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Lkctgo
2020-06-01, 03:46 AM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

I know that people like to bring up two points in rebuttal:
1. Feudal tradition (people identify with certain rulers in certain regions)

For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).

In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.

Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.

2. Lack of stability/continuity issues

For theocracies, those clerics of major gods have an inherent hierarchy (and other spellcasters of the same faith) to tap onto. I understand that there are limitations (e.g good gods may not want their clerics to slaughter innocents to take over a city), but even if they are unable to take over a city-state, won't it make sense to found/create a city where the church is the major power (after all one of the main objectives of the clerics is to bring more believers for their god)?

For magocracies, admittedly it is more difficult to ensure a steady supply of mages, but there are always training schools (and also a lot of ways for mages to prolong their lives and solidify their rule).

I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

Elysiume
2020-06-01, 04:23 AM
This is a massively setting-dependent question; it's not going to be the same answer between 3.5e, Pathfinder, 4e, 5e, Exalted, Shadow of the Demon Lord, etc., even before you get into the existing settings in each of those rulesets. That said, if we're looking at a sort of general question of "why don't mages run the world," here are some potential options:

They can't. It's hard to be a wizard. Studying to become a wizard (or arcanist, or whatever) is rigorous enough that by the time you finish your magic schooling, a mundane counterpart has had twenty years in politics. Any use of magic to try to usurp their position would be detected by whatever mages they have on retainer.
They don't want to. Who cares about ruling some measly humans when you can reshape reality itself? Trying to control extant humans is a major risk when you can always just create your own humans if you want to.
Infighting/tall poppy syndrome. Mages keep out of politics. A mage who tries to interfere in politics immediately draws the attention of senior mages: why are you trying to interfere in mundane matters? Don't you know that we milk them for mundane resources without overtly interfering in their lives? Suddenly a horde of archmages descend upon you because you're risking their steady stream of various resources.
The law of averages. Someone will notice you casting a spell (e.g. an adept making their spellcraft check) or you influencing someone (e.g. another politician making a sense motive check).
At the end of the day, it's going to boil down to the setting you're in. Some settings inherently apply restrictions to their mages while some let them roam free. Even within a single ruleset, you're going to come down to rule application and optimization: a low-op 3.5 mage and a high-op 3.5 mage are living entirely different lives.

With this thread in the general roleplaying forum, I'm not sure what else I can say. Both mechanics and setting have such a major influence on your question that it's hard to narrow it down further unless you specify the range in which we're working.

Cazero
2020-06-01, 05:04 AM
Wizards are highly intelligent.
Altruistic wizards can trivialy figure out that ruling is not a good solution because it makes the people rely on them too much.
Likewise, non-altruistic wizards can trivialy figure out that no amount of peasants, servants and land would bring them anything of value, save for the egomaniacs who enjoy having power over the masses.

AdAstra
2020-06-01, 08:26 AM
Most mages have better things to do. At least in fluff learning magic takes a really, really long time, much less acquiring 20th level-equivalent powers and such. Learning decent governance is itself a lifelong task that most can't accomplish (and no, being smart and magic will not automatically make you a good leader, any more than Superman would make a good mayor of Metropolis). Given enough time and magical life-extension, sure a powerful Wizard or group of such could take over, and perhaps even govern well, but how much interest and ability would they have to actually maintain their gains? Most would rather continue their studies, not form a wizardly bureaucracy. Whatever resources and power they could gain from controlling a kingdom they could probably just conjure up themselves. You've got Thay, but that's an outlier and hardly an example of somewhere people would want to live, for this kind of reason. The major reason why a Wizard would entertain the idea of running a government would be ego, which tends not to make for a stable society and usually puts you in the sights of adventuring parties. The only other one I can think of would be altruism, which is rare (making it hard to actually get enough mages together to make it work), can easily go wrong, and can be done better by just helping people directly. If you were interested in using your magic to help people, you can just do that.

As for theocracies, It's somewhat of a fair point, since in real world medieval societies the church had quite a bit of pull. The problem is that in DnD, the clerics are very much beholden to their gods, and the gods will often have the same issue that Wizards do. Why would they care about their clerics being in charge of the kingdom? Most of the ones who would want that (ie, self-centered and belligerent) are not the type that would take kindly to other gods' worshipers. And that will make other gods and adventurers (including high level casters) oppose them, likely preventing them from gaining a meaningful foothold.

Quertus
2020-06-01, 08:46 AM
Magic takes study and dedication. Anyone who would want to take over the world that way would fail out of Wizard school - they're clearly not bright enough (too much abnegation, too little erudite) to be a Wizard if they think that controlling muggle institutions directly is any form of real power.

Clerics and Wisdom get you to much the same place.

Ruling over others - and doing it well - is generally a *downgrade* for the self-focused. That is, why would I want to manage idiot junior programmers, when that cuts into how much time I get to spend writing better code than most of them ever will? Heck, why would I want to manage *the janitors* or *the mail room* when I could be writing code instead?

So, when you can envision the senior programmer managing the "muggles" of the company, you'll have your models for what a Magocracy looks like. So, a flying country that crashes often; every time it does, the citizens have to close all their windows, turn the country off and back on, then try opening their windows again.

Not saying it can't happen, but… there's reasons why it might not be the normal model for successful countries.

Cicciograna
2020-06-01, 08:47 AM
Let me introduce you to the Tippyverse (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy).

Anonymouswizard
2020-06-01, 08:52 AM
Short answer, it depends.

Medium answer: define a magocracy, define the religion behind the theocracy.

Long answer: government is about more than the person at the top. It's about administration, and even if the person at the top wields mystical or religious might it doesn't mean the people who do the actual running of the country do. Which means that a mystical or religious ruler has to stay on the good side of their civil service (or lesser lords, if we're using a fuedal system), or keep their civil service small enough that they can use their mystic powers to control them. But once you've used your magic to control the civil service you can't really use it for other things. Therefore actual magocracies tend to either be small or to have significant numbers of magic-users ('magocracy by default'). Mages who do forge their own realms are encouraged to keep them small enough to get only what they actually need and to remain on their populace's good side unless the taxes stop coming in, or else brutally repress their populace and run the risk of mass emigration over the course of the next few generations.

That's not to say that mages will never be a political power. It doesn't matter whether it's a guild, a school, noble families, or just lone mages in towers, they will engage with politics in order to get what they want. Which in many cases leads to organised groups of mages being given special permissions to get them to stay out of politics.

That's even before getting into the court mage, one of their duties is almost certainly to uncover and remove magical influences from the court. Yes, they probably have a great amount of power from their position and access to the leader's ear (assuming just one court mage), but they can't stop enemies from controlling the leader if they're also using their magic to control the civil service.

The most logical form for a magocracy is a feudal system, where houses of wizards horde magic and form the highest rank of the nobility, with lower ranks having no or heavily restricted education in the mystical arts, and a monarch drawn from one of these noble houses. In D&D you might even give each house a focus on one or two schools of magic.

As for theocracies, it's mainly because not all religions want political power, and there's potentially even a religion with a vested interest in stopping other religions from gaining political power (probably a CG god of freedom). That's not to say that religions won't hold power, in fact realistically religions will hold a lot of power just from being a large part of people's lives, and individual towns might even work as a theocracy, but it's unlikely that a church will take on the task of administrating an entire realm when they can just attempt to convert the people who run stuff into followers.

TL;DR: actually ruling is a hassle, and ruling a large realm via magic takes up a lot of resources. Plus the churches probably already have a lot of influence, do they really want more.

Palanan
2020-06-01, 08:57 AM
Originally Posted by Cazero
…save for the egomaniacs who enjoy having power over the masses.

There’s a nontrivial number of these people out in the world. In fact they’re all around us, but most of them lack the skill and discipline to effectively do what they want.

If studying magic is an option, then driving egomania could certainly be a motivation to pursue the arcane arts. Anyone intelligent enough to excel in the study of magic should be able to channel that drive and operate effectively in a sociomagical environment.

Kelb_Panthera
2020-06-01, 10:25 AM
In 3e at least, there are too few of them and they're far too busy interfering with each other.

There's also the fact that magical gear and architecture that can substantially mitigate what such characters can do that easily outlives their creators.

Further still, there's the -dramatic- overstatement of the caster/non-caster divide. It is there but it's a -long- way from insurmountable, even before you consider the far from perfect in-game knowledge of the rules of the game that such characters would have as they progress.

As for theocracies, they're fairly common and often defacto rather than explicit. That's not in the sense of actual cleric spellcasters running the show but in the sense of the church being the center of power and social organization. That's no different from reality in the late 17th century. Even extraordinarily powerful clerics are still part of their gods' churches and defer to the leaders of the church, who are often -not- casters because there's no need for the gods to invest their divine power in administrators. That's what holy texts and the odd prophet are for. Those who've been invested with the gods' divine power have had that investment made so they can take on preturnatural and supernatural threats that common soldiers simply can't and to advance the gods' interests through the direct application of mystical power.

Back to that interference comment; chaotic gods and their clerics have a vested interest in making sure that those who have immense power don't get too big for their britches. Any powerful mage seeking to establish himself as a ruler, much less clerics of the churches of gods like Hextor and St Cuthbert, have to go through equally powerful clerics and mages that think no one with such powers should rule over the common folk.

__________________________________________________ ____________________________

Finally, there's the sheer practicality of it.

Having the mind necessary to gather all that magical power says -nothing- about any inclination to actually manage a state and the people of it. While a top-class mystic theurge may have the perfect solutions for every imaginable problem in his perfect mind but he -must- rely on much less perfect beings to execute those likely quite complicated plans. He simply can't be everywhere at once and there are only so many hours and spell slots in a day.

If he doesn't get every single order just so, it won't be executed properly. Worse, orders that have to go down the chain of command will almost invariably get twisted by the game of telephone that carries it to its final recipient. It -inevitably- hits the wall of civil bureaucracy, regardless of the civic structure, and there any perfection of the Caster-King/Chairman/President dies through a slow, brutal, bureaucratic murder. It'd be a full-time, never-ending job just to make sure your orders even reached who they're supposed to in-tact before you even consider dissidents.

And you can't just erase the dissidents without making more of them and drawing out those who have the power and inclination to stop you if you're even a caster for whom that's an option to begin with. Your power won't last long if it comes from a good deity and you're just disappearing folks without following the divinely approved methods. It'll go even faster if such a caster that's more powerful than you is part of your opposition.

All the personal power of even a god can't keep the people from turning against you if even people of an appreciable portion of your political power are working in tandem and parallel against you. A sorcerer king can be deposed by experts (the NPC class) if they can outmaneuver him in the courts of nobility and public opinion. Bringing his head to the block may be out of reach but making rulership impossible certainly is not.

TL;DR: no matter how well suited to the job you may be, people will always get in the way and at the end of the day you're just one spell-slinger and you haven't dedicated your whole life to being a politician.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-01, 10:36 AM
Others have brought up some very good points (particularly those roughly along the lines of 'time spent ruling is time not spent wizarding'). I'm going to focus on a specific foundational piece of the premise I disagree with. Here:


Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

Setting aside that the initial clause doesn't independently support the concluding clause, I don't think it is true in the first place. Spellcasters are inherently overpowered, compared to the non-spellcasting classes, at doing what players generally want their characters to do (in particular, solving adventure-level challenges that the DM might bring to bear against the party as an obstacle to success).

When it comes to kingdom or even town/city-level challenges, most of the abilities that a spellcaster can bring to bear (particularly that other people with money and followers couldn't do) don't actually tend to solve them.
Droughts, famines, or plagues?: Certainly druidic and clerical magic are quite nice stopgap measures, and a high level caster can feed dozens-to-perhaps-a-hundred per day or cure disease for maybe a dozen or so. However, once you are looking at the hundreds-to-thousands level of suffering people, it becomes a problem solved by either real governance/logistics (finding parts of the world with excess food, buying it, and bringing it to the people who need it; setting up disease treatment centers and isolation areas and such), or a full-PC-party adventure to, let's say, find the magical macguffin which will appease/rebuke the god of pestilence (where a spellcaster will probably out-contribute the sword-swinger, to be sure).
Natural Disaster?: My group once envisioned a volcanic eruption threatening a town, and what the party could do about it. Outside of Wish* (which, honestly, the fighter ruler with a purchased ring of wishes is just as good with as the wizard who is burning XP to cast it), not much a caster has could do a bit of good. Even using 'port to demiplane with different timescale to re-memorize spells' trickery to get the right load out of spells isn't going to give you enough walls of stones to block a lava flow. Same with enough water/weather to cool the lava in its tracks. Once you start dealing with phenomena well above 'as big as a football field' sizes, D&D spells are pretty much inadequate (for good reason, since the game was designed around dungeon-level challenges).
*and here I am assuming that your DM has quashed any, 'and now I have infinite cost-free wishes' shenanigans, because if they haven't, who rules is the least of the problems.
Invading army?: At this one, a caster actually can do something, but again most effects they have are not scaled properly. Some cloudkills and fireballs and summoned monsters (preferably with DR 15/<not what normal soldier usually have available>) will do some serious damage to an army, but the army is still going to succeed or fail based on your side's fortifications and low-level troops and the like. The spellcaster was just a high-value asset (one that needs a safe place to rest and 're-fuel'). So it is like having an fighter/bomber pilot end up being president/prime minister/etc. -- certainly possible, but not an intuitive link.
Insurrection/Rebellion/Coup?: Much like the natural disaster scenario, most of the spells which seem appropriate don't really work past a certain scale. Sure, a scrying wizard can spy on a cell of rebels plotting against them -- one location at a time, and only the ones the wizard already knows to be monitoring. This too is something that is more readily solved by having your own competent spy network, something any ruler can have. Sure, minion-mancy can help, but (like Wish, assuming the DM has nixed infinite loops or the like) the numbers favor the guy who can wrangled hundreds of citizens to their side, particularly since a conspiring rebel is much more likely to spill the beans to a regular pretty barmaid than to a demon or celestial or whatever (and yes, you can have the demon or celestial shape/appearance-change into one of those, but for that effort you could get dozens to hundreds of mundane ones).

I could go on with more examples, and I'm sure there are specific spells which break this mold and actually do work on the kingdom-level, and I am excluding certain 3e rules exploits on the grounds that if they are allowed, who is ruling is the least of the worldcrafting issues. However, my point still stands -- D&D spellcasters, even the high-disparity ones that 3e has, aren't really very powerful once the problems scale up to the level of ruling kingdoms and solving kingdom-level problems.


The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

So leaving aside the powerful issue, we have highly intelligent (we know, because we can see their character sheets and Int score) individuals who might not have as many blind allegiances as a theocracy. Okay, I can see the value of intelligent leadership (I certainly am in favor of a meritocracy). I guess that comes down to whether 'wizard intelligence' is the same as actual intelligencesmartness. I am a bit biased, in that I manage a team of programmers and lawyers (two groups that I feel are somewhat analogous to D&D wizards) and much of my job is wrangling them into actually solving the problem we have been asked to solve, not the one they want to solve. Likewise, in the literature, wizards (and yes I have drifted from spellcaster to wizard, since you mentioned magocracies) are regularly portrayed as perhaps book and knowledge smart, but not necessarily showing other characteristics of overall smartness. It's really not obvious to me that a group of wizards would the ones to make the best decisions.


Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side.

Sure, but Wizard+Leader >= Leader just means that Wizard isn't negative. It doesn't have to contribute at all.

Telok
2020-06-01, 10:38 AM
Pretty much all my world building post-AD&D has the primary political structures being heavily magic user biased. The much maligned AD&D level limits plus spell casting, learning, and memorization rules were specifically there to support a human-centric quasi-feudal setting.

The recent editions have magic users who inherit or aquire power without study or hard work. This is in addition to basically removing upper limits on magical power growth. Just the need for, and power of, scrying & anti-scrying should mean that most magic users are in, or directly employed/controlled by, the ruling classes.

Following on that, theocracies were common and quite viable for long periods of time. Even after direct theocratic rule stopped being common (actual weather control being something that didn't happel in rl) having clergy in positions of power & governence, plus the religous system being a major land owner, made for a sort of shadow theocracy in places/times.

Tldr: Yeah, the easy access to magic power should result in magic using people being over represented in governance.

Tvtyrant
2020-06-01, 11:49 AM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

I know that people like to bring up two points in rebuttal:
1. Feudal tradition (people identify with certain rulers in certain regions)

For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).

In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.

Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.

