total biosphere annihilation, as bad as that would be, wouldn't be unrecoverable. Nuking the planet down to its mantle would not, in fact, guarantee sterilization--just a long, long road to re-development.

Not even a particularly long road actually, since even if you sterilize the surface of a planet, it can be re-colonized swiftly from other planes. Opening a permanent gateway to the Plane of Water into a major basin, for instance, will not only pull in liquid, but will swiftly push through enough organisms to supply an entire ecology. Life can also be re-spawned by certain high-level entities like Elohim, that can just magic an ecology into being in a few days.

There are, however, powers in the D&D cosmology that will totally dismantle entire planets, like the Clockwork Horrors so that's a thing that can happen, and there are also entities like Ethergaunts who sterilize whole crystal spheres of intelligent life and then take steps to make sure it stays that way, so creation and destruction remain in a certain balance.

Ultimately, the history of the D&D multiverse isn't even that long. The entire current era on the Prime Material is a post-apocalyptic scenario, the apocalypse in question being the collapse of the Illithid Empire due to the Gith rebellions ~30,000-50,000 years in the past.

[AvatarVecna]

The majority (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SST_20131220_blended_Global.png) of the Earth’s ocean area is above 14-16 °C in surface temperature (57-60 °F) so a few feet of snow every day will melt as fast as it falls. You’ll inconvenience a few seagulls, but you won’t be covering the ocean in snow, just quickly melting slush.

1) The mean is not the mode. Waters closer to the equator will be warmer, waters closer to the poles will be colder. Additionally, waters will be colder at night and warmer during the day. Meanwhile, how warm/cold it is in the area won't change the amount of snowfall.

2) The surface area of the world is ~196.9 million square miles. The surface area of the world's oceans is roughly 70% of that total (so 137.83 million square miles, or 3,842,479,872,000,000 square feet). This build/organization would be adding 3.5 ft of snow to all that area, so the total volume of snow on the ocean would be 13,448,679,552,000,000 cubic ft (or roughly 91364 cubic miles). It's not even a percent of a percent of the total volume of the ocean, but it adds up: after two months, I've dropped about as much snow onto the oceans as humanity would if the polar ice caps completely melted. And it lasts more than two months, it lasts 28 months.

3) That melted snow doesn't just disappear. It lowers the temperature of the water it falls onto, gradually dragging down the average temperature on a global scale, and it increases the volume. It may not immediately freeze the surface of the ocean worldwide, but that's okay, it's got two years for gradual temperature change to make ocean water cold enough that it can.


Hmm... checking... reply hazy, ask the DM in question.

Disjunction (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magesDisjunction.htm) says "All magical effects and magic items within the radius of the spell, except for those that you carry or touch, are disjoined. That is, spells and spell-like effects are separated into their individual components (ending the effect as a dispel magic spell does)" plus a bunch of stuff that doesn't seem immediately relevant.

However... it's not clear which form of dispel magic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dispelMagic.htm) is referenced. If it's an area dispel, then you have:
"For each ongoing area or effect spell whose point of origin is within the area of the dispel magic spell, you can make a dispel check to dispel the spell" and "For each ongoing spell whose area overlaps that of the dispel magic spell, you can make a dispel check to end the effect, but only within the overlapping area" (and other things not of immediate relevance). However, if it's a targeted dispel, there is no mention of origins, you just target the spell, and it falls back to the same logic of targeting as for other things - if any bit of it is in range, it can be affected.

However, as you say:

... and I'm assuming you'll get a fair number of casters opposing you, so this aspect is fairly moot, regardless of which way the DM in question rules.

Sure. I'm assuming you'll be outnumbered six or eight to one, assuming an even distribution of alignments. Do you think an equally well-optimized 20th level Wizard build will have at least one-sixth as many 9th level spell slots to expend as you have eighth and ninth level spell slots to expend? The (admittedly, rather loose) logic is as follows:

The desire to destroy everything is CE. The other eight spots on the alignment spectrum, though?
The good row wants folks to survive, so will be against you (about the only things that will vary are approach and how much cooperation they do... also hem-hawing and such, but they're all liable to act in fairly short order for something that's that obvious of an attack).
The entire Neutral (g-e axis) row likely understands that if other folks are all dead, there's nobody to make stuff for them and/or trade with. Also, it tends to cause issues for their plans when everything is buried under umpteen zillion feet of ice.