2. Lack of stability/continuity issues

For theocracies, those clerics of major gods have an inherent hierarchy (and other spellcasters of the same faith) to tap onto. I understand that there are limitations (e.g good gods may not want their clerics to slaughter innocents to take over a city), but even if they are unable to take over a city-state, won't it make sense to found/create a city where the church is the major power (after all one of the main objectives of the clerics is to bring more believers for their god)?

For magocracies, admittedly it is more difficult to ensure a steady supply of mages, but there are always training schools (and also a lot of ways for mages to prolong their lives and solidify their rule).

I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

The same reason militaries, scientists, economists or doctors aren't the dominant form of government in all periods; having two jobs makes you worse at doing one or the other. A mage has to spend their time doing magic, a politician has to spend their time trying to run bureaucracies and balance interest groups. Certainly magic based governments would crop up, but that makes them responsible for a whole lot of stuff that they may not want to do.

Joe the Rat
2020-06-01, 12:21 PM
On the Cleric Side: Godwar.

Some schmuck with a slightly better horse and a slightly longer spear can claim all the land he wants in the name of his patron deity. But once cleric - people chosen by the god to be a beacon of their power in the world - start horsing around, your counterparts in the pantheon might want their own piece of the pie. Last time, Bad Things happened. So the gods agree to not have their spell-slinging devotees play priest-king, and to gain followers the old-fashioned way.

Paladins can get a pass on Oaths - they may follow a god, but their personal crusades are on ideals - something broader in scope. This is why Tyranny/Conquest Paladins show up with invading armies.

Man on Fire
2020-06-01, 12:28 PM
Rules are for players, not for worldbuilding. If worldbuilding had to adhere to raw it would mean wizards learn magic by comitting waton ton of murder. Worlds are not mago/theocracies because it doesn't fit the theme they are going for

Zarrgon
2020-06-01, 12:44 PM
Well to add in somethings I did not see above:

*Power Levels: A Typical D&D world is full of people and creatures of power levels from 1 to 20. Even if a wizard was to get to 10th level, and then decide they would want to rule the world, HALF of the world would still be more powerful them them. There is a good chance someone will oppose the wizard, and a good chance they will be more powerful.

*No Kid Gloves: A Typical D&D world is a Game World made to unfairly support and protect the PCs. Very few DMs would ever do anything "cheap or unfair" to a PC. For example attacking a sleeping character or stealing (or destroying )that character's spellbook or unique item. But if you are talking about a world with no PC, then all of those ways don't apply. A wizard will go to sleep, and be killed by a stealthy character or monster. The whole world will be on the "Real Life Simulation Old School Anyone Can Die" setting with no sympathy, do overs or take backs.

*Homebrew; Many think of a D&D world as only "what is in the official book". But in a "real life simulation " world, no one looks at the Rule Book of Life and picks a specific feat, spell or magic item to use. In a Real Life Simulation Old School Anything Can be Brewed" setting.....anything can be 'Brewed and created. You can have a wizard all perfectly optimized to be invulnerable "by the silly book rules" and they can be obliterated in one round by another wizard casting Anti-Time Obliteration. And not a single "silly rule book" will EVER have magic that deals with anti-time(and few are even likely to even know thw concept). But even if they did have an anti-anti-time protection, there are endless ways to do things....

*People are People: Er, sure, maybe Bob can take over the country or world. But then what? He then has to rule it....and that is not quite as easy as it sounds. Just take a sampling of DMs to see how well a fictional world might be run.

*The Unknown: Again, going off think of a D&D world as only "what is in the official book". A "real life simulation " world will have many things unknown, even more so unknown to the "rule book folks". Like say magic affiliations that effect wizards (2E had them). Just take our poor emperor wizard who rules the empire, he teleports a lot and wakes up one day immaterial and unable to do anything he dies of a lack of food and water in a couple days.

*End Goal: This is the philosophical one. A person can rule the world. Get a nice place to live and whatever they want. They can make the world whatever they want. But THEN what? You have everything and can do anything...but then what do you DO?

LordCdrMilitant
2020-06-01, 01:11 PM
That depends.

To some degree, I'd expect almost all wizards to be of generally upper class. To become a wizard takes time and money a commoner doesn't have.
However, by the inverse, not all upper class are wizards, because it takes time to train as a wizard and until you get to high level [which is generally unlikely], you're not really any more powerful than a martial, or are in fact less so, so it's not worth it for the upper class to become wizards.

Magic is valuable, but I think it would be more reasonable to see wizards as retainers on the noble's court than as the noble themselves. The noble sponsors the wizard's training for the wizard to work for them and do basic magical tasks.


That said, sorcery is a path to a mageocracy if you want to build one. You can write the whole structure of inherited magical power and inherited political power together, and being a sorcerer doesn't take having a college degree. This is also a path just for magical noble families in general even if the rest of the world isn't a mageocracy.



As for theocracies, well, real life states in the time were theocracies, so it doesn't take much justification to have them, since the church holds influence over the lives of the commoners even without clerics having magic. The Clerics themselves could or could not be lords themselves, though they'd certainly be nominated for tasks like leading crusades and "persuading" kings that have ideas about not being subservient to the church.
And this is not because of the Cleric's personal power, but because of the power of the greater organization they too are a pawn of.

Nifft
2020-06-01, 01:16 PM
In some editions of D&D, there's less imbalance between spellcasters and other characters.

The settings you're surprised about might have been written under the assumptions of another edition.


In 3.x D&D, the imbalance between high-level spellcasters and others is both significant and obvious. One setting written specifically for 3.5e D&D limited NPC levels to a range where spellcasting isn't such a stark imbalance.

That's your answer for Eberron: NPCs aren't high enough level that the spellcasters can dominate. It's a deliberate design decision to make the setting work within the rules of the game.


If Eberron wasn't the setting you were asking about, could you list the names of the ones you do want explained?


For my homebrew settings, often times each city / nation / state has some kind of power source. Might be divine, might be arcane, might be a family of dragons, might be a vampire lord... everybody has an ace in their back pocket, a local power behind the throne. That's a trope which I use to justify some sword-and-sorcery trappings of my homebrew.

Jorren
2020-06-01, 01:29 PM
Spellcasters, particularly mages, are defined by personal power not bestowed power. Traditional rulers rely on alliances, charisma, oaths, and other instruments of fealty and obligation to advance the causes of their state and themselves.

Spellcasters, particularly high level ones need no such things to get what they want. In other words they do not rely on other people (soldiers, tax collectors, bureaucrats, messengers, etc.) to enforce their will. As such the incentive to rule a nation is much less. While non-spellcasting classes can somewhat achieve this through the use of magic items, spellcasters are the ones that truly shine in this area.

Democratus
2020-06-01, 02:36 PM
There are places where this did happen.

Thay, in the Forgotten Realms, is a magocracy.

Segev
2020-06-01, 02:47 PM
Often, the answer is, "Adventurers." There is a fine tradition of Evil Mages trying to take over kingdoms/the world, and 4-6 heroic individuals banding together to thwart them.

Why mages don't become institutional powers? Administration is a lot of hard work and keeps you busy; when will you have time to study? Maybe you don't need to; you're a sorcerer. Great! That means you can have a noble bloodline defined by magic for your mageocracy! But it's not perfect, and it still takes some practice (see how few skill points sorcerers get). And those with the magic bloodline are probably rare, so you might be able to breed your relations into every layer of your feudal structure eventually, but it's not guaranteed. So there will be non-mages.

Plus, you don't have to be a wizard or a cleric or a sorcerer to benefit from magic. So the guy who's actually very skilled at administration and management who hires a wizard who just wants to be left alone but will do magic on reasonable demand for sufficient backing can give wands and magic weapons to the administrator's mundane forces.

Telok
2020-06-01, 03:40 PM
I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

If you want story reasons you can make up anything you want. You'll hear lots of that, with more or less rules referencing depending on edition and setting differences. For example Eberron lacks high level casters, but doesn't have rules preventing them, it's just a narrative decision.

If you want a rules based reason you'll probably run up against the problem that many editions just have rules for a few adventurers wandering around killing things. There will be a distinct lack or rules covering rulership, governence, taxation, populations, etc. Trying to extrapolate from the adventuring rules to governance and world building will generally fail or result in a setting wildly divergent from the normal assumptions (ref: Emperor Tippy) because the adventurer rules give some individuals massive world altering abilities with few or no drawbacks using an assumption that such abilities will be used only for dungeon crawling.

Quertus
2020-06-01, 08:51 PM
Natural Disaster?: My group once envisioned a volcanic eruption threatening a town, and what the party could do about it. Outside of Wish* (which, honestly, the fighter ruler with a purchased ring of wishes is just as good with as the wizard who is burning XP to cast it), not much a caster has could do a bit of good. Even using 'port to demiplane with different timescale to re-memorize spells' trickery to get the right load out of spells isn't going to give you enough walls of stones to block a lava flow. Same with enough water/weather to cool the lava in its tracks. Once you start dealing with phenomena well above 'as big as a football field' sizes, D&D spells are pretty much inadequate (for good reason, since the game was designed around dungeon-level challenges).

My brother retired a character with at-will Wall of Stone that could probably manage :smallwink:

We'll see if my senility will let me research "lava response", to determine time frame vs resources required.


So leaving aside the powerful issue, we have highly intelligent (we know, because we can see their character sheets and Int score) individuals who might not have as many blind allegiances as a theocracy. Okay, I can see the value of intelligent leadership (I certainly am in favor of a meritocracy). I guess that comes down to whether 'wizard intelligence' is the same as actual intelligencesmartness. I am a bit biased, in that I manage a team of programmers and lawyers (two groups that I feel are somewhat analogous to D&D wizards) and much of my job is wrangling them into actually solving the problem we have been asked to solve, not the one they want to solve. Likewise, in the literature, wizards (and yes I have drifted from spellcaster to wizard, since you mentioned magocracies) are regularly portrayed as perhaps book and knowledge smart, but not necessarily showing other characteristics of overall smartness. It's really not obvious to me that a group of wizards would the ones to make the best decisions.

Lol. Agree that "intelligence" and "smartness" are not synonyms.

Haven't really had trouble with techies (can't speak for lawyers) trying to solve the wrong problem, outside a) trying to spend too many resources / going outside budget, or b) trying to solve the problem that they were told to solve, rather than researching what the costumer actually needed.


Rules are for players, not for worldbuilding. If worldbuilding had to adhere to raw it would mean wizards learn magic by comitting waton ton of murder. Worlds are not mago/theocracies because it doesn't fit the theme they are going for

There's also role-playing XP. But, I must admit, I do like the world-building in "murder-powered leveling".


*Power Levels: A Typical D&D world is full of people and creatures of power levels from 1 to 20. Even if a wizard was to get to 10th level, and then decide they would want to rule the world, HALF of the world would still be more powerful them them. There is a good chance someone will oppose the wizard, and a good chance they will be more powerful.

I would love to see the world-building around a world - or even a single kingdom - where half the citizens were more powerful than a level 10 Wizard.


*People are People: Er, sure, maybe Bob can take over the country or world. But then what? He then has to rule it....and that is not quite as easy as it sounds. Just take a sampling of DMs to see how well a fictional world might be run.

Preach it!


*End Goal: This is the philosophical one. A person can rule the world. Get a nice place to live and whatever they want. They can make the world whatever they want. But THEN what? You have everything and can do anything...but then what do you DO?

Hmmm… conquer other worlds? That could make for a fun game.

aglondier
2020-06-01, 09:25 PM
Because unless you are the Crimson Permanent Assurance, there is not much adventure to be had in bureaucracy, accountancy and administration...

Satinavian
2020-06-02, 02:06 AM
It is obvously rule/setting dpendent. But :

- While a caster may be more powerful than a noncaster, a kingdom where the casters rule is not more powerful than a kingdom where casters don't rule but are still employed by the rulers and are cherished and sponsored.

- A wizard might have a lot of tools that are useful for a coup. But not actually that many tools that are useful for gouverning or staying in power.

- The really powerful caster can get pretty much everything he want anyway. And if there still is something that needs the power of the realm to get, he probably has a good chance getting it by simply asking the ruler for it. There is no need to claim a throne.

- Clerics are bound by the rules of their goods. Politics is a messy buisness full of compromises. It is way easier to stay true and clean if someone else does it.

- Rulers are often more interested in providing nice positions to their offspring, not to their competitors in the same field. So regardless who actually rules, their is an incentive to make rulership hereditary and not a class based meritocracy.


Of course with casters so powerful there is a strong incentive for nobles to have their children become casters which can lead to a de-facto magocracy even if it is still actually hereditary feudal. Especcially if aside from the main heir the children need to find retainer posts at other courts it would be very common to train them as court wizards or court priests and then use connections.
There is also an incentive to make church posts hereditary and bind them to political posts, but usually the gods don't want the less talented firstborn as the next high priest and put a stop on that.

Yanagi
2020-06-02, 02:44 AM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster.

Government is a social structure that asserts control over a population to direct the flow of resources to achieve ends by pooling and allocating labor and resources in a way that individuals or informal groupings cannot. Different forms of government propose different structures of moving, pooling, and distributing resources; different philosophies of the use and government and the good order of society. Government also has to root itself in governed population--that is, it has to exploit a mix of practical and cultural elements in the people governed to compel their participation, and tweak that process of exploitation to keep people compliant even when circumstances are especially bad or good.

RPG magic is application--means to achieve ends--but rarely is presented as having philosophical dimensions that create new concepts of governance: "magocracy" doesn't actually describe a philosophy of governance or an administrative structure. Theoretically in different settings there could be different ways of integrating "magic" as tools of an administrative state and the infrastructure; but the naked assertion of "magic dudes make government therefore magic government" is so free of details that it doesn't actually propose anything. The described case--magic users dispatched to be problem solvers--is civil service but with magic, not something novel.

That said, what "magocracy" does describe is a hard hierarchical distinction...a gate between those that can have administrative power, and those that cannot. So...is the process of qualification to rule (magic) a meaningful test of the skills required to rule? Does training in magic use (of whatever type) create useful skillsets in economics, accountancy, communication, bureaucracy? In most settings I've ever encountered...no. So a magocracy immediately starts one down, in that the testing mechanism includes no skills necessary for directing and guiding large groups of people to achieve collective goals. This gating issue become even more worrisome if total magic power is a qualifier for higher position in governance, because then you've got a system where a key criterion of more administrative power is not succeeding as an administrator, but accumulating personal arcane power highly suited to (1) abusing one's position, (2) avoiding accountability because who has sufficient force to stop you.

Furthermore, if you've got magic users enclosed together making plans without consultation with non-magic-users, chances are very good you're going to get the arcanist equivalent of groupthink: making decisions from a fixed perspective of "solve with magic" while ignorant or disregarding non-magical solutions that would work better because the infrastructure could be maintained without magic.

But if we set that aside, the idea of smart wizards ruling through problem-solving parties has a scalability problem: how many casters, circulating over how much space, casting how many spells per day for how many people? If the backbone of your resource pool and allocation process is magic, then you are dependent on spellcaster labor, meaning that each caster is incredibly valuable but also a point of failure, and the more powerful the caster the more disruptive their absence would be.

That last bit gets especially wonky if magic is anything less than perfectly repeatable by different individuals. What's described is a magic civil service, which means...these are jobs where workers have to put in man-hours of labor necessary to keep things operating at a satisfactory status quo, and in turn every day there's going to be human resources problems. Bureaucracies are good because horizontally there's redundancy, and vertically there's quality control: every single day the work can be done over and over, consistently. If magic is beautiful personal snowflakes sent out into the world, you have a crisis when putting-out-fire arcane specialist is too sick to work. If a crucial construction project hinges on caster and his replacement is weaker or less of a master of the specific task, that's a civil engineering disaster seeded.

The personal power level, individual-directed learning of spells, and "artistic" aspects of magic mean that death, and thus filling job positions, would be a huge issue in a magic infrastructure system. If magic is all natural talent and you lose a talented member of a corps doing essential work, you've got no replacement because it's just luck. If magic is the product of deep study and years of mastery, then a death at the top--well, what system is in place to make sure there's a replacement of equal ability with the same skillset?

So...on top of all that is the larger economics implications of a caster system. If your problem-solving infrastructure is based on casters it's implicitly based on caster tools. If a spell has a consumed material component you have to have a procurement process that acquires and distribute it at a rate commensurate with it expenditure. Even if the materials can be magicked up...that's more magic labor that has to operate a continuous rate of production day after day. Either way, that maintenance production rate becomes a point of failure for the system because there's limited magic-man-hours.

I guess in a 3.5 world there are a bunch of ways to get Tippy because there's a bunch of magic items that just become perpetual motion machine equivalents, but even those tend to play fast and loose with the fancy-ass materials required to make the widgets because they can just buy stuff with gold forever and RPG worlds have fantasy economies in which there's no relative value and scarcity is fixed enough for things to be pricey but supply can never be so scarce it's systemically unavailable.

And all of that is without getting into the question of consent of the governed. Magic lends itself to applications that permit individual abuse of power, and in a lot of settings the focus upon individual accomplishment and obsessive research begets hubris. If legitimate authority, and in particular use of force, is gated behind magic use, then at some point there's going develop a body of law regulating use of magic by the state versus constituents of the state, of the state simply voids their consent through coercion individually or collectively.


The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

An inherent hierarchy and blind allegiance if the rulers can maintain a completely compliant ideologically-homogeneous population. RPG fantasy settings aren't just polytheistic, the structure of the afterlife and the material benefits of belief are close to identical doing apples to apples comparisons. This is to make player choices weigh the same, but it has the side-effect of taking the wind out of compelling belief: spiritual self-determination is written into the metaphysics undergirding the cosmos. Bluntly--theocracies lean heavier on coercion than secular societies because they are trying to compel total assimilation of their worldview, not just performative compliance. And the biggest stick a theocracy has is that noncompliance is not just death, but eternal suffering.

If the followers of Corn God set up a rump state and start boiling alive the followers of Walnut God...well in most metaphysics that mean Walnut God's followers are doomed to suffer forever and Corn God's followers can feel relieved that they're not because IA IA COB ANESTI. But in RPG metaphysics there's no one true afterlife, and the various gods hoover up belief but don't poach one another's exclusive markets...it's like a oligopoly where each participants competes in new markets but agrees to not directly intervene in the other's controlled market regions.

This metaphysical back stage combined with the layers and layers of cosmic intrigues also means that theocracy isn't really incentivized as way of getting what any one god, or their church, wants. Controlling dirt and labor through an administrative state to control people is adding extra unnecessary steps.

Many gods belong to pantheons with common goals that can be advanced without complete milieu control over a region, and within the multi-pantheon system there are often deities so pathologically destructive that collaboration is necessary to keep them from advancing objectives far more alarming than regional franchise. Furthermore there are existential threats that do not operate inside of soul-market format--demons, extraplanar things, Lovecraftian things, yadda yadda--that require a different pattern of resource allocation and delegation of responsibility.


For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).

The real, real reason that a setting aren't map full of magic civil servants fixing everything to the tune of a magic autocrat is...it shrinks the space that players can play in.

So mostly I've talked in fluff terms, but I'd like to switch to mechanics-and-design-level ones for a moment: I realize that RAW high INT is glossed in-game to high general intelligence and the small number of skills and the class skill sets mean that casters ended up "smart"...but it's bad character writing. If casters are stat blocks and spell lists and there's no narrative line about why they have their power or what it means, then it technically "works" if you assume high-powered casters are boilerplate economic rational actors with the same manpower needs and the exact same lack of concern for mind-controlling. If they're characters actually living in a world and they know what they know because they learned stuff and they talk how they talk because of their personality, then their "intelligence" is not just a fixed score on a character sheet and it makes more sense that don't a priori Know Stuff So Good They're Better Than The People What Know Stuff.

Wizards as advisors to kings and manipulators of kings is a common and effective trope, but a setting where it just recurs over and over because it "makes sense" is not creative or fun. But if fluff terms--what does God a demigod want with a starship a feudal kingdom?

RPG magic in mechanical execution is concrete--it is built to tool-like perform operations for PCs--but the description of magic communicates that it is about expansion of esoteric knowledge that alters one's perception of the world. High level casters are transformed, psychologically and sometimes physically, in ways that eject them from material concerns. They are madmen, obsessives, hermits, saints drawn to an extreme of experience that authors don't communicate because it's really hard to whole-cloth make up esoterica and not get lost in the details. A high level caster isn't just an accumulation of personal power, they're the end point of biography of learning crazy stuff about the cosmos to become that powerful, in a world full of gods and monsters and power systems that stretch outward into a multiplanar afterlife that's connected to a multiverse full of immortal scheming critters who have a creased copy of your business card in their spare wallet.


In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.

See, this doesn't actually work as smart as it seems to on the surface.

It's not a good assumption that nobody but the magic user would consider the possibility that magical coercion is available as a tool and nobody puts "maybe magical coercion" on the table when they speculate about the new and interesting choice made by people in power. I mean, this is a general problem with how mind control magic and society would interact: we have multiple words to describe degrees of harm caused by forcing people to do stuff by controlling them with threats, manipulation, and physical harm...in a world where magic that altered or controlled minds existed, there would be an equivalent extensive lexicon for magically taking away someone's consent and violating their mental autonomy. So if there's someone moving around who explicitly has the skillset to force people to act again their nature and someone starts acting against their nature, people are not going to respond with confusion.

And since the premise references mechanical game aspects like specific spells and rolls, the failure point is when someone rolls a successful save or rolls a 20 on a skill check. Your power as Mind Eating Wizard King hinges depends on controlling a key set of individuals with broad powers capable of giving orders without being questioned, so you can't just get rid of them if there's an off day or somebody notices the something's off. I mean, what's the fallback plan when Operation Erotic Lobotomy begins to fray at the edges? I mean, with all that casting you can certainly defend yourself against direct attack, but after two or three instances (day after day for YEARS) of someone saying (1) "I think someone cast a spell on me to mess with my head" (2) "I have an entirely different opinion on the same subject than I did a few hours ago" there's going to be a credibility crisis that diminishes first the authority of Mind Control Squad and then the entire government system because either there's contagious case of Goon Brain or a wizard did it.

The other thing is...can you imagine how tedious this method of control would be? You'd have to spend tons of time developing scripts for your Brain Goons and cross-checking them to make sure there weren't any contradictions of errors. And spend time just feeding them their lines. And doing QA testing on their audiences to see if the stuff you were making them say was actually translating into the stuff you wanted done and not, say diverted into a moral panic about kippers and irrational large subsidies to quince farming. Like, to get high level enough to brain-squeeze enough people you probably had stab out a ghost's eyeballs and feed them like grapes to a dragon that's 50% spare golem parts by weight while contemplating the deeper mystic meaning of the chewing noises, and now you're basically a comptroller who runs an improv school in their spare time.

And in additional to the creep factor it's also really inefficient compared to, say, using clout and rhetoric and maybe a bit of threat because you're an atomic bomb in a shiny robe and a codpiece that emits faint sobbing noises.


Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.

Are people specifically inclined to give enormous power to randos on a strictly transactional basis, or are they more comfortable with power systems that include deep cultural roots and a shared social contract?

Now answer that question with the added proviso of "...hand over power to a person with enormous supernatural power that includes the ability to destroy everything and also casters have a habit of going crazy with power and doing shady stuff, and because of the setting tropes wizads abusing power are a knowable thing that people worry about."

And, I repeat myself, this idea that casters are "supremely intelligent" in a way that translates into all the abilities to both win and retain total political power is...nakedly bad writing if it happens more than once. It also an argument that leans heavy into mechanics...technically being able to do something...superceding characterization and a setting's need for spicy unusual phenomena for PCs to interact with.


I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

By the time you've learned the largest, most complex spells that exist you've fought insanely powerful entities that worked for more powerful entities, and the latter now hate you and would enjoy seeing your projects fail. And you're so intelligent/wise/enlightened that you realize that temporal power seems small, and you're frightened of what would happen if you re-connected with the vulnerable normal people whose lives are governed by temporal power.

You've had your home village torched by an archdevil or a loved one tormented in impossible cruel ways. Maybe you've come out of that with a general love of people such that you don't want to use your power to force them to do things...and it would be so easy to do. Maybe you've come out of that with a total indifference to people because you're getting beyond old, slouching towards immortality, and it's just become routine people live and die in rhythms that are pretty to watch from afar but no longer relatable.

Maybe you've seen or learned things that have shifted your gaze away from everything; the new research that going to save everybody from something they don't even know is a threat; a way to replicate a moment of sensation experienced in a distant moment in an impossible faraway land; aeciding to use your power to batter at a rule that others think is a law and you demand be a suggestion.

Or maybe they all just wake up in the morning, look in the bathroom mirror and think, "Man, I could be that guy who has to get up at 5am every morning and mind control a bunch of cabbage-and-madeira reeking, flatulent dukes to make sure they don't raise the tariff on frozen orange juice, just like he's done for the last decade."

Willie the Duck
2020-06-02, 08:13 AM
My brother retired a character with at-will Wall of Stone that could probably manage :smallwink:

Unless said character can also address any of the other potential things that happen to the kingdom -- despite having permanently devoted slotting one out of (one? It's been a long time since I've played high-level 3e) at-will spells to Wall of Stone -- I think this supports my point rather than detracts from it. If the solution to each individual problem is 'but there is a specific, permanent, and exclusive build that could,' then we're suggesting that a generalist wizard couldn't. And since you can't actually play Schrodinger's Wizard, well then I think the kingdom shouldn't be looking to a wizard dictator to hands-on solve their problems.


We'll see if my senility will let me research "lava response", to determine time frame vs resources required.

Let's keep it super simple -- create a wall tall and wide enough to block a lava flow (ignoring that the lava might melt/break/push over said wall, seep under it, off-gas toxic fumes which kill the town anyways, etc.); or enough water to chill that much lava back to a solid state (assumption, created water starts at the avg surface temp of the ocean: 17 C, and all the energy required to bring it to boiling and then phase change is pulled from the lava).


- Clerics are bound by the rules of their goods.

:smalltongue:Well now there's a right skewering of organized religion if ever I saw one. :smallbiggrin:


And all of that is without getting into the question of consent of the governed. Magic lends itself to applications that permit individual abuse of power, and in a lot of settings the focus upon individual accomplishment and obsessive research begets hubris. If legitimate authority, and in particular use of force, is gated behind magic use, then at some point there's going develop a body of law regulating use of magic by the state versus constituents of the state, of the state simply voids their consent through coercion individually or collectively.
...

It's not a good assumption that nobody but the magic user would consider the possibility that magical coercion is available as a tool and nobody puts "maybe magical coercion" on the table when they speculate about the new and interesting choice made by people in power. I mean, this is a general problem with how mind control magic and society would interact: we have multiple words to describe degrees of harm caused by forcing people to do stuff by controlling them with threats, manipulation, and physical harm...in a world where magic that altered or controlled minds existed, there would be an equivalent extensive lexicon for magically taking away someone's consent and violating their mental autonomy. So if there's someone moving around who explicitly has the skillset to force people to act again their nature and someone starts acting against their nature, people are not going to respond with confusion.

This, combined, raises a good point -- At some point, if you are ruling through coercion/manipulation/magical-autonomy-violation, why not cut out the middle man and lob around a few Fell Locate City bombs and get yourself a perfectly compliant workforce that does not need to take bathroom breaks, allows you to export any crops grown, and can march in your army to conquer other lands. That conveniently answers the question of why doesn't said wizard ruler show up in games, because they do -- necromancer-kings with nations of the dead, hell*-bent on conquering the world, are a staple of fantasy literature.
*Or wherever, campaign-dependent.

Nifft
2020-06-02, 01:05 PM
:smalltongue:Well now there's a right skewering of organized religion if ever I saw one. :smallbiggrin:

IIRC there are domains for Artifice and Trade, so it could be turned into a pun which actually works.

Rerednaw
2020-06-02, 01:20 PM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

...
I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

There are several even in the context of official D&D content. For example an anti-magic political party in Thay probably won't last too long :)
And there was the Theocracy of the Pale which used divine powers to make arcane magic heavily regulated or even outright illegal. And there's a lot more...

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-02, 08:23 PM
The Forgotten Realms is a setting whose history is full of powerful mageocracies (and theocracies and psiocracies). All of them were head and shoulders above even current mageocracies like Thay, Rashemen, or Halruaa in terms of quality of life, physical and social mobility, safety from monsters, and so forth, making good and full use of Toril's unusually high magic levels and putting the comparatively more primitive modern Faerûnian civilizations to shame. However....

Imaskar? Their attempt to keep their slaves' gods out of Realmspace failed and they got themselves smote for their hubris.

Netheril? Their most powerful archwizard got delusions of grandeur, tried to become the god of magic, and caused the entire civilization to literally fall when his plan backfired.

Jhaamdath? They pissed off Nikerymath (an elven mageocracy) who used Elven High Magic to sink their entire empire with a single tidal wave.

Narfell and Raumathar? They mutually annihilated each other in a full-on magewar that ended when one side summoned an avatar of the god of fire to burn both sides to a crisp.

Talfir? They managed to wipe themselves out so thoroughly with their shadow magic that no one even knows how exactly they did it!

And that's just the more powerful half of the human mageocracies; there are a bunch of elven and Creator Race mageocracies that imploded too. And mageocracies in other settings have suffered similar fates: Suel and Baklun in Greyhawk nuked each other with the Invoked Devastation and Rain of Colorless Fire, Istar in Dragonlance got themselves meteor'd off the face of Krynn for the Kingpriest's hubris, the Sorcerer-Kings in Dark Sun wiped out previous rhulisti mageocracies so they could play mageocrats themselves and are due to be wiped out in turn if the Dragon ever escapes his prison, and so on and so forth.

The point is, it seems like societies becoming mageocracies is indeed the natural course of events in D&D settings...but mageocracies getting too big for their britches and offing themselves also seems to be the natural course of events, hence why you might not see many (or any) mageocracies at any given point in time because the setting might currently be in the "up-and-coming proto-mageocracy" or "recovering post-magical-apocalypse" stage of the cycle.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-02, 11:11 PM
I guess this depends on how many mages there are?

I mean, for all the blathering about governance and politics and so forth, feudalism was based on a caste of mounted men who were militarily dominant each getting their own little bit of land, and then showing up to the killing party when needed.

Sure, they had rights judge and levy and so forth, but their function as a knight or leader of armed forces was what made a lord - his liege didn’t pick him based on his renowned agricultural knowledge.

So if mages are plentiful, and D&D “if you’re not magical, you’re a third rate turd” rules, then you could very easily have the mage replace the knight - and subsequently lords - in a feudal system. It’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t.

If mages are rare, they aren’t sufficient basis to expansive military power, and thus until being god like are still constrained by the rule of the muggle masses.

Luccan
2020-06-02, 11:32 PM
Cuz it's all being run by druids, man! Think about it, they all report to one Archdruid, they got a secret language, they can disguise themselves as any animal. They keep the churches and wizards under their thumb. They got kingdoms hunting sorcerers and warlocks, man! The time for them to step out of the shadows is coming! Druid uprising!

Different settings have different explanations, but my reasons generally fall in line with Bigger Fish and lack of interest/power/numbers. Relatively few clergy are powerful clerics (even if most are at least 1st level Adepts) and most good/neutral deities don't really go in for world domination any way, so even if your power LN hierophant tried it you'd rapidly find them without power and subsequently smote. Followers of evil don't get away with it because they're opposed not just by most good and neutral gods, but also other evil deities who want a piece of the pie. And generally that's all they get; there are theocracies of both good and evil in the world, but none might enough that a divine power feels threatened.

As far as "mages" in general go: Sorcerers are pretty uncommon (especially those that live to adulthood), Warlocks have that whole sell your soul/firstborn/kidneys thing that makes becoming one pretty icky to most people, and being a Wizard or some other class that requires study and training (which can include Clerics and Druids) is hard. Those who follow that path are generally predisposed to being more interested in the mystical than mortal influence. Plus, there's simply not enough united in any significant number to make it common place. Magocracies are prone to infighting over magical theory as much as politics. Which isn't to say they don't exist, but those who wish to rule rarely wish to spend many of their days in contemplation over scripture or sequestered in a library and vice versa

Lucas Yew
2020-06-03, 12:24 AM
Most likely that the settings' writers tend not to think thoroughly about the hypothetical impact of working high spellcasting in a quasi medieval society...

----

OTOH, even while assuming the in setting spellcasters do acknowledge how awesome their potential powers are, if there was a non-ignorable class of folks who are experts on dealing with abusing of power (like properly scaled up martial classed characters), they might be kept in check.