As for the Evil row:
LE wants to rule it all, but there's little point if there's nothing left to rule.
NE just wants to enjoy the suffering of others in peace, and that's hard to do when everyone's dead. These folks may or may not oppose you.
CE maybe wants to go along with your plan... but many of them will want to go along with their own plans.

So I figure you'll be outnumbered roughly six or eight to one.


At the upper limits of optimization, everyone's pun-pun. So ... yeah, I suppose. Lots of things can be done, and then mostly undone, too. Hmm. So... world likely keeps turning, I imagine, although you may reset a few continents that way.

I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, because that wasn't the point of the Fimbulwinter post. My first post (before the Fimbulwinter one) was "it doesn't matter if we get it Six Sigma complete, because even if we lose we can ignore it". Essentially, my point was "it doesn't matter what we do because it can always be undone", and then I saw somebody else saying "it doesn't matter what we do because nothing in D&D operates at a scale large enough to really matter"; I agree with that person that it doesn't matter what we do, but I don't agree with why they thought that. Just because this game largely takes place at the individual scale doesn't mean there aren't beings - even weak lil mortals like that mage - who can't affect the world at large if they try hard enough. The thing preventing them from destroying the world isn't "D&D beings don't have nuke-level destructive capabilities", it's "D&D beings have nukes, and also have anti-nukes that cancel out anything the nuke did, so other people's anti-nukes will stop their nukes from nuking the world".

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by AvatarVecna
This build/organization would be adding 3.5 ft of snow to all that area….

That melted snow doesn't just disappear. It lowers the temperature of the water it falls onto….

Except you’re not covering the entire surface area simultaneously, you’re doing it in tiny divots.

And cold water sinks, so each divot of cold water will drop lower in the water column, allowing warmer water to fill in around it. Now you have to account for the effect of a few feet of snow on a few miles of water column.

Beyond that, the ocean isn't static; there are currents at every level in the water column, pulling apart your divots of slush as fast as they form. The ocean as a whole barely notices.

[AvatarVecna]

Except you’re not covering the entire surface area simultaneously, you’re doing it in tiny divots.

And cold water sinks, so each divot of cold water will drop lower in the water column, allowing warmer water to fill in around it. Now you have to account for the effect of a few feet of snow on a few miles of water column.

Beyond that, the ocean isn't static; there are currents at every level in the water column, pulling apart your divots of slush as fast as they form. The ocean as a whole barely notices.

I like how you left out the part about how it increases the volume. In particular how every two months it adds as much ice/snow to the oceans as if the polar ice caps melted. In the 122 weeks this would be operating, we would increase the ocean's volume by 26%. The system we have only operates because the weather is a part of the water cycle, not just snow coming from nowhere...and weather stops eventually. You cannot look at an endless ice age and say that it's not affecting anything, when we know, for a historical fact, what happens when it is snowing everywhere, forever.

EDIT: And this wasn't even about killing the planet, just about being a problem for civilization. Sure, the planet itself might eventually run into problems with you adding infinite mass from nowhere into the system, but in the short term all "endless snow" does is gradually kill of anything that can't survive indefinitely in sub-zero temperatures.

[Caudex Capite]

A little bit more thinking about AftS optimization has left me with a couple of questions. For one, once spell radii get big enough, do you need to start accounting for the curvature of the planet? The intersection of an 1800 mile radius sphere with a planet is probably statistically significantly less than an 1800 mile radius circle in size, since the planet is curving away. For two, how does Line of Effect work with AftS? If you cast it in a building or a cave, does that block LoE and save everyone outside? If we read it as not requiring LoE (since the area entry doesn't specify burst or spread), does that mean it deals full damage to the ground at the bottom of the radius as well? If so, is the ground one object, or one object per 5-foot cube, or something else? If you deal damage to every 5-foot cube of the ground going down 1800 miles, does that mean damage optimization potentially makes AftS leave an enormous hole straight to the bottom of the mantle? That's a planet-killer, I imagine.