Something related that I learned from somewhere is the weakness triangle of three common fantasy parties; that is, the People < Monsters and Spellcasters < Warriors < the People.
The theory is that Monsters and Spellcasters use their toughness and crowd controlling spells to terrorize or lord over the common People, the Warriors can withstand single/small numbered powerful threats like Monsters and Spellcasters and whack them before their tyranny can continue, and finally the People can overrun a Warrior with sheer massive numbers when one decides to take the helm as the new tyrant.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-03, 01:51 AM
I guess this depends on how many mages there are?
[...]
So if mages are plentiful, and D&D “if you’re not magical, you’re a third rate turd” rules, then you could very easily have the mage replace the knight - and subsequently lords - in a feudal system. It’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t.

If mages are rare, they aren’t sufficient basis to expansive military power, and thus until being god like are still constrained by the rule of the muggle masses.


As far as "mages" in general go: Sorcerers are pretty uncommon (especially those that live to adulthood), Warlocks have that whole sell your soul/firstborn/kidneys thing that makes becoming one pretty icky to most people, and being a Wizard or some other class that requires study and training (which can include Clerics and Druids) is hard. Those who follow that path are generally predisposed to being more interested in the mystical than mortal influence.

In the case of 3.5, at least, the rules say that a randomly-generated Metropolis of 25,000 people can expect to have, assuming maximum rolls, 4 16th-level wizards, 8 8th-level wizards, 16 4th-level wizards, 32 2nd-level wizards, and 64 1st-level wizards, plus the same number and distribution of sorcerers. That's 248 mages just in core, and if you add in Wu Jen, Beguilers, Dread Necromancers, and Warmages at the same rates (squeezing out appropriate numbers of commoners) that's 744 mages. If you count Artificers, Warlocks, and Clerics, Archivists, and Favored Souls of gods of magic as "mages" for mageocratic hierarchy purposes, that makes 1,364, before you even get into partial casters like Bards or Duskblades or more obscure full casters like the Sha'ir or Death Master.

That gives you a sizeable mage overclass of roughly 5.5% of the population, comparable to Medieval Europe where the nobility was 2% to 10% of the population, and of those 1,364 a good 44 are in "archmage" territory (8th+ level spells or equivalent) to serve as your Sorcerer-Kings and Witch-Queens and Royal Oracles and Arcane Viziers and so forth. Between the archmages chain-binding fiends and crafting flying cities and the over 700 1st- and 2nd-level apprentices filling the city with minor magics, you can make a pretty darn credibly mageocratic civilization with no tweaking or houseruling required.

Speaking of the 3.5 DMG, a commonly-overlooked part of the demographic generation rules is the "random power center" tables. Power centers are the de facto rulers in a given settlement, and rolling a 19 or higher on a power center roll gives you a Magical power center, which is exactly the kind of mageocratic ruler or government the OP is talking about.

In a Metropolis you roll 1d20+6 four times for that check, so there's an 82% of getting at least one Magical power center (the "ruling archmage with a few non-mage advisors" scenario) and a 2.56% chance of having all four power centers be Magical (the "true mageocracy" scenario). So once again, without any kind of tweaking or houseruling, a generic randomly-generated setting actually will end up having a significant number of casters in charge of things. 82% isn't 100%, of course, and Magical power centers can be doddering wizards in their mage towers on the outskirts of town rather than Lich-Kings running Lich Kingdoms, but it's not like the system outputs "straight-up Medieval Europe, with wizards stapled on as an afterthought" if you actually use the guidance and tables it suggests.

Kardwill
2020-06-03, 04:32 AM
Let's keep it super simple -- create a wall tall and wide enough to block a lava flow (ignoring that the lava might melt/break/push over said wall, seep under it, off-gas toxic fumes which kill the town anyways, etc.); or enough water to chill that much lava back to a solid state (assumption, created water starts at the avg surface temp of the ocean: 17 C, and all the energy required to bring it to boiling and then phase change is pulled from the lava).


Yeah, lava flows give you impressive pictures you can show to your friends, but it's the stuff of cute, tourist-friendly volcanoes. A mean volcano will throw a pyroclastic wave at your face at 500kph, shredding your city and boiling alive everyone in it in a matter of minutes. Or it will belch a plinnian column that will smother life out of the entire region. Or it will simply explode at your face without warning.
So, you might need a bigger wall ^^

Nifft
2020-06-03, 08:27 AM
Yeah, lava flows give you impressive pictures you can show to your friends, but it's the stuff of cute, tourist-friendly volcanoes. A mean volcano will throw a pyroclastic wave at your face at 500kph, shredding your city and boiling alive everyone in it in a matter of minutes. Or it will belch a plinnian column that will smother life out of the entire region. Or it will simply explode at your face without warning.
So, you might need a bigger wall ^^

The pyroclastic wave seems to be the one case which a wall would counter.

The column: build upwind, I guess.

So if you're upwind and downhill, you'd want that wall.

If you're downwind and downhill, you'd want another house somewhere upwind.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-03, 08:44 AM
Yeah, lava flows give you impressive pictures you can show to your friends, but it's the stuff of cute, tourist-friendly volcanoes. A mean volcano will throw a pyroclastic wave at your face at 500kph, shredding your city and boiling alive everyone in it in a matter of minutes. Or it will belch a plinnian column that will smother life out of the entire region. Or it will simply explode at your face without warning.
So, you might need a bigger wall ^^

That's why I specifically said, "Let's keep it super simple." I'm not going to ask someone else to become a volcanologist to play my elfgames, so I'm extending the same curtesy to Quertus (if he really wants to do this at all). If he wants to up the ante, more power to him.

Kardwill
2020-06-03, 08:58 AM
The pyroclastic wave seems to be the one case which a wall would counter.


A pyroclastic flow can get over obstacles, and even run uphill on short distances. And topple church walls, if it's strong enough. You'd need a BIG wall to survive, and it's unlikely you could save the city behind you

During the Montagne Pelée explosion in 1902, the pyroclastic cloud killed 99,99% of the population of Saint-Pierre (3 confirmed survivors out of a 30.000 population), destroyed every building including the fortress, the lighthouse and the cathedral, and then ran over the water for a mile to set ablaze 20 merchant ships in the bay. The 3 survivors were a little girl that escaped on a rowboat, a man who was hiding in the cellar of a very sturdy house, and a convict who was in isolation in an underground cell with only one small window facing away from the blast (and who still was so heavily burnt that he spent the rest of his life in a Barnum freak show).
And if you survived that kind of apocalypse because you were miracuously out of the way, then the fun stuff begins : The fires of course, but also the Lahars, gigantic mudslides caused when rain sogs up the volcanic ashes, that can wipe out entire valleys.

So yeah, a powerful wizard could fight some volcanoes for a time. The cute, harmless ones. But I have trouble picturing anyone going after the kind of "wrath of god" a real killer volcano can unleash.

Quertus
2020-06-03, 09:43 AM
Unless said character can also address any of the other potential things that happen to the kingdom -- despite having permanently devoted slotting one out of (one? It's been a long time since I've played high-level 3e) at-will spells to Wall of Stone -- I think this supports my point rather than detracts from it. If the solution to each individual problem is 'but there is a specific, permanent, and exclusive build that could,' then we're suggesting that a generalist wizard couldn't. And since you can't actually play Schrodinger's Wizard, well then I think the kingdom shouldn't be looking to a wizard dictator to hands-on solve their problems.



Let's keep it super simple -- create a wall tall and wide enough to block a lava flow (ignoring that the lava might melt/break/push over said wall, seep under it, off-gas toxic fumes which kill the town anyways, etc.); or enough water to chill that much lava back to a solid state (assumption, created water starts at the avg surface temp of the ocean: 17 C, and all the energy required to bring it to boiling and then phase change is pulled from the lava).

I was just commenting that it wasn't as impossible of a challenge as you made it sound.

That said… I cannot find any reference to how *tall* lava flows are, but… any walled city, the answer to your challenge is to simply wall off the gates; any smaller settlement requires much fewer walls to convince the lava to "go around". Although destroying the dirt, making a channel for the lava, is easier for some Wizards. In fact, the majority of the high-level casters I could think of would have *some* answer to this problem (granted, in at least one case, the town would be flooded, and not much better off than without said Wizard's intervention…).

But, IMO, the best answer involves Divinations, knowing that the lava is coming, and having muggles build walls / ditches / etc months or years in advance.

And this *still* doesn't point to the value of Wizards as leaders, only to the value of Wizards as civil servants.

(And, yes, against *real* lava, you'd need a Wizard with *real* spells, that look like they were designed by someone actually living in that world, rather than someone living in a world of 5' squares and "toy" lava (EDIT: which explains why Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, has developed *so* many custom spells - because he's actually *lived* in numerous worlds.))

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-03, 11:28 AM
Alas that the quality of leaders at governance has never through history been all that major a driving factor in whether they actually are leaders.

There’s a lot of arguments going “well just being a good mage doesn’t make you a good ruler, so good leaders would govern.”

Throughout human history leaders have been in place based on any number of factors - birthright, capability for violence, popularity, ability to not flop-sweat on camera, wealth, etc. - and skill at governing has rarely been a defining one of them.

The idea that (meta)-humanity in a sorta high medieval/early renaissance setting only is lead by those who are wise and skilled government and not say, a combination of wealth, birthright, and command of violent force would seem especially spurious.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-03, 11:38 AM
Incidentally, medieval Paris in the 1300s had about 250k population (without the benefit of high magic on commerce and agriculture)If PoDs numbers are right, then cities, let alone kingdoms, are chalk full of world shaping individuals of immense power.

The freakin Scottish alone would have some hundred odd archmages to play with.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-03, 12:57 PM
If PoDs numbers are right, then cities, let alone kingdoms, are chalk full of world shaping individuals of immense power.

The freakin Scottish alone would have some hundred odd archmages to play with.

Note that those are the best-case scenarios (or worst-case, if you don't like having lots of powerful casters around), assuming max rolls on the tables and splitting non-core casting classes from core classes because it's never specified how they should be treated (though the Eberron-specific demographic tables and Forgotten Realms demography do imply pretty strongly that new classes should be counted separately).

If you assume that the "Wizard" and "Sorcerer" entries on the DMG tables mean "all prepared arcane full casters" and "all prepared spontaneous full casters" (so e.g. a Warmage NPC would take up a Sorcerer "slot" demographically speaking) and assume minimum rather than maximum rolls on the level chart, you could have as few as 30 arcanists in a Metropolis (1 13th-level, 2 6th-level, 4 3rd-level, and 8 1st-level prepared casters and the same number of spontaneous casters), making up just 0.12% of the population.

The point of my post was not to say that all settings are necessarily crawling with high-level casters, but to provide a counterpoint to the "mages are rare, mageocracies are the exception, and casters generally keep out of politics" line of thought because 3e in fact does support (but doesn't mandate) the kind of mageocracy-heavy setting the OP talks about.

King of Nowhere
2020-06-03, 01:21 PM
wizards are basically nerds. most nerds would not want to take over the world. boring. it's not what interests them. most wizards would have no interest in ruling.

Also, a solitary wizard is vulnerable. unless he's the only one doing high optimization in a world of muggles, everything a wizard can do to conquer a country can be undone easily if the organization in charge is smart. In fact, in my campaign world, "being able to survive a powerful wizard trying to take over" is pretty much the established baseline for effectiveness of any powerful organization. If you can't keep up a protocol to detect if someone is being dominated, or if there is an invisible wizard in the room, or stuff like that, then you did not survive.
Now, a whole organization of wizards is an entirely different matter. but if such an organization exhist, its members must be stable enough to cooperate with each other and not resort to a magic duel to establish hierarchies. otherwise your organization will quickly destroy itself. this would make those wizards, in effects, politicians.

there is a stronger argument for theocracies, because a religion has many clerics and they are all devoted to a cause. they will cooperate and will not backstab each other. So, i expect that most religions, depending on their portfolios, will have a country somewhere, sort of like the church in the middle age. but there are many more countries than religions.

so, magocracies and theocracies certainly have their places, but by no means they would be the only forms of government.



Alas that the quality of leaders at governance has never through history been all that major a driving factor in whether they actually are leaders.

There’s a lot of arguments going “well just being a good mage doesn’t make you a good ruler, so good leaders would govern.”

Throughout human history leaders have been in place based on any number of factors - birthright, capability for violence, popularity, ability to not flop-sweat on camera, wealth, etc. - and skill at governing has rarely been a defining one of them.

true, skill at governing has little impact on whether you get the place.
on the other hand, skill at governing is a major factor in ensuring that you keep the place for long.
otherwise you may get assassinated or you may get ousted by a revolution or you may be unable to face an invasion.
do notice that "skill at governing" does not mean "keeping the people happy", though it certainly helps to avoid a revolt (which, even if you may survive because you have a strong army, would still leave you weakened against external threats). a lot of it involves navigating politics to ensure you are not the target of assassination or invasion.
if you look at history, you can see that most rulers who remained in charge for a long time are considered skilled ones. that's because the incompetent ones mostly got themselves killed or ousted.
in my campaign world, as a rule of thumb you get all kind of upstarts in positions of power. but if you find someone who has held power for a few decades, that's someone you don't want to mess with. they may be very powerful spellcasters, they may be good at gaining loialty and followers, they may be great schemers, whatever the reason, you can be certain that in all this time many people must have tried to replace them, and failed. overthrowing someone who has been in power for centuries may be a long term goal in a high level campaign.


In the case of 3.5, at least, the rules say that a randomly-generated Metropolis of 25,000 people can expect to have, assuming maximum rolls, 4 16th-level wizards, 8 8th-level wizards, 16 4th-level wizards, 32 2nd-level wizards, and 64 1st-level wizards, plus the same number and distribution of sorcerers. That's 248 mages just in core, and if you add in Wu Jen, Beguilers, Dread Necromancers, and Warmages at the same rates (squeezing out appropriate numbers of commoners) that's 744 mages. If you count Artificers, Warlocks, and Clerics, Archivists, and Favored Souls of gods of magic as "mages" for mageocratic hierarchy purposes, that makes 1,364, before you even get into partial casters like Bards or Duskblades or more obscure full casters like the Sha'ir or Death Master.


objection.
the numbers given in the dmg assumed the core 11 classes. subsequent splatbooks expanded the number of classes so much, if we kept the same numbers the amount of people with pc classes would become greater than the whole population.
so, to keep faith to the table, I'd replace the number of "wizards" in this randomly generated town with an equal number of "arcane casters", which are split between wizards, sorcerors, wu jen, beguilers, and so on.

Tvtyrant
2020-06-03, 02:19 PM
Alas that the quality of leaders at governance has never through history been all that major a driving factor in whether they actually are leaders.

There’s a lot of arguments going “well just being a good mage doesn’t make you a good ruler, so good leaders would govern.”

Throughout human history leaders have been in place based on any number of factors - birthright, capability for violence, popularity, ability to not flop-sweat on camera, wealth, etc. - and skill at governing has rarely been a defining one of them.

The idea that (meta)-humanity in a sorta high medieval/early renaissance setting only is lead by those who are wise and skilled government and not say, a combination of wealth, birthright, and command of violent force would seem especially spurious.

It's a large component of whether they stay leaders though. You must be this competent to ride the "not get conquered" train. In D&D they have to deal with issues like Dragons, Sharn, Ithiliads, Beholders, undead plagues, etc. So if the leader is truly incompetent everyone becomes a Wight, vampire spawn, or food in short order.

AdAstra
2020-06-03, 03:47 PM
Incidentally, medieval Paris in the 1300s had about 250k population (without the benefit of high magic on commerce and agriculture)If PoDs numbers are right, then cities, let alone kingdoms, are chalk full of world shaping individuals of immense power.

The freakin Scottish alone would have some hundred odd archmages to play with.
As to your last post, actually maintaining your power requires not only ability to rule, but also the ability to make organizational structures that allow you to govern effectively when you're not personally overseeing them. Think Genghis Khan and Alexander. While their actions shaped the political and cultural landscape in massive ways, their actual governments (as combined entities) pretty much disintegrated when they died. Alexander even set up a very competent governing system derived from what the Persians had used, and that still failed to keep his empire together. These were people who actually put a lot of serious thought into their governments. Note that in this case your prospective caster king needs to actually establish a mageocracy first, not just inherit one.

As for this one, 100 archmages is precisely what allows for no one archmage to conquer the world, or even all that much. For every wannabe magelord there are 90 equally powerful individuals who couldn't care less, and 9 people who are heroes/adventurers/other lesser crazies who would actively hunt such people down if they were a threat (numbers purely spitballed). And the archmages that couldn't care less are still going to strenuously disagree if you roll an army up to their front door.

If there's any problem with DnD governments, it's how ANY kings manage to avoid getting assassinated by the various high-level characters running around.

Clistenes
2020-06-03, 07:52 PM
In our gaming group, the world is kinda run by Theocracies of sorts, just not directly...

You see, most churches are quite focused on their patron's portfolio. The gods give them power to advance their portfolio, after all, not to amass power for themselves (well, save the gods of rulership, lawmaking and tyranny...).

And when one of the churches manages to become the government, things become weird. A country whose government cares only for say Warfare, or Money, or Joy tends to neglect other vital areas, so these countries tend to fall due to rebellions or takeovers...

So churches go about it in a different way now: They support secular governments aligned with their interests...

Churches with close enough alignments are able to work together, so they support each other and become the state pantheon. They pact not to try to rule directly, and they support a widely accepted, efficient enough, morally palatable regime whose head becomes anointed by the gods. The rulers have to abide to a certain ethical/moral/religious frame and listen to the common voice of the churches, but not to obey any of them in particular. And since the churches tend to compete among themselves and lobby for their own areas of interest rather than using their combined power to bully the rulers, these enjoy quite a bit of leeway doing their job...

Think of Medieval Europe, or the Muslim Caliphate, or Republican Rome... the ruler (or rulers) were so by grace of God/the gods, and had to avoid sacrilegious stuff and care for religion, but the priests weren't (well, not always, anyways) dictating the law...

As for Wizards... first of all most of the churches won't allow Magocracies to exist; Wizards tend to not listen to priests the same way other secular rulers do, so if a group of Wizards start plotting a takeover, they will have the churches in front of them, ready to stop them...

Having a king or queen who can use arcane magic is fine; magic is a tool, after all... but Magocracies are a No-No, save for a few gods of Magic, Knowledge and maybe Tyranny.

Then you have the fact that becoming a powerful Wizard is hard. Few people have the talent (abilities) to become a decent Wizard, and even less manage to find (or can afford) a teacher.

The lack of teachers is a big problem for would-be Wizards. Arcane magic is unlike science and technology in that, if you have knowledge, you don't need anything else; you can use your magic directly, no need of investors lending you money, tech companies giving you tools and materials...etc. A powerful Wizard can do anything on his own, and can almost literally make money from thin air... why would they take disciples?

Only low level Wizards teach for money. High level Wizards do it for love, for honor, for duty, because they want an apprentice to carry on with their work...etc.

So there aren't magic schools, and there aren't many Wizards around. And among those who exist, the most powerful ones don't need anything from society... They can make money from thin air, create lovers and servants, watch everything and be everywhere... they can travel to freaking HEAVEN and stay there!

So, why would they bother trying to conquer the world, fighting the churches and the gods themselves? That's dangerous and so much work!

A powerful Wizard only tries to influence society for two reasons: 1.-Because of altruism and 2.-To caress their own ego. The first ones can help society without starting a war against the churches, and the second ones tend to meet early deaths (unless they are really good... these are called "villains").

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-03, 08:24 PM
objection.
the numbers given in the dmg assumed the core 11 classes. subsequent splatbooks expanded the number of classes so much, if we kept the same numbers the amount of people with pc classes would become greater than the whole population.
so, to keep faith to the table, I'd replace the number of "wizards" in this randomly generated town with an equal number of "arcane casters", which are split between wizards, sorcerors, wu jen, beguilers, and so on.

That's the worse-case-for-mageocracy scenario, yes, as I outlined in the follow-up post. The first estimate, the best-case-for-mageocracy scenario, is supported by things like the Eberron demographics table adding on Artificer and Magewright entries rather than folding them in with e.g. Wizard and Adept.

The point is that there's a broad spectrum of degree of arcanist influence in government supported in the core rules, so the answer to the question "Why aren't wizards in charge of everything?" is "They can be, by RAW, if you want them to be" and no one needs to bend over backward to come up with arguments like, say, "wizards are nerds and nerds don't want to govern" to justify no wizards being in charge, because that's not what the rules necessarily entail.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-03, 11:45 PM
Re: governance.

Again, we are conflating “I can think of reasons some wizards may not be optimal governors” with “clearly wizards can’t govern (because they aren’t my idea of an optimal governor.” To use someone else’s example, you may may need to be this tall to stay on the ride, but the theoretical existence of a seven foot man doesn’t mean no one else can get on the roller coaster.

We have seen men ranging from merchants to priests to illiterate warrior castes to ruthless ideologues all govern societies and manage to stay in power. We have also seen a trend in more modern societies for lawyers to take an active role as leaders. Plenty of family dynasties as well.

They haven’t all fallen apart for lack of being the perfect governor, and indeed for having their primary skill set be something other than governance, is it really practical to believe that although we literally had hundreds of years of superstitious, often illiterate, warrior castes stay in positions of power somehow mages couldn’t do it? That even though a bunch of Greek demagogues could govern with little qualification besides agricultural wealth and a talent for stirring up the public - that somehow mages would have zero chance to do what rabble rousing gentlemen farmers did just fine?

Frankly, it’s grasping at straws. Can we just admit the writers either screwed up but we don’t care because that’s not the game we want, or that the writers really do want magicracjes everywhere but we want to rationalize it away because that’s not the game we want?

Satinavian
2020-06-04, 12:55 AM
Re: governance.

Again, we are conflating “I can think of reasons some wizards may not be optimal governors” with “clearly wizards can’t govern (because they aren’t my idea of an optimal governor.” To use someone else’s example, you may may need to be this tall to stay on the ride, but the theoretical existence of a seven foot man doesn’t mean no one else can get on the roller coaster.

In a sense such a theocracy is a bit like a military dictatorship.

Wizards have a lot of power and might use it for a coup. Just like traditionally the military has. But wizards are not full time polititians and administrators, just like officers are not.


Now, would you expect a military junta to make a particularly good job gouverning a country after coming to power ? Well, that is pretty much the same quality of gouvernance you would get from a cabal of wizards doing the same.

It would work for a time but not be stable. Either the gouvernment transforms itself to get better results (and become a more traditional country), or the problems will become gradually worse while the old wizards/officers cling to their power, refusing to give actually competent administrators/politicians a chance.

FabulousFizban
2020-06-04, 01:49 AM
because wizards have low charisma.

Seriously though, it is a bit like asking why engineers and physicists don't run our world. Some people think that would actually be a pretty good idea, but there are a few things that get in the way. The big one is, the arcanist isn't really interested in running the world, they have their own sphere to explore (engineers and physicists are absolutely arcanists, just like wizards. All being possessors of arcane knowledge). Another is numbers. Magic users may be pretty ubiquitous in gaming, but they are almost always canonically very rare. And while magic is indeed powerful, you're going to run out of fireballs pretty quick against a 200k man army. Lastly, spellcasters often do run things in ttrpg settings, either directly or from behind the scenes.

Telok
2020-06-04, 02:23 AM
For a great deal of human history people have been getting into the ruling classes by being good at fighting, brave, and a bit lucky. Also popular has been blackmail, poison, and bribery.

Up untill fairly recently, the last 3 centuries or so, simply collecting a band of violent people and being more trouble to put down than to pay off was a successful method of becoming a small/local ruler. Once a person was part of the ruling class military prowess, political maneuvering, or simply being very very rich allows one to move upward into larger and more powerful circles.

Is there any reason to think that mind control and actual, functioning, divinations wouldn't help?

In D&D land any full powered spell caster that really wants to, and doesn't get themselves killed by someone meaner and smarter, can get into the ruling classes. Once enough of the ruling class is casters you have your mageocracy or whatever. A tendency for the casters to also have the methods of life extension and cheating death will only mean that they last longer in positions of power as well.

If you have an actual empire with a working bureaucracy that isn't dependent on the personality of and loyalty to the leader, then it's even easier. Just don't break the functioning governing apparatus. A nice strong empire will last because the day to day functions don't depend on who is at the top. In that case you could swap from a mageocracy to a theocracy to a dinkle-fwadel-doo-ocracy all in a single month and large portions of the populace might not even notice.

Really. Any reason to think that the ability to mind control, read minds, and get accurate information on the future would not help in ruling? The rules of D&D don't make wizards or clerics any less capable or ruling than other people who aren't casters. Those same rules do give casters better tools for ruling than non-casters have.

BlacKnight
2020-06-04, 03:55 AM
If you have an actual empire with a working bureaucracy that isn't dependent on the personality of and loyalty to the leader, then it's even easier. Just don't break the functioning governing apparatus. A nice strong empire will last because the day to day functions don't depend on who is at the top. In that case you could swap from a mageocracy to a theocracy to a dinkle-fwadel-doo-ocracy all in a single month and large portions of the populace might not even notice.

This is something that a lot of people misses. Being on top doesn't mean managing things. There are other people paid to do that.
The real rulers just set the guidelines, intervene if they want, but generally just benefit from the system.
The peasants don't even notice who is on top, and don't care if they change.
You can have systems like the late Roman Empire, with high instability and frequent changes of emperor, that lasted very long because of that.

So yes, casters can be rulers and probably would be. Even if they were worse at it than mundane rulers (and there's no reason to think that), because mundane rulers simply lack the means to keep power.
Once casters are in power only other casters could remove them.

Vaern
2020-06-04, 04:45 AM
It's likely that there are balancing points within the magical community itself that prevents wizards from using their power to assert control over nations and whatnot, whether that be mentors generally refusing to train those they believe can not be trusted to use their powers responsibly and respectfully, or a council which oversees the world and steps in if a caster begins using his magic to break the economy and effectively buy countries and whatnot, or an occasional ragtag band of adventurers popping up once in a while to kill the latest necromancer using his hordes of undead to try taking over the world.
I'd like to think that congregations of spellcasters in fantasy settings would exist like the wizards of the Discworld, in which the wizards live separated from the rest of the world and largely govern themselves without paying much mind to outsiders. There was an occasion where the wizards went mad with power and tried taking over the world, but the resulting destruction and devestation to the world around them only served to remind them of why those with great power shouldn't seek to rule the world and they ultimately went back to living the way they did before.

King of Nowhere
2020-06-04, 04:53 AM
The point is that there's a broad spectrum of degree of arcanist influence in government supported in the core rules, so the answer to the question "Why aren't wizards in charge of everything?" is "They can be, by RAW, if you want them to be" and no one needs to bend over backward to come up with arguments like, say, "wizards are nerds and nerds don't want to govern" to justify no wizards being in charge, because that's not what the rules necessarily entail.

that's not a bend-over-backwards argument but it's actually very relevant as to why most wizards won't meddle in politics. I've seen settings where every wizard was power-hungry, backstabbing, and bent on conquest, but i find hard to suspend disbelief on them. wizards are people, they are not made with a mold, and they will have different personalities. most people i know in real life isn't a megalomaniac bent on world conquest, so it stands to reason most wizards also would not be.
magocracy are definitely a thing, and if one does not consider the chance that all those powerful people would want to have power one is not doing a good job at worldbuilding. but not all wizards would be rulers, and not all rulers would be wizards.

Satinavian
2020-06-04, 09:17 AM
If you have an actual empire with a working bureaucracy that isn't dependent on the personality of and loyalty to the leader, then it's even easier. Just don't break the functioning governing apparatus. A nice strong empire will last because the day to day functions don't depend on who is at the top. In that case you could swap from a mageocracy to a theocracy to a dinkle-fwadel-doo-ocracy all in a single month and large portions of the populace might not even notice.Usually magocracy means not just replacing the figurehead but the whole ruling class. Which means all of those bureaucracy jobs have to be filled with casters who might be more interested in arcane knowledge and developing their personal skills than in administration.


Really. Any reason to think that the ability to mind control, read minds, and get accurate information on the future would not help in ruling? The rules of D&D don't make wizards or clerics any less capable or ruling than other people who aren't casters. Those same rules do give casters better tools for ruling than non-casters have.If those means exist, why would any non-magocracy not employ them as well ? Those got wizards (and clerics) too. They don't need to be the actual rulers to provide spellcasting services for the realm and get an upperclass life and research opportunities in return.
Until a magocracy actually produces more casters, it doesn't actually have more magic at its disposal.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-04, 09:40 AM
But, IMO, the best answer involves Divinations, knowing that the lava is coming, and having muggles build walls / ditches / etc months or years in advance.

And this *still* doesn't point to the value of Wizards as leaders, only to the value of Wizards as civil servants.

Which is the cadre of problem-solving mage rulers with regards to which the OP framed the thread.


(And, yes, against *real* lava, you'd need a Wizard with *real* spells, that look like they were designed by someone actually living in that world, rather than someone living in a world of 5' squares and "toy" lava (EDIT: which explains why Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, has developed *so* many custom spells - because he's actually *lived* in numerous worlds.))
So we are in agreement there. D&D spells aren't actually great at solving many kingdom-level problems.



Is there any reason to think that mind control and actual, functioning, divinations wouldn't help?

Really. Any reason to think that the ability to mind control, read minds, and get accurate information on the future would not help in ruling? The rules of D&D don't make wizards or clerics any less capable or ruling than other people who aren't casters. Those same rules do give casters better tools for ruling than non-casters have.

I do not think anyone has suggested that spellcasters would be somehow less capable of being rulers (outside of some edge issues like the time spent being/becoming a high powered caster competes with time spent becoming/being a competent ruler). I think people have rightly stated that the skills it takes to be a competent ruler are, for the most part, independent of whether one is a spellcaster (so you can have a member of the ruling class* who happens to be a spellcaster, and the next room over have a ruler who isn't a spellcaster).
*hereafter simply 'ruler'

As to having access to spells, having them at your disposal is clearly of use (although, again, many are set up for very adventure-level scales, divinations being an exception, although they are fairly DM-dependent), but there's not particular benefit to having them performable by the rulers themselves.

Mind control and reading is a double-edged sword. The instant you live in a world where mind control is possible, everyone has to worry that everyone else is secretly suborned by it, and thus all governance has to operate in some kind of anti-magic field or the like. The Tippy 3e-verse ought to be a very paranoid place, needing anti-teleport zones to protect vs. scry&die, anti-mind control zones, invisibility purge bubbles at various points. Getting into a major kingdom's main palace should put modern air travel screening to shame.

Nifft
2020-06-04, 09:54 AM
Usually magocracy means not just replacing the figurehead but the whole ruling class. Which means all of those bureaucracy jobs have to be filled with casters who might be more interested in arcane knowledge and developing their personal skills than in administration.

Thing is, a Wizard of sufficient capability can create or conjure subordinates to do that work.

Most Wizards at least have a familiar with all the requisite skills to serve as a secretary (which could be a very cute image, think about a cat with glasses and a day-planner, ignoring for a moment that a cat might only schedule her own naps and feedings).

This might be exactly why mageocracies fall: someone has the bright idea of outsourcing the planning of an upcoming festival to a Succubus, and *fwoosh* the whole empire collapses after a month-long celebration of inhuman pleasure and excess.

BlacKnight
2020-06-04, 11:51 AM
Usually magocracy means not just replacing the figurehead but the whole ruling class. Which means all of those bureaucracy jobs have to be filled with casters who might be more interested in arcane knowledge and developing their personal skills than in administration.


Why? Do monarchies replace all civil servants with kings?

Telok
2020-06-04, 11:51 AM
Thing is, a Wizard of sufficient capability can create or conjure subordinates to do that work.

Most Wizards at least have a familiar with all the requisite skills to serve as a secretary (which could be a very cute image, think about a cat with glasses and a day-planner, ignoring for a moment that a cat might only schedule her own naps and feedings).

This might be exactly why mageocracies fall: someone has the bright idea of outsourcing the planning of an upcoming festival to a Succubus, and *fwoosh* the whole empire collapses after a month-long celebration of inhuman pleasure and excess.

"Muffy! What's this 3pm to 7pm 'scritchies' on my schedule? I have an empire to run!"

I have to say, at least the mageocracys have interesting collapses. It's better than "and then dragons/ogres/goblins/illiterate barbarians overran the place and enslaved/ate everyone because the army was involved in politics" that the places without organized magical support tend to have.

AdAstra
2020-06-04, 11:55 AM
Thing is, a Wizard of sufficient capability can create or conjure subordinates to do that work.

Most Wizards at least have a familiar with all the requisite skills to serve as a secretary (which could be a very cute image, think about a cat with glasses and a day-planner, ignoring for a moment that a cat might only schedule her own naps and feedings).

This might be exactly why mageocracies fall: someone has the bright idea of outsourcing the planning of an upcoming festival to a Succubus, and *fwoosh* the whole empire collapses after a month-long celebration of inhuman pleasure and excess.