[NichG]

Six Sigma is a strategy for process improvement that has as one of its motivating factors the concept that if you produce something in large enough quantities, a failure rate of 1.0%, 0.1%, or even 0.01% can still produce an unacceptably large number of undesirable outcomes. This is particularly problematic when the product in question is of a critical nature - such as automobile airbags. It's always important when planning for success/failure rates to take into consideration 1) how critical is it that success be achieved, and 2) how frequently is this scenario going to be repeated?

Now consider the problem of potentially world-ending threats in a fantasy setting and apply the same principles. Let's assume that it is possible for a monster or NPC in the setting to generate a threat that truly has the potential to either end the world outright, or at the very least end the world as we know it, reducing it to a post-apocalyptic aftermath setting. Obviously, it is absolutely critical that these threats be overcome, presumably by a heroic party of adventurers. If this sort of thing only happens once in a given world, everyone can breath a sigh of relief when disaster is averted and medals can be hung around the necks of the heroes by the princess and everyone turn and smile at the camera as the closing music from Star Wars begins to play and credits roll.

However, when you create a world with 20th level characters and suitable CR challenges for them, and even more so when your world includes Epic level characters and challenges, the frequency of these potentially world-ending threats is going to increase. At some point, particularly in a world that is put in peril with the frequency similar to that of our own world as depicted in the Marvel Universe, the rate of success for heroes overcoming these challenges has to reach levels similar to the goals of Six Sigma (99.99966% successful), because even one failure would result in the end of the world (which, in the defense of the writers behind the Marvel Universe has actually happened numerous times).

Yet are encounters of an appropriate challenge rating really that easy? Is the party really 99.99966% likely to win every single time? Because if the answer is that the challenges are actually harder than this, it would be appropriate to assume that every world with this level of characters and challenges has probably already experienced apocalyptic outcomes several times in the past and had to rebuild from that. This is where I like settings like Krynn (Dragonlance) which has already experienced a major cataclysm, and Athas (Dark Sun) which is a post-apocalyptic world. I think that every world with high-level challenges (Epic 6 settings may be excused here) should have in their back-story at least a couple of ruined civilizations, lost continents, long-extinct races, or other evidence of the very real dangers of failing to achieve a perfect record when facing these kinds of threats.

So what are your thoughts? Is it reasonable to have a world with high-level and epic-level threats where every single threat has always been overcome by the heroes? Or would it make more sense when the challenge ratings get this high, the scars upon the world from past failures would be equally epic?

In a given campaign, a given party of epic adventurers is not going to need to save the world more frequently than they have sessions, we we're (at most) talking about a few hundred times and in practice it might be something like 5-10 times. The issue isn't that the onscreen stuff has to be quite so robust, but rather that depending on the context it might imply e.g. 'if one group of people had to save the world five times this year, and civilization is 20000 years old, that's 100000 such events'.

But then surely the issue is that people are running campaigns that just don't advance time sufficiently. One could, for example, have a campaign where between each arc there's 10 years of downtime, and not all arcs are cataclysmic. If the characters save the world once every 20 years lets say, then that 20000 year civilization only had 1000 such points. It's still an absurd amount compared to reality of course, but if some of those 'save the world' events are really more like 'decide the direction the world will go in', is it so strange to think that there would be 1000 defining moments over all civilizations over 20000 years of history? That's getting closer to sustainable, and maybe even realistic for intense periods of history in reality - that 20 year gap is about right for the gap between WW1 and WW2 for example.

And for epic D&D characters, 10 year downtime arcs could easily be 1000 year downtime arcs since immortality isn't really that hard to obtain. Or it could be saving 20 different worlds within the course of a year - if there are billions of worlds out there, the per-world rate of cataclysm doesn't have to be so high.

Anyhow, point is that a lot of this has to do less with the idea of characters whose day job is world-saving, and more to do with combining those characters' careers with ponds that are too small for them (in terms of space and time).

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by AvatarVecna
In particular how every two months it adds as much ice/snow to the oceans as if the polar ice caps melted.

The key word being melted, not frozen. Adding volume doesn’t automatically ensure the oceans freeze, not given your piecemeal application and the ocean dynamics mentioned above.


Originally Posted by AvatarVecna
You cannot look at an endless ice age….

122 weeks is hardly an “endless ice age.” Actual glacial maxima last for thousands of years, not two years and change.