Yup. Vast majority of prospective Mageocracies are going to fail or stop being mageocracies in one of the following ways:

1. Ruler gets killed as the BBEG for some adventuring party or holy order, or assassinated by some nefarious group for whatever reason. Basically, this person pisses off enough people with the means to kill them.

2. Ruler is competent but single-minded and unwilling to delegate (like the stereotypical wizard), and their attention bounces from one project to another. Problems that don't draw the interest of the Mage don't get solved and the kingdom collapses.

3. Ruler delegates, but those chosen are incompetent or malicious. The ruler may be able to keep their servants in line for a while, but if their attention slips or they die, things will go to hell quickly. You might still have a government, but it's a prime target for do-gooders and heroes to "fix"

4. Ruler actually rules effectively and delegates well enough, but since high-level wizardry and sorcery can't be reliably inherited and high-level casters are hard to find and keep, many non-casters become integrated into the government. Either the line of succession is muddled, and after the ruler dies their government collapses, or the government becomes more "muggleized" over time and it eventually becomes more or less like any other.

5. The ruler just loses interest and goes off wherever to do whatever. If they actually created a structure that can function without them, it'll probably continue, but it's not necessarily a mageocracy anymore given the above due to manpower issues.

Now certainly, a mage can make for a fine warlord or conqueror, and could easily carve out a sizable area, but such situations are rarely stable. And casters are a necessity to most DnD governments, yes, but casters as rulers? Not really

Nifft
2020-06-04, 12:13 PM
1. Ruler gets killed as the BBEG for some adventuring party or holy order, or assassinated by some nefarious group for whatever reason. Basically, this person pisses off enough people with the means to kill them.
(...)
5. The ruler just loses interest and goes off wherever to do whatever. If they actually created a structure that can function without them, it'll probably continue, but it's not necessarily a mageocracy anymore given the above due to manpower issues.

If you combine these two options, you might get Nazarick & Morty.

Democratus
2020-06-04, 01:46 PM
Why? Do monarchies replace all civil servants with kings?

Yes, typically.

They aren't given the name 'king' in deference to the ruler. Usually they are a grand minister, a esteemed councilman, a high advisor, and so forth. And each is the king of his own little bureaucratic kingdom. And their underlings are kings of their respective areas, and so forth.

AdAstra
2020-06-04, 05:06 PM
Yes, typically.

They aren't given the name 'king' in deference to the ruler. Usually they are a grand minister, a esteemed councilman, a high advisor, and so forth. And each is the king of his own little bureaucratic kingdom. And their underlings are kings of their respective areas, and so forth.

Not sure if I really get this explanation, but you're referring to titles of lesser nobility right? Like barons and lords and other feudal vassals? In which case, yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.

It's not really much of a magocracy if there's only one high-level caster around. At that point your government probably has less magic power than most DnD nations, which usually have substantial numbers of mages of varying power in non-leadership roles. A magocracy implies not just that a single mage is in charge, but that the government places a greater emphasis on magical power than say, martial prowess, administrative skill, or bloodline when it comes to selecting its leaders.

BlacKnight
2020-06-04, 05:37 PM
Yes, typically.

They aren't given the name 'king' in deference to the ruler. Usually they are a grand minister, a esteemed councilman, a high advisor, and so forth. And each is the king of his own little bureaucratic kingdom. And their underlings are kings of their respective areas, and so forth.

So... Ministers in modern democratic nations are kings of their own ministry.
Thus such nations are actually monarchies.

But wait, wizards are just people that knows magic, which is just a knowledge like any other. So any technician is a wizard, and any public position for which one is selected by merit of its skill is a wizard position.
So modern bureacracies are actually magocracies.

See, I can twist words and reach non sensical conclusions too.

Cluedrew
2020-06-04, 06:52 PM
It does depend on the setting a lot of course, for instance I know at least one world where the answer is "Because you can't win a war without the support of the martial schools." This is not a setting based in D&D and since we are talking about those settings I will not say much on that.

Next is, what do you mean by magocracy or theocracy? If a monarchy uses the nobility to form government, a theocracy uses the church and a magocracy uses... the wizard's guild? So I guess a magocracy it a type of corporate state/trade empire except its magic users instead of general merchants. I'm not sure what that actually looks like, do you just have to be a magic user to hold a public office? Do you have to pass harder and harder tests for higher and higher offices?

Regardless of you answer an important issue occurred to me. I think a bit one D&D magic is a academic pursuit and that does not imply a united political agenda. Even among the ones who A) want to participate in politics and B) aren't just want to be tyrant wizard-kings, there are a lot of different ways they thing the world could be run. So you probably have wizards and other magic-users in all the existing political forces already. In a feudal system you probably have a lot of noble wizards who don't take power themselves but help their family's power base and benefit from that while others in the family do a lot of the actual political wrangling.


*Power Levels: A Typical D&D world is full of people and creatures of power levels from 1 to 20. Even if a wizard was to get to 10th level, and then decide they would want to rule the world, HALF of the world would still be more powerful them them. There is a good chance someone will oppose the wizard, and a good chance they will be more powerful.GM: You go up to the city gates, there is a guard keeping watch.
Player: Can I scope them out? Get a feel for how strong the guard is?
GM: She is a fighter. {Rolls d20} And she is level 16.

Is that really how you run your games? Did you mean something more like "You are still only half as powerful as others out there in the world."?

King of Nowhere
2020-06-04, 08:08 PM
Why? Do monarchies replace all civil servants with kings?

if most of the civil servants are not wizards, then it's not a magocracy. it's just a normal government where the top guy just happens to be a wizard.

if you consider it, in a monarchy all top level positions are filled with nobles. if you go down the line enough you'll find commoners, but you cannot get a position of high power without being a noble. or sometimes a member of the clergy.
in order to be a magocracy you need some similar system where you must be a wizard to access top tier positions. everyone above a certain title is a wizard, and the law itself says if you are not a wizard you cannot be anything more than major of a small town.
of course, just like real world nobles, many wizards would not really do anything, they'd have underlings to take care of the day-to-day administration. and people would start wondering why they get so much money and power since they don't seem to be useful for anything. except a revolution would be much more difficult when every single noble can cast fireballs and every non-noble cannot.

Zarrgon
2020-06-04, 09:28 PM
GM: You go up to the city gates, there is a guard keeping watch.
Player: Can I scope them out? Get a feel for how strong the guard is?
GM: She is a fighter. {Rolls d20} And she is level 16.

Is that really how you run your games? Did you mean something more like "You are still only half as powerful as others out there in the world."?

Off Topic? Trust me that a multiple leveled high magic world stops "spellcaster take overs".

I go by the idea that NPCs gain a level about every 3-5 years if they lead a mundane life. If they are involved in more danger or combat, that rate will be much faster. So yes, most guards level faster then say cooks. Also, I run the Status Que World where the bouncer at the underdark tavern is a 13th level fighter when the PCs go there, no matter what level the PCs are(when they 2nd level PCs start a cool bar fight to be annoying they are in for a surprise).

TeChameleon
2020-06-04, 10:28 PM
Short answer, at least from my point of view?

The personality traits that would tend to drive you towards devoting your life to the magical equivalent of lifelong academia aren't the ones that would generally tend to drive you towards seeking domination over large groups of people. Nor, for that matter, are they the traits that would typically lend themselves towards extensive co-operation.

Sure, there will be wizards here and there who decide to Show Them, Show Them ALL!, or whatever, but there's a pretty good reason for the 'wizard in a lone tower' stereotype. The mindset that leads to spending your days pondering the mysteries of the infinite in order to violate the laws of reality on a regular basis isn't one that would generally derive any real satisfaction from dealing with the problems of the great unwashed. There's probably a pretty good reason we don't have more cosmologists in politics, after all :smallamused:

Kelb_Panthera
2020-06-05, 12:04 AM
Re: governance.

Again, we are conflating “I can think of reasons some wizards may not be optimal governors” with “clearly wizards can’t govern (because they aren’t my idea of an optimal governor.” To use someone else’s example, you may may need to be this tall to stay on the ride, but the theoretical existence of a seven foot man doesn’t mean no one else can get on the roller coaster.

We have seen men ranging from merchants to priests to illiterate warrior castes to ruthless ideologues all govern societies and manage to stay in power. We have also seen a trend in more modern societies for lawyers to take an active role as leaders. Plenty of family dynasties as well.

They haven’t all fallen apart for lack of being the perfect governor, and indeed for having their primary skill set be something other than governance, is it really practical to believe that although we literally had hundreds of years of superstitious, often illiterate, warrior castes stay in positions of power somehow mages couldn’t do it? That even though a bunch of Greek demagogues could govern with little qualification besides agricultural wealth and a talent for stirring up the public - that somehow mages would have zero chance to do what rabble rousing gentlemen farmers did just fine?

Frankly, it’s grasping at straws. Can we just admit the writers either screwed up but we don’t care because that’s not the game we want, or that the writers really do want magicracjes everywhere but we want to rationalize it away because that’s not the game we want?

As you said, the existence of a seven foot man doesn't mean no one else can get on the rollercoaster. The mere fact that a mage is -not- a perfect ruler is exactly why you can't presume magocracies would overtake societies' highest rungs with any reliability.

Even with all of the tools that a mage -may- have at his disposal, you can't presume his perfect use of them anymore than you could presume an architect or engineer would never make a mistake in building whatever structure they're working on. There's no doubt a ruler with access to the wealth of information available through divination would be able to govern a bit better than average and would be irritatingly difficult to unseat with a surgical coup but it wouldn't protect him from his own failings or the people's response to them.

Would there be -some- magocracies from time to time? Sure, of course. Would that be all there ever was? No, of course not. For all the same reasons that not all RL governments are or were the same; people, especially powerful people, just don't make a reliably stable system. Not even magic can fix that.

Gnoman
2020-06-05, 07:00 AM
One key idea is that much of thr caster disparity is built on a "spherical wizard in a vacuum" model. Meanimg that players have access to every spell and can plausibly build their casters to use them. In-universe NPCs do not have that knowledge.

Democratus
2020-06-05, 08:26 AM
So... Ministers in modern democratic nations are kings of their own ministry.
Thus such nations are actually monarchies.

True. This has been a problem in many countries throughout history. The bureaucracy becomes more powerful than even the leaders and ends up being de facto rulers. A monarchy with the illusion of democracy.

Telok
2020-06-05, 10:39 AM
One key idea is that much of thr caster disparity is built on a "spherical wizard in a vacuum" model. Meanimg that players have access to every spell and can plausibly build their casters to use them. In-universe NPCs do not have that knowledge.

How do we know? In AD&D, yes. Because of the limits on learning spells and 3d6 stats paradigm. After that, what rules are there that say any casters don't have to option to know any particular spell on their list? I can't find any rules in the last couple D&Ds for NPCs or PCs saying they don't have the option of taking particular spells on their lists (3.5 specialists excepted).

Silly Name
2020-06-05, 11:03 AM
How do we know? In AD&D, yes. Because of the limits on learning spells and 3d6 stats paradigm. After that, what rules are there that say any casters don't have to option to know any particular spell on their list? I can't find any rules in the last couple D&Ds for NPCs or PCs saying they don't have the option of taking particular spells on their lists (3.5 specialists excepted).

This a case of the rules and the logical assumptions built on the fluff not coinciding, for the player's benefit.

If we go by what the books tell us, among primary casters, only Wizards actually learn their spells. Clerics, druid and warlocks are all granted spells by some higher power, who in theory could dictate what spells are actually accessible for the character in question. Sorcerers don't really learn spells as much as they discover powers that already existed in their bloodline and learn how to better manipulate them, but still have an hard limit on how many spells they will ever known.

Wizards are the only ones who actually study and learn magic, training themselves in how to correctly cast a spell rather than having their brains imbued with that knowledge by a god or a demon or by virtue of having a dragon somewhere in their family tree. But, this also implies that, contrary to game mechanics, wizards can't just pick up any spell that is written on a splatbook: they need to actually know the spell in question exists and research it, spending their downtime training and collecting the knowledge necessary to use the spell.

It's similar to how your fighter doesn't suddenly learn new combat maneuvers when they level up: in-fiction, they spent days or weeks training and refining that maneuver, and the level up simply represents having acquired sufficient mastery of this combat technique that it can be used in actual battles.

Now, all of this doesn't apply to the players, for their benefit: you don't need to announce early what new skills you want to acquire at level up, it is retroactively assumed you spent the necessary time training; the DM doesn't act as a stand-in for gods and patrons and dictate what spells warlocks and clerics get, and neither do they act as arbiters of what spells the wizard may learn (keep in mind, of course, that a DM is free to ban or restrict certain spells in their games).

Mendicant
2020-06-05, 11:08 AM
IMO, the only plausible reason for spellcasters not to predominate in positions of power is conservation of magic power. Mages need to be some combination of low-power, low-efficiency, and rare, or they're going to be the default military and social elite. Even then, they're unlikely to be far from the halls of power.

The combination of raw personal power and greater learning and wisdom would over time distribute those people into positions of authority, without the need for "Dominate Person"-based coups. Unless magic wielders are a sudden, new introduction, power structures would reflect their existence as obvious sources of authority, knowledge and coercion dating back well before anything we would recognize as a modern or premodern "government". Clan elders with divination that actually works and war leaders that can actually summon monsters would evolve into queens and ministers and generals without any need to overthrow anything. It would just be baked into people's assumptions about who ought to run things. Bonus points if magic works off of charisma, blood ties, divine patronage or exceptional intelligence.

You don't need to be a megalomaniac to seek power and you don't need to be a practiced politician or even particularly competent to wield it. Every objection about magic being insufficient to run a country runs smack into the problem that it doesn't *need* to be. The choice isn't between scrying and a spy network, it's between a spy network + scrying and a spy network by itself.

Willie the Duck
2020-06-05, 12:32 PM
You don't need to be a megalomaniac to seek power and you don't need to be a practiced politician or even particularly competent to wield it. Every objection about magic being insufficient to run a country runs smack into the problem that it doesn't *need* to be. The choice isn't between scrying and a spy network, it's between a spy network + scrying and a spy network by itself.

People have addressed that multiple times already in the thread. No one is saying that wizards couldn't be rulers, only that they will not dominate because (using your example) the overall benefit of ruler doing the scrying compared to the ruler having a wizard to do the scrying for them is small (plus my side point that scrying, and lots of other spells in the books, aren't actually all that useful on a kingdom-ruling level).

EDIT: (noticed hostile sounding tone) which is not to say you can't disagree, of course, I'd just love to know your reasoning if that's the case.

Telok
2020-06-05, 01:38 PM
People have addressed that multiple times already in the thread. No one is saying that wizards couldn't be rulers, only that they will not dominate because (using your example) the overall benefit of ruler doing the scrying compared to the ruler having a wizard to do the scrying for them is small (plus my side point that scrying, and lots of other spells in the books, aren't actually all that useful on a kingdom-ruling level).

EDIT: (noticed hostile sounding tone) which is not to say you can't disagree, of course, I'd just love to know your reasoning if that's the case.

I think that the various self only buffs and defenses could help, likewise casters tend to have better save versus mind control. In addition the leaders having particular or custom spells could help ward against dopplegangers and illithid trying to replace people.

Hmm. To-do for my next setting: a kingdom run by a family of dopplegangers. Where they took over a generation or two ago and then turned out to be good at it.

Mendicant
2020-06-05, 02:34 PM
People have addressed that multiple times already in the thread. No one is saying that wizards couldn't be rulers, only that they will not dominate because (using your example) the overall benefit of ruler doing the scrying compared to the ruler having a wizard to do the scrying for them is small (plus my side point that scrying, and lots of other spells in the books, aren't actually all that useful on a kingdom-ruling level).

EDIT: (noticed hostile sounding tone) which is not to say you can't disagree, of course, I'd just love to know your reasoning if that's the case.

This hasn't really been addressed, because this paragraph isn't separate from the rest of its post. People who have a direct leg up in acquiring power, hanging onto power, and being perceived to hold a more legitimate right to power are going to filter into positions of power. It will be an accepted norm that is older than the empires and city states it is operating in. "The normal course of things is that we are ruled by a military elite" was a much older norm than, say, Merovingian France.

Long before any kind of system develops where you have specialized ministers like court mages or complex systems of nobility or vassalage or heredity, you're going to have much smaller societies ruled based on personal charisma, personal power, or perceived divine link. Spellcasters are more likely to have all of these, and it's much more likely that by the time more complex governments evolve, it's more likely you'll have a ruler and a court fighter, not a ruler and a court wizard.

The only way this doesn't happen is if there is an active barrier to spellcasters being rulers, ministers, etc. and I haven't seen many good ones.

Democratus
2020-06-05, 03:04 PM
In the olden times, when a wizard reached level 10 she built a tower and followers flocked in to follow her.

Eventually the tower could become the center of a community with the wizard at its center.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-05, 06:46 PM
It looks as if the better part of those arguing have conceded that mage-ocracies could exist, and that they aren’t somehow stopped by wishful thinking that “them nerds couldn’t rule”. It’s a good start.

So, then we run into what are the actual basis of government? Fundamentally, force. Oh, you’ll certainly have custom and law and so forth, but none of those work if you don’t have some sort of ability to defend your self/subjects/citizens/property/rights/beliefs/etc. realistically. Both from outside aggression and to serve as a coercive power enabling you government to do whatever it does internally.

When everyone is more or less equal at killing the next guy, that gets channeled through armies, leaders, and so forth. While you don’t need to be personally fluent in force to rule under those conditions, it certainly helps - particularly in smaller bands where often ass-kicking really does equal authority. Even at a larger scale, history is replete with governments that found they weren’t a government anymore when a general disagreed.

D&D isn’t a world where most people are basically equal at killing. It’s a world where you either have magic and therefore trump everything, or you’re pathetic cannon fodder, at best a second ran until a mage supposedly your junior flicks you aside contemptuously.

And that world looks a lot like the same social dynamics that created knight and feudalism. A period where one caste was so much supremely more useful at killing that they became the government.

Anonymouswizard
2020-06-05, 07:41 PM
Why? Do monarchies replace all civil servants with kings?

Despite what people have claimed on this thread, no. They don't even replace them all with nobles.

Long story short, and simplifying somewhat, a monarchy can be one of two things, an Absolute Monarchy where power flows from the monarch, or a Constitutional Monarchy where the power flows from the constitution or elected government. In an absolute monarchy the administrators will generally, but not always, be nobles, while in a constitutional monarchy they may or may not be (and are probably more mixed in noble/commoner terms than in an absolute monarchy).

An absolute monarchy is not automatically an autocracy, but I really don't want to get into an in-depth discussion of political systems as I know very little about them. The setting I'm working on at the moment is a feudal principality with occasional spellcaster administrators (mainly city and town administrators, and licenced sorcerers are officially barred from holding direct political power*).

* Which suits most of them fine, they've bargained it into a lot of perks including a country-wide monopoly on nondivine magic. Those that do wield political power do so on behalf of others, or manipulate behind the scenes.

The Fury
2020-06-05, 08:07 PM
In honesty, I can think of reasons why a magic user would not want to be a head of state or otherwise running a government. Sure, you have a lot of political clout, especially when your nation is doing well. That said, when you run a nation of some kind, you're responsible for it. Not only do you get credit for when your country does well, but you also take ownership when things get bad. Rival factions and nations will be gunning for you, you need to manage the day-to-day functions to keep your country stable.

However, if you were a court mage on retainer for a noble, minister, or monarch, you get a sizable amount of political power. Probably a very comfortable living and a fair amount of resources too. As a bonus, anyone attempting to overthrow the government you work for will probably prioritize your boss over you. If you were an unscrupulous, clever sort, you could even manipulate your "boss" and effectively run the government while allowing them to take the fall if things go wrong.

TL;DR, Running a nation is very high-risk, high reward. Working for people that run nations is lower risk, but still high reward.

TeChameleon
2020-06-05, 10:57 PM
Yeah, my biggest question is still why a wizard would want to be the head/a member of a country-running elite. Sure, it sounds good on paper, but, at least in my experience, a lot of the type of people who want to spend their entire lives studying really don't care that much about the rest of the world as long as they've got someone to wash their socks and make them eat occasionally. If there's anybody they care about impressing, it's their fellow-academics (i.e. other wizards), who likewise don't tend to be all that impressed by things outside their fields (like governing a country). An award given by a group of those they acknowledge as their peers? They'll run the streets red with blood if they have to for a chance at that. Ruling over those whom they do not acknowledge as their peers? 'Who are these stupid people, and why do they keep bothering me with their insignificant little problems?'

I'm not saying that a mageocracy is impossible, or even that unlikely, just that they wouldn't be nearly as common as the OP seems to be positing.

King of Nowhere
2020-06-06, 04:25 AM
It looks as if the better part of those arguing have conceded that mage-ocracies could exist



I'm not saying that a mageocracy is impossible, or even that unlikely, just that they wouldn't be nearly as common as the OP seems to be positing.

here is the thing: nobody has ever argued that there would be no magocracies.
the argument is not "wizards can rule" against "wizards cannot rule". no, the argument is "every ruler would be a wizard" against "it is possible to be a muggle and still rule".
if nothing else, the burden of proof would be on demonstrating that a non-caster cannot, possibly, ever be a ruler. which i don't think anyone would argue.


the overall benefit of ruler doing the scrying compared to the ruler having a wizard to do the scrying for them is small (plus my side point that scrying, and lots of other spells in the books, aren't actually all that useful on a kingdom-ruling level).

I think we can all safely agree that no ruler can avoid being outcompeted without access to magic. whether the ruler has access to magic because he himself is a spellcaster, or because he has loial court wizard(s), that will depend. there are certainly many good arguments that can be made both on why the guy with the spell slots would float on top, or why he would stay an employee.

Clistenes
2020-06-06, 04:59 AM
Despite what people have claimed on this thread, no. They don't even replace them all with nobles.

Long story short, and simplifying somewhat, a monarchy can be one of two things, an Absolute Monarchy where power flows from the monarch, or a Constitutional Monarchy where the power flows from the constitution or elected government. In an absolute monarchy the administrators will generally, but not always, be nobles, while in a constitutional monarchy they may or may not be (and are probably more mixed in noble/commoner terms than in an absolute monarchy).

An absolute monarchy is not automatically an autocracy, but I really don't want to get into an in-depth discussion of political systems as I know very little about them. The setting I'm working on at the moment is a feudal principality with occasional spellcaster administrators (mainly city and town administrators, and licenced sorcerers are officially barred from holding direct political power*).

* Which suits most of them fine, they've bargained it into a lot of perks including a country-wide monopoly on nondivine magic. Those that do wield political power do so on behalf of others, or manipulate behind the scenes.

A non-Constitutional Monarchy isn't necessarily an Absolute Monarchy. So long as there are checks to the king's power, like a powerful feudal nobility with traditional rights the king can't overrule and their own armies and fiefdoms they rule and tax, or a church with temporal (judicial, military, administrative) power of their own, or self-governing free cities that choose their own governments and make their own laws the king can't repeal, or medieval type parliaments that can repeal royal taxes not backed by tradition...etc., the monarchy isn't Absolute...

In an Absolute Monarchy the king theoretically can do whatever he wants, at least until he pisses enough people that he provokes a rebellion (which is the reason Absolute Monarchs usually restrain themselves and don't do whatever they want...).

Drascin
2020-06-06, 05:20 AM
Again, there's a difference between "magocracy" and "monarchy where the king is a wizard".

To be a something-cracy, that means that the trait in question is important to achieving political power. A plutocracy means that the richer you are the more socially powerful you are. An aristocracy means that the more prestigious your lineage is the more social power you have. And so on. A magocracy, thus, means a place where your magical ability is directly related to your position - a magocracy is something like Thay, where if you're not a wizard you straight up do not matter to the levers of political power. If you have a magocracy that means pretty much all the most prestigious and important civil positions are filled by mages, in the same way you could not expect to be lord of a feud if your family wasn't prestigious as hell (unless the king himself came and made you a new prestigious family, entering you into the system). If you have a wizard-king but most of the civil servants are just dudes, you do not have a magocracy. You have a bog-standard monarchy where the king happens to also be able to summon demons.

So, sure, there could be plenty of places that think magic of a specific type is an important marker of power. Those would be magocracies. There could similarly be a ton of places where the king happens to be a caster but otherwise it's just normal delegation. There could be plenty of places where it's a normal kingdom but the king has a prestigious vizier position that is traditionally always a wizard. You could have aristocracies where it is considered proper that every aristocratic family trains their eldest in wizardry, blurring the line between the two. Etcetera.

(Also this should probably be in the D&D forums, seeing how this is very much not a generic RPG thing).

Anonymouswizard
2020-06-06, 05:40 AM
A non-Constitutional Monarchy isn't necessarily an Absolute Monarchy. So long as there are checks to the king's power, like a powerful feudal nobility with traditional rights the king can't overrule and their own armies and fiefdoms they rule and tax, or a church with temporal (judicial, military, administrative) power of their own, or self-governing free cities that choose their own governments and make their own laws the king can't repeal, or medieval type parliaments that can repeal royal taxes not backed by tradition...etc., the monarchy isn't Absolute...

In an Absolute Monarchy the king theoretically can do whatever he wants, at least until he pisses enough people that he provokes a rebellion (which is the reason Absolute Monarchs usually restrain themselves and don't do whatever they want...).

Sure, I was simplifying. And even without written in stone limits an absolute monarch's powers only extend far as his administrators are willing. History has examples of civilians rebelling against their governments, governments rebelling against their monarch, and even monarchs rebelling against their government.

It's a simplification, but it's a gameable simplification.

Tanarii
2020-06-06, 08:46 AM
Why aren't most c-levels engineers or programmers? Why aren't most politicians hard-scientists? Because there's trivial overlap between the successful application to the position of the necessary trained skill, natural talent, and effectively wielded personal power that results.

Also, because the BECMI rules say that only fighters get a domain. As well as a fighter knows how to lead armies, can build strongholds, and naturally attracts a body of followers at name level. All a Wizard knows to do is build a tower with a dungeon beneath it for monsters to inhabit, or work as a court wizard. Incidentally clerics can build strongholds and attract followers, since they're basically a member of a military religious order, but they don't rule domains.

It's worth noting that in older editions of D&D, successfully casting a spell when there were melee combatants around was a non-trivial exercise. And that Fighters and Clerics had amazing saves at high levels, approaching impossible to affect with any save spell at epic levels.

In 3e? Eh, who knows. That edition quickly became viewed as RAW over everything, but also took away most of the things that kept magic in check. I liked it a lot at the time, but looking back it's easy to pick a lot of holes in it.

Nifft
2020-06-06, 10:15 AM
Also, because the BECMI rules say that only fighters get a domain.

Therefore, only fighters can be clerics, and all monarchies are theocracies.

Tanarii
2020-06-06, 11:54 AM
Therefore, only fighters can be clerics, and all monarchies are theocracies.
And the resulting wave of natural disasters is how they learned never to mix D&D edition terminology again :smallamused:

Vahnavoi
2020-06-06, 02:56 PM
Let's look at what happened in history of Praedor's Jaconia:

In ages past, the world was a magocracy. The entire plane-wide society was founded upon everyday use of planar gates and immortality elixir. It was either near or actual post-scarcity society, with wizards at every level of goverment.

The strain the resultant overpopulation and overuse of their technology placed on the multiverse caused an apocalyptic, multiplanar collapse. Only a group of what were essentially wizard luddites survived.

These wizards did rule as a class of wizard-nobles and wizard-kings for ages, but in order to prevent replicating the disaster that destroyed their former society, they had to limit use of planar gates and immortality elixir. This put a cap on their numbers, created a lower class of vulnerable wizard-aspirants, as well as an ever-growing slave-class of mortals.

As the wizard-kings grew increasingly decadent and insane, not only did some of the slaves escape and rebel, demanding for freedom, the internal tensions within the magocracy made the wizards turn against each other. This culminated in yet another, smaller-scale societal collapse followed by a civil war, where some younger wizards openly sided with the revolting slaves and brought the remaining wizard-kings down.

The cost of this was so great that the magocratic wizard society could never recover. They voluntarily retreated into their own, highly-isolationist smaller communities, with the community of now-free mortals creating their own governments in the ruins of the wizards.

Since Jaconia is essentially post-apocalyptic Tippyverse (largely predating Tippyverse, mind you), you can take Praedor's answer and apply it liberally to various D&D settings: not all goverments are magocracies or magical theocracies, because sometimes those fail catastrophically and leave room for non-magical goverments to form. Note that many D&D's settings already have this process as part of their histories, in one form or another.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-06, 11:53 PM
Something like Vahnavoi's point is the best answer. Just because mageocracy dominates in the long run doesn't mean it dominates right now. In the real world, it took thousands of years to go from the emergence of civilization to empires that could even claim to be global in scope. D&D has various trends pushing that number up or down, but seeing as most campaigns last a single-digit number of in-game years (with that digit often being 1), it's entirely plausible to say "this campaign happens before mages take over the world", just as if you want to write a story without guns you can set it before the invention of gunpowder.


Why aren't most c-levels engineers or programmers? Why aren't most politicians hard-scientists? Because there's trivial overlap between the successful application to the position of the necessary trained skill, natural talent, and effectively wielded personal power that results.

That's not really the right analogy. It's not like historically the king was king because we was the best at ruling. He was king because he was descended from the last guy who assembled a large enough army that "look at all these dudes who will stab you if you don't put me in charge" seemed like a compelling reason to have him be in charge. In a world where that's the paradigm for allocating political power, the question "why isn't the guy who can summon an army of demons in charge" becomes a lot less obvious.

AdAstra
2020-06-07, 01:08 AM
Well, since we have plenty of abstract discussion, why not develop some slightly less abstract models on what a mageocracy might actually look like. Because "having a mage as a king" really isn't enough. Magical power has to actually be considered the most relevant factor in terms of giving people institutional power, or else it's just a government with mages in it.

Here I've created some spitballed examples very loosely based on some real-world historical governments.

Magic Sparta- Magic is considered the only worthwhile skill. Children or even infants are tested for magical ability. Those unable to express magical powers, or those found wanting (assuming magic is particularly common) are either killed or enslaved. Those with magic are trained brutally their entire lives to master it, and the best are entrusted with leading their compatriots in matters of state and war. A large nonmagical slave class exists to provide food production (undead usually are depicted as not being all that good for their surroundings), certain manufactured goods, fodder in low-intensity conflicts, and corpses for use as undead servants. Much time and effort is spent cracking down on revolts and unrest, usually through terror and police state tactics. Due to such a need for combat and info-gathering magic, the mages of this nation will likely sell their services abroad as mercenaries and spies. This is kinda like Thay, and moreover, is a place very few people would want to live. A prime government for some aspiring heroes to form a noble resistance against, or as a terrifying past threat who's echoes still haunt the land.

Magic Imperial China- Somewhat more like a conventional kingdom. Magic is a highly respected skill, and there are regular examinations in which young people from across the country are tested for their magical abilities. Those with sufficient potential are brought to training centers to be taught the magical arts they are judged most suited for, then given positions of power in various levels of administration. Advancement in the magical bureaucracy is mostly through selection by one's superiors, meaning that in practice, one's position is going to be largely determined by their networking skills and ability to navigate an unwieldy system. This government could probably manage things pretty stably, but there may be little significant advancement, and significant changes may leave it reeling. May or may not have a leadership dynasty of some kind, but a significant amount of the power will be in the bureaucracy, waxing and waning with time. Significant tension may arise between the two, especially since the dynasty is far from guaranteed to have magical ability at all. Nonmagical arts, history, and philosophy liable to be suppressed. This society will likely produce many powerful but disaffected mages, who were screwed over or uninterested by the bureaucracy. Rebels, villains, exiles, etc. A decent background for an NPC or PC. Possibly one of the only Mageocracies I can think of that might focus on magic other than that used for war or manipulation.

Magic Stereotypical Tribal Society- Various scattered enclaves of people, led by chieftains who earn their positions through demonstrations of magical prowess, often through combat. Magic is informally trained but very respected by the community, and is likely critical to their survival. While it's likely very possible for someone to win leadership through nonviolent means or magical cleverness, it's usually easier to just disintegrate your opponent, so...

King of Nowhere
2020-06-07, 06:44 AM
the unseen university model: wizards are powerful and can do what they want. society then provides them with all the means they need, mostly as a bribe to keep them out of their hair. which works well enough, because wizards don't have much interest in the actual day-to-day workings of the city. gradually they become their own enclave.
this is actually a good example of how a magocracy could collapse without violent revolution, simply because the wizards become gradually more isolationistic.

the aes sedai model: wizards are all gathered in a tower that serves as a center of the world political network. they meddle in the politics of everyone else, using manipulation and blackmail mostly. over the course of centuries, they become gradually more isolated and mistrusted, until most lands barely tolerate them, at best. still, nobody can challenge their power, because they have magic.
the moment there is an actual crysis, it becomes obvious that the vast majority of them are whoefully unprepared to deal with anything out of the ordinary.
and the moment they are faced with a country that trains war wizards, it becomes obvious they spent too much time politicking and too little time actually practicing their magic.