[King of Nowhere]

Having civilization collapse periodically is honestly not that weird, historically speaking. Even today, nations collapse fairly regularly, and going back it only gets more common. Living in the ruins of a civilization that had performed feats of engineering beyond your comprehension isn't some fantastical premise, it's just being in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment.

that's not a collapse of the scale we're talking about, though.

Sure, it's normal that civilizations collapse, but they always get overtaken by other civilizations. even the collapse of the roman empire left behind several kingdoms, and while some technologies were lost, others were gained (ancient romans didn't have mechanical clocks, for example).

We can see progress in our world as a relay race; sometimes the runner will slow down, or falter, or even get shot; but someone will always pick up the torch and keep carrying it on. Some things are lost, but there is a generally forward direction.

the common fantasy world, instead, has as much going back as going forward, and the kind of catastrophes that leave no civilization, but only a few hunter-gatherer survivors. it doesn't compare all that well to our world.

[AvatarVecna]

The key word being melted, not frozen. Adding volume doesn’t automatically ensure the oceans freeze, not given your piecemeal application and the ocean dynamics mentioned above.



122 weeks is hardly an “endless ice age.” Actual glacial maxima last for thousands of years, not two years and change.

Im a wizard 20. It took 80 days to get 854 days. I can take two years breaks between casting periods and keep it up as long as I want.

[AvatarVecna]

Or if you're still gonna nitpick, we can instead RoS persistent GCF until reach CL 1 million (killing a bunch of bee farms should get enough deaths), then cast limited wish: extended Blizzard for a 2 million round, 200 million ft radius AoE where snow falls at a rate of 1 ft/round.

[The Kool]

Im a wizard 20. It took 80 days to get 854 days. I can take two years breaks between casting periods and keep it up as long as I want.

That sounds like an excellent premise for an apocalyptic setting that needs a hero to overthrow the endless winter.

[AvatarVecna]

That sounds like an excellent premise for an apocalyptic setting that needs a hero to overthrow the endless winter.

Indeed. There's even a semi-artifact Location that's basically this exact premise: a slowly-growing ice storm that creeps up its area until the whole planet is blanketed. I think it also srives you crazy the closer you get to the source.

[Elkad]

The multiverse is likely littered with worlds where the cataclysm did happen.

Some didn't survive even as a wasteland. Heck, in some cases entire planes were probably destroyed.

But if creating a new world/plane/whatever is easier than destroying one the multiverse keeps expanding anyway.

So all you have to do is keep the multiverse intact. Which, when it threatens EVERYONE, does become very unlikely, as even the worst enemies will band together to stop that.

[The Kool]

if creating a new world/plane/whatever is easier

*coughs and looks at OotS*

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by AvatarVecna
Or if you're still gonna nitpick, we can instead RoS persistent GCF until reach CL 1 million….

No idea what any of this is. I’m a biologist, so for me a GCF is a Great Crested Flycatcher (https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/great-crested-flycatcher).


Originally Posted by AvatarVecna
…limited wish….

Well, I was pointing out the limitations with the Fimbulwinter plan as applied to open ocean. Going with wish obviously kicks it up a notch, but doesn’t retroactively mean the Fimbulwinter plan would have worked.

[Caudex Capite]

Pretty sure those are Reserves of Strength and Greater Consumptive Field. I'm actually not sure if that works, looking at the text of RoS. It allows you to exceed the "normal level-fixed limits" of a spell, but GCF doesn't have a level-fixed limit, it has an effect based on your caster level ("maximum increase of half your original caster level").

[JNAProductions]

Pretty sure those are Reserves of Strength and Greater Consumptive Field. I'm actually not sure if that works, looking at the text of RoS. It allows you to exceed the "normal level-fixed limits" of a spell, but GCF doesn't have a level-fixed limit, it has an effect based on your caster level ("maximum increase of half your original caster level").

Which is why AV assumed the normal limits for GCF were in place for their initial plan.

And their point was not that "The planet will be destroyed!" it's that "Civilization will be destroyed," which two years and change of endless winter should do, for most civilizations. (Frost giants probably gonna be okay.)

[Andezzar]

I think you overestimate the capability of high-level characters to generate doomsdays. The ability to kill specific targets on a whim from a different plane should not be confused with the ability to kill everything on a plane.

Furthermore, I do not accept the claim that the failure of a given party, even of high level, results in an apocalypse. Bad guys win =/= apocalypse. Bad guys win == under new management. That is not a fundamental problem in any setting I can think of - it is a hook for the next campaign.

In Dark Sun, for instance, there has been both a cataclysm and then the bad guys won. That's a lot of the theme of the setting, not a plothole.Summon Undead V (a 5th level spell) can summon a wight. So any 9th level cleric, sorcerer or wizard can start the wightpocaypse. All living creatures being undead counts as apocalypse I think.

[The Kool]

And a pair of level 2 or 3 adventurers can take down said wight. Or a small town militia. If it takes over a whole town, a party of 5-6 level adventurers can clear it out before it spreads. This is before it even gets the attention of any casters of similar level to the one who caused it.

[Caudex Capite]

I don't know about 5-6th level adventurers clearing out a small town of wights. That's around a thousand wights, which is more than enough to overwhelm them if they ever get cornered, and negative levels from handful of hits could put them in serious danger. They have escape options, especially if they have Fly available, but it could easily go wrong if the caster gets energy drained first, and they don't have the endurance to take down a large horde. At 7th level, Death Ward would let a melee type really mess the wights up for 7 minutes or so, but that's only 70 rounds. They'd need multiple days to get it done at that rate, and wights do have Int 11, so there's some danger they'll come up with a clever stratagem.

[Andezzar]

And a pair of level 2 or 3 adventurers can take down said wight. Or a small town militia. If it takes over a whole town, a party of 5-6 level adventurers can clear it out before it spreads. This is before it even gets the attention of any casters of similar level to the one who caused it.Sorry I confused wights with wraiths and they are not available for Summon Undead.

[BowStreetRunner]

...The ability to kill specific targets on a whim from a different plane should not be confused with the ability to kill everything on a plane...Agreed. Which is why I did qualify my premise by stating these scenarios have the "potential to either end the world outright, or at the very least end the world as we know it". My point was that while there are lots of high level threats that would result in the sort of changes we've seen throughout history IRL, when world-changing magic and monsters are introduced that exist in 20th level or higher settings, sooner or later a BBEG is going to win. So settings that incorporate this concept (Krynn, Athas) are more believable than ones where it is assumed that the heroes always win.


"Old ruins populated by monsters where ancient treasure can be found" are a classic dungeon type for a reason.
Forgotten Realms has a whole bunch of destroyed civilisations (Netheril, for example) and cities which have crumbled to dust after some cataclysm.
And that's how in greyhawk the old baklunish empire and ancient suloise empires vanished...The closer I look at other settings the more I see that these examples are, indeed, well represented.


The multiverse is likely littered with worlds where the cataclysm did happen.This particular aspect hadn't even occurred to me. It would make for some great campaign seeds though. Sort of like the world that Jadis comes from in the Chronicles of Narnia.

Actually, the original reason I started thinking about this concept is that I am in the middle of world-building for a future E6/P6 campaign and had the idea that this particular world had gone through at least four apocalyptic events that had completely altered the entire world. After the last apocalypse the world was given a level-cap. So it's an E6 world in the ruins of what was once a full 20+ level world.


*coughs and looks at OotS*:smallredface: I may have been a little bit influenced by OotS along the way. However, the similarities are very small.

[AvatarVecna]

Pretty sure those are Reserves of Strength and Greater Consumptive Field. I'm actually not sure if that works, looking at the text of RoS. It allows you to exceed the "normal level-fixed limits" of a spell, but GCF doesn't have a level-fixed limit, it has an effect based on your caster level ("maximum increase of half your original caster level").

Limits based on your caster level is exactly what Reserves Of Strength affects, per the example.


When you cast a spell, you can decide to increase your caster level with that spell by 1, 2, or 3, but you are stunned for an equal number of rounds immediately after doing so. Your increased caster level affects all level-based variables of the spell, including range, area of effect, spell penetration, and the difficulty of dispelling the spell. You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell withthis feat, so a 9th-level wizard could use Reserves of Strength to cast a Fireball as a 12th-level wizard and deal 12d6 fire damage.