Ignimortis
2020-06-07, 07:04 AM
I'm quite surprised at people saying "why aren't most scientists/engineers/etc. politicians, presidents and rulers?". The answer is simple. It's not about them not feeling up to it - everyone at some point had a "hey, if I were in charge, I'd do this..." thought, and might've followed on it, if not for one factor. They don't have any world-bending, almost instantly summonable power to circumvent normal processes, and use the same rules as everyone else, so it would take a gigantic amount of work and luck to get to a point where they could affect the situation.

Wizards and other casters usually don't suffer from these limitations - they're mortals plus, they're someone who can very well have everything a mortal ruler has, plus supernatural powers. As such, it seems very plausible that a sufficiently irked/interested D&D wizard can upend society, unless the society has someone of similar power oppose them.

Vahnavoi
2020-06-07, 09:12 AM
Something like Vahnavoi's point is the best answer. Just because mageocracy dominates in the long run doesn't mean it dominates right now. In the real world, it took thousands of years to go from the emergence of civilization to empires that could even claim to be global in scope. D&D has various trends pushing that number up or down, but seeing as most campaigns last a single-digit number of in-game years (with that digit often being 1), it's entirely plausible to say "this campaign happens before mages take over the world", just as if you want to write a story without guns you can set it before the invention of gunpowder.

Exactly. The default D&D setting the rules introduce the player characters to makes some very specific assumptions, some of which are cast into doubt or cannot be derived from grassroots elements of the system. For example, the demographics tables given in DMG don't really follow from character generation rules, they're largely arbitrary.

Additionally, tables ignore certain rules or their implications for player convenience and they are poorly factored into world building. My favorite example is starting age rules.

For example:

The starting age for barbarians is "young adulthood" plus 1d4 years, plus 1d6 years for fighters and 2d6 years for wizards.

So if 100 people start training as barbarians, 100 people start training as fighter and 100 people start training training as wizards on a setting's year zero:

After 1 year, you will have (expected values) 25 combat-ready 1st level barbarians, 16 fighters and... 0 wizards.

After 2 years, you will have another 25 barbarians, 16 fighters and just 3 wizards. And now you have to ask the question: what did the previous age cohort of barbarians and fighters do for an entire year? We know that extrapolating from grassroots up, it's theoretically possible to get to epic levels in matter of months. Now, realistically, everyone attempting that would die, but even accounting that, some of those 1st year barbarians and fighters would survive and be at least 2nd level or higher.

So in a world where everyone has to do by-the-rules work to become who they are, wizards don't come into being lording ultimate cosmic power over peons. They come to being as greenhorn apprentices, armed with cantrips and 1st level spells against non-wizard warriors who have years of experience on them and outnumber them.

It's fair to ask: what happens if the faster "graduating" classes decide that they don't want slower graduating Tier 1 classes to exist? Can 3 1st level wizards triumph over 25 1st level barbarians lead by 2nd level+ barbarian chieftain? Can 0th level wizard trainees (a mix of 1st level commoners, adepts and 1 RHD humanoids, most likely)?

Just because a high level caster could dominate a low-level non-magical society, it doesn't follow this scenario gets to happen. Because low-level casters can be beat up by higher-level martials like the nerds they are. :smalltongue:

Tanarii
2020-06-07, 10:14 AM
That's not really the right analogy. It's not like historically the king was king because we was the best at ruling. He was king because he was descended from the last guy who assembled a large enough army that "look at all these dudes who will stab you if you don't put me in charge" seemed like a compelling reason to have him be in charge. In a world where that's the paradigm for allocating political power, the question "why isn't the guy who can summon an army of demons in charge" becomes a lot less obvious.
Summoning an army of demons either requires one specific edition of D&D and splatbook tricks, or DM fiat, or being an NPC.

Other than that, I reiterate my analogy. The skills and talents it takes to become a Wizard and the personal power that results only trivially overlap those that make rulers. Including ruling by force of army.



Magic Sparta- Magic is considered the only worthwhile skill. Children or even infants are tested for magical ability. Those unable to express magical powers, or those found wanting (assuming magic is particularly common) are either killed or enslaved. Those with magic are trained brutally their entire lives to master it, and the best are entrusted with leading their compatriots in matters of state and war. A large nonmagical slave class exists to provide food production (undead usually are depicted as not being all that good for their surroundings), certain manufactured goods, fodder in low-intensity conflicts, and corpses for use as undead servants. Much time and effort is spent cracking down on revolts and unrest, usually through terror and police state tactics. Due to such a need for combat and info-gathering magic, the mages of this nation will likely sell their services abroad as mercenaries and spies. This is kinda like Thay, and moreover, is a place very few people would want to live. A prime government for some aspiring heroes to form a noble resistance against, or as a terrifying past threat who's echoes still haunt the landOh I really like that one. Even better would be if the active duty warriors are 5e EKs, who multiclassing into Wizard when they become elder statesmen. :smallamused: (Or some NPC equivalents.)



Wizards and other casters usually don't suffer from these limitations - they're mortals plus, they're someone who can very well have everything a mortal ruler has, plus supernatural powers. As such, it seems very plausible that a sufficiently irked/interested D&D wizard can upend society, unless the society has someone of similar power oppose them.
- the personal power of wizards doesn't translate into large scale power very well. They're incredibly vulnerable individuals, glass cannons. Except, yknow, in 3e specifically.
- there always are those of similar power to oppose them. Usually it's the PCs. :smallamused: But most D&D worlds assume there are NPC adventurers, so there's always someone.

Zarrgon
2020-06-07, 01:43 PM
They don't have any world-bending, almost instantly summonable power to circumvent normal processes, and use the same rules as everyone else, so it would take a gigantic amount of work and luck to get to a point where they could affect the situation.

Well once you drop the Silly Game Rules and the Gentleman's Fairness and the Soft Safe Reality Rules and the Low Magic Rules(except for that concurring spellcaster, right?)and the Everyone is a Nobody World and even more so the PC Privilege Rules: The alternate fictional reality would be a lot like what we know. So it WOULD take a spellcaster a gigantic amount of work and luck to take over.


The only way it looks easy to have a spellcaster rule is to have the reality operate under all the Kids Glove Settings: Silly Game Rules, Gentleman's Fairness, Soft Safe Reality Rules, Low Magic Rules, Everyone is a Nobody World and the PC Privilege Rules. All the above alter a reality into easy mode, take them all away and you have a Reality of Hard Knocks.

Cluedrew
2020-06-07, 03:34 PM
Again, there's a difference between "magocracy" and "monarchy where the king is a wizard".I'm not an expert but that seems pretty good. A lot of people have mentioned this difference but no one has really gone into detail. Or maybe someone did in the initial rush and I forgot.


(Also this should probably be in the D&D forums, seeing how this is very much not a generic RPG thing).Which actually makes me think, what elements of a magic system - and larger setting - would lead to a magocracy?

In broad strokes you would first need "magic-user" to somehow be able to form a caste, which is mostly having the right population, some tiers within that group would help. The only other thing you need for it to happen on occasion is that being a magic user leaves you with enough time to participate in politics.

To be common there has to be a strong reason to have casters in positions of power. Not just working for the government either, actually leading it. And as I do not consider mass mind control to be a political system just being sufficiently powerful is not enough. Wizard-tyrants will show up on occasion but their conquests will free themselves on their (likely sudden) deaths, via either a rival or a more noble caster (or general hero). Less egotistical wizards will likely be quite a force for the regimes they support (and also hold some sway over it) but rarely would lead it better than any given existing member.

Really I think magic might be a critical part of a nation in a fantasy setting, but maybe not its leadership. The best leader-casters would be the ones that are naturally wise and personable, but even then its not really the magic that is doing it. Even if we assume that enough casters want to rule for their own ego and there is no one else can stop them, that doesn't seem like it will consistently lead to governments of almost as powerful casters.

Zarrgon
2020-06-07, 05:13 PM
I'm not an expert but that seems pretty good. A lot of people have mentioned this difference but no one has really gone into detail. Or maybe someone did in the initial rush and I forgot.

You might note that Magocracys are rare in fiction for a simple reason: you'd need a LOT of spellcasters for it to exist. And for a lot of writers that makes for a huge problem as that is a lot of magic around in the world. You can do it, but for the most part it's a head ache that most writers just avoid by making magic rare.

A true magocracy would be world changing, so much to make a world alien. And again while some fiction does this, most fiction sticks to the world that is "just like Earth, but with a twist or two".

Just think of a magocracy, with just Divination: Think Minority Report, but worse.



Which actually makes me think, what elements of a magic system - and larger setting - would lead to a magocracy?

Freedom.

The best example of a magocracy would be where the spellcasters take over specifically to give themselves and others freedom.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-07, 05:54 PM
Exactly. The default D&D setting the rules introduce the player characters to makes some very specific assumptions, some of which are cast into doubt or cannot be derived from grassroots elements of the system. For example, the demographics tables given in DMG don't really follow from character generation rules, they're largely arbitrary.
[...]
Just because a high level caster could dominate a low-level non-magical society, it doesn't follow this scenario gets to happen. Because low-level casters can be beat up by higher-level martials like the nerds they are. :smalltongue:


Well once you drop the Silly Game Rules and the Gentleman's Fairness and the Soft Safe Reality Rules and the Low Magic Rules(except for that concurring spellcaster, right?)and the Everyone is a Nobody World and even more so the PC Privilege Rules: The alternate fictional reality would be a lot like what we know. So it WOULD take a spellcaster a gigantic amount of work and luck to take over.

The only way it looks easy to have a spellcaster rule is to have the reality operate under all the Kids Glove Settings: Silly Game Rules, Gentleman's Fairness, Soft Safe Reality Rules, Low Magic Rules, Everyone is a Nobody World and the PC Privilege Rules. All the above alter a reality into easy mode, take them all away and you have a Reality of Hard Knocks.

If you want to assume that the default setting is operating under "Soft Safe Reality Rules" and/or arbitrary PC favoritism and you want to see what society would "logically" look like without those, well...society as we know it wouldn't exist at all, because the only sapient beings on the entire Prime Material Plane would be aboleths in the sea and dragons on land.

The former were the first Prime creatures to exist and come with innate psionics, mind control, perfect racial memory back to their race's creation, and unique forms of racial magic; the latter arose at or aruond the same time and come with innate magic, breath weapons, incredible tankiness, and some of the highest CRs in the book; and neither aboleths nor evil dragons would "logically" let a couple of hairless apes exist for more than a few days after their patron deities plopped them on a given Prime world. :smallamused:


The rules cover the "modern day" of the various D&D settings, so you can't really talk about what things would "really look like" in the setting's ancient past or when everyone was 1st level or whatever. The past could very well be treated as a different setting (like how the Dragon Magazine "planet of humanoids and dinosaurs living together" setting has a bunch of tweaked rules and race/class changes) or operate under different rules (like how editions changes are explicit in-world events in the Forgotten Realms), so any assertion you make about how things would "really be" is as valid as any other.

Barbarians, Rogues, and Sorcerers have the same starting ages, and maybe those three classes were the only ones around at "the beginning" and the sorcerers' supremacy let them stick around long enough for wizardry to be invented. Or maybe every class was around then, and the local God of Magic made it clear that offing all the apprentice wizards would be answered with divine smiting. Or maybe early humanoid settlements only survived because a Good-aligned dragon took each one under its literal and metaphorical wings, and wizards were the dragons' valued servants to whom the dragons taught magic.

Maybe there's no need for DM Gentlemen's Agreements to keep people alive because all the monsters that would otherwise eat all the low-level humanoids are busy fighting each other, the same way high-level casters tend to oppose each other and ignore any low-level future threats. Maybe any gentlemen's agreements are in-world ones, where LE Lich-Kings and CG King-Priests agree not to try to dethrone each other because every few decades there's another demonic invasion or whatever and society needs to be stable and full of well-trained casters to deal with them. Maybe there's no gentlemen's agreements at all, in- or out-of-game, and the world is a barren wasteland in which humans are barely clinging to survival Dark Sun-style because neither monsters nor evil wizards are pulling their punches.

Any attempt to go hard RAW in one area and handwave things in another is pointless, because the possibility space of "take rules A1, A2, A3, ... as-is and extrapolate B1, B2, B3, ..." is infinitely large and no one's going to make the same assumptions; for every "low-level martial jocks easily beat up low-level caster nerds" there's an equal and opposite "low-level casters have sleep and daggers and low-level martials have low Will saves," and so forth.


To be common there has to be a strong reason to have casters in positions of power. Not just working for the government either, actually leading it. And as I do not consider mass mind control to be a political system just being sufficiently powerful is not enough. Wizard-tyrants will show up on occasion but their conquests will free themselves on their (likely sudden) deaths, via either a rival or a more noble caster (or general hero). Less egotistical wizards will likely be quite a force for the regimes they support (and also hold some sway over it) but rarely would lead it better than any given existing member.

Really I think magic might be a critical part of a nation in a fantasy setting, but maybe not its leadership. The best leader-casters would be the ones that are naturally wise and personable, but even then its not really the magic that is doing it. Even if we assume that enough casters want to rule for their own ego and there is no one else can stop them, that doesn't seem like it will consistently lead to governments of almost as powerful casters.

That assumption holds for magocracies, but not theocracies. In a theocracy:
Priests come with a built-in structure that wizards don't: Wizards might all be loners sequestered in their wizard towers eschewing the formation of wizard guilds, but even small-fry Chaotic Evil gods tend to have their followers gather in cults instead of sending lone mad priests to do their thing, and where non-wizard arcanists have no reason to take on apprentices because sorcery can't really be passed on the way wizardry can, clerics are encouraged to proselytize to gain their god more followers.
Priests have an excellent reason to be in positions of power: If you're a priest of a god of Justice or Community or Tyranny or Cities or the like, not only are you probably going to study government and politics as part of your religious devotions, but "I'm a high priest of the God of Governing Places Well" is likely to get you accepted by the public a lot better than "I'm a wizard and I have ideas!" would.
In a D&D-like system, divine magic is correlated with wisdom and force of personality such that a powerful cleric (or favored soul, or shugenja, or...) is necessarily going to be much more insightful and personable than the average non-caster politician; granted, "personable" could mean either "feared and beloved Priest-Tyrant" or "good and noble King-Priest" so the populace might not like their priestly ruler, but it's more than can be said for powerful wizards either way.
So in any magic system where magocracies are at all possible, theocracies are actively encouraged, I'd say. And once you have a bunch of theocracies around, well, magocracies might very well spring up in reaction to that: a group of people who aren't faithful enough to be a priest of an existing theocracy or don't like the religions in charge or whatever, but who still want both magic and political power, might be encouraged to go the magocracy route, giving rise to a bunch of magocracies even if they wouldn't have arisen naturally on their own.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-07, 05:59 PM
It's fair to ask: what happens if the faster "graduating" classes decide that they don't want slower graduating Tier 1 classes to exist?

Presumably they eventually get conquered by someone who didn't make that mistake. Or by monsters that get magic just for waking up. Fundamentally, D&D is a game that has a lot of magic in it. If you're looking for a setting that doesn't have very much magic, either constrain it explicitly (e.g. E6) or play a different game.


Summoning an army of demons either requires one specific edition of D&D and splatbook tricks, or DM fiat, or being an NPC.

Well, seeing as the vast majority of world leaders are NPCs, needing to be one doesn't seem like much of a constraint. And most other editions have comparable tricks (though not always in the hands of Wizards specifically).


Other than that, I reiterate my analogy. The skills and talents it takes to become a Wizard and the personal power that results only trivially overlap those that make rulers. Including ruling by force of army.

And your analogy continues to be wrong. Magical power overlaps pretty perfectly with force of arms, because D&D is fundamentally a game about applying force of arms to get what you want. The idea that a guy whose literal job is killing people would be bad at killing people betrays a fundamental lack of logic.


there always are those of similar power to oppose them.

Sure. They're called "other claimants to the throne", and when they win they become king. Which doesn't really change the outcome. You seem to be assuming some notion of political legitimacy or something, where people would oppose your declaration that you were king because your army is tougher and stronger than the other armies on moral grounds, but that simply does not exist in medieval societies.


The former were the first Prime creatures to exist and come with innate psionics, mind control, perfect racial