If you are not subject to stunning effects, you instead suffer 1d6, 3d6, or 5d6 points of damage when you call upon your Reserves of Strength feat.

That's not why this use of Reserves of Strength is controversial. Anybody reading this feat immediately knows how it was intended to be used: in exchange for being dazed a few rounds (or taking some nonlethal damage), you can cast a spell at a slightly higher caster level, and that slight CL bump is allowed to break the normal CL limits of the spell in question (so the +1-3 can allow you to cast a Fireball that has more than 10d6 damage, or a Disintegrate with more than 40d6 damage, and so on), and that this "doing away with the CL limit of the spell" is only for the purposes of the CL bonus the feat itself gives...

...but that's not what it does in a strict RAW reading. By strict RAW, use of this feat does two things: first, it gives you a slight bonus to caster level, and two, "you can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell". Obviously, obviously, this was only meant to bypass CL limits via the feat's CL bonus, but a strict reading is that it just does away with those CL limits entirely if you cast the spell in question using Reserves Of Strength.

Using it with (Greater) Consumptive Field means the only limit to the CL bonus it provides is how many beings can be made to fail their save within the duration, which gives access to some significant CL shenanigans with lots of spells. The example I'm giving here is the Blizzard spell, which has a CL-based radius and duration and significantly-increased snowfall over Fimbulwinter.

[The Kool]

I don't know about 5-6th level adventurers clearing out a small town of wights. That's around a thousand wights

Sorry, I wasn't thinking Small Town by DMG definition, I was thinking 'collection of NPC homes and shops big enough to have a tavern and a general store'. I've run an encounter like that which is why it was my mental image, there was only a few dozen wights all told. Any town much bigger than that likely has means in place to deal with the wights before they completely take over, even if those means are merely for the militia to hold them cornered until adventurers arrive.

[Caudex Capite]

I think that you're failing to address the relevant question, which is whether or not the CL boost limitation is a "normal, level-fixed limit" of Consumptive Field. "A maximum increase of half your original caster level" reads as a variable effect based on caster level, not a level-fixed limit like Fireball ("maximum 10d6") or Dispel Magic ("maximum +10") or Shapechange ("maximum of 25 HD"). I read (G)CF as having no level-fixed limits, just an effect whose potency is based on your caster level. By that reasoning, allowing RoS to uncap the CL bonus is analagous to allowing it to make a CL 12 Fireball do infinityd6 damage.

You can still get an arbitrarily high CL by casting Consumptive Field, maxing out the bonus, casting Greater Consumptive Field, maxing out that bonus, then repeating, though. Just a lot more castings and time/kills required.

For a base CL of 20, you get +10 for the first CF, bringing you to 30, then +15 for the GCF, bringing you to 45. Then you recast CF, for a bonus of +22, overlapping with the original +10, for a net +12 bringing you to 57. GCF for +28, +13 net, bringing you to 70, CF for +35, +13 net, bringing you to 83, GCF for +41, +13 net, bringing you to 96, and so on and so forth.

[AvatarVecna]

I think that you're failing to address the relevant question, which is whether or not the CL boost limitation is a "normal, level-fixed limit" of Consumptive Field. "A maximum increase of half your original caster level" reads as a variable effect based on caster level, not a level-fixed limit like Fireball ("maximum 10d6") or Dispel Magic ("maximum +10") or Shapechange ("maximum of 25 HD"). I read (G)CF as having no level-fixed limits, just an effect whose potency is based on your caster level. By that reasoning, allowing RoS to uncap the CL bonus is analagous to allowing it to make a CL 12 Fireball do infinityd6 damage.

You can still get an arbitrarily high CL by casting Consumptive Field, maxing out the bonus, casting Greater Consumptive Field, maxing out that bonus, then repeating, though. Just a lot more castings and time/kills required.

For a base CL of 20, you get +10 for the first CF, bringing you to 30, then +15 for the GCF, bringing you to 45. Then you recast CF, for a bonus of +22, overlapping with the original +10, for a net +12 bringing you to 57. GCF for +28, +13 net, bringing you to 70, CF for +35, +13 net, bringing you to 83, GCF for +41, +13 net, bringing you to 96, and so on and so forth.

1) Any argument that a limit on the spell that is based on your caster level isn't a caster level based limit in exactly the same way some other spells have such limits is one I've seen before, and it always feels like people are less giving an honest reading of the rules as much as reading it how they want it to work for balance purposes (this happens elsewhere in the rules, where people's readings will change depending on how abusable the case in question is, but that's a different story). That's probably not the case here, since...

2) You make a good point that RoS limit-breaking isn't necessary for making GCF boost CL arbitrarily high, it's just that it makes it a lot quicker and simpler. Although if you are gonna go with chaining GCFs together, you're probably better off doing your other CL boosts first (Circle Magic for CL boosts + Heighten Spell/Earth Spell, the items, and even just the regular +3 from RoS for putting the initial number at 46 instead of 20 to get that train rolling quicker), which is something you don't necessarily need to bother with if it's just breaking the limit, since it's only one spell slot getting you NI CL no matter what CL you start with.

[ezekielraiden]

that's not a collapse of the scale we're talking about, though.

Sure, it's normal that civilizations collapse, but they always get overtaken by other civilizations. even the collapse of the roman empire left behind several kingdoms, and while some technologies were lost, others were gained (ancient romans didn't have mechanical clocks, for example).

We can see progress in our world as a relay race; sometimes the runner will slow down, or falter, or even get shot; but someone will always pick up the torch and keep carrying it on. Some things are lost, but there is a generally forward direction.

the common fantasy world, instead, has as much going back as going forward, and the kind of catastrophes that leave no civilization, but only a few hunter-gatherer survivors. it doesn't compare all that well to our world.

The bolded claims are rather more inaccurate than you seem to be allowing for. That is, if you restrict your attention only to Europe, Africa, and Asia, and even then only if we restrict it to the past two or maybe two and a half millennia, do we get this "the fragments or the conquerors pick up the pieces."

Again, Mycenaean Greece is a solid example as is Troy, but more recent ones in the Americas (the Inca, for instance), or the Indus River Valley civilization, or if we allow a looser definition, e.g. the genuine abandonment of a capital city and never re-occupying it, hence why the Angkor Wat can be visited today. Several of these cultures disintigrated to the point of even losing their written language. The Hellenic Greeks replaced Mycenaean Greek's Linear B with the Phoenician-based alphabet we know today, because they had, as a culture, lost writing entirely--the epic of Troy is a story about Mycenaean Greeks, that only survived because of oral tradition.

Humanity always survived, and in "recent" social collapses usually some technology and some form of cultural continuity remained, but across all human history? No, we've had multiple "back to hunter-gatherer" phases. It's really not that unprecedented, and these fantasy cultures are usually brought down by something reasonably systemic (like the literal, physical fall of Netheril).

All of human "civic" history (that is, permanent-building-based even if not permanently inhabited), as far back as we can find any evidence at all, fits into a span of at most 12,000 years. Being very generous, perhaps we can extend that to 15,000 BP. For many fantasy settings, individual empires may find that time span confining. And due to the dependence on magic rather than technology (the latter being much easier to preserve and communicate across generations), coupled with rather strong ethnic identity groups and threats that prevent globalization (gods, dragons, giants, monsters, etc.) it's not that surprising that some of these civs came crashing down, literally or figuratively. Having nuclear-level magic at the era of city-states is a huge destabilizing factor, as (for example) Illefarn proved to be its own undoing with that whole King of Shadows debacle.

[magic9mushroom]

1) Any argument that a limit on the spell that is based on your caster level isn't a caster level based limit in exactly the same way some other spells have such limits is one I've seen before, and it always feels like people are less giving an honest reading of the rules as much as reading it how they want it to work for balance purposes (this happens elsewhere in the rules, where people's readings will change depending on how abusable the case in question is, but that's a different story). That's probably not the case here, since...

The difference is that RoS breaks caps on your caster level, not caps scaling with your caster level.

An example of a spell with both is Chain Lightning. Chain Lightning has a cap scaling with your caster level (# secondary targets), as well as a cap on your caster level of 20 (for both damage and # secondary targets). Reserves of Strength on Chain Lightning with a (post-RoS) CL of 25 would let you hit 25 secondary targets for 25d6/2 damage, but it wouldn't let you hit 300 secondary targets for 25d6/2 damage, as your CL is not 300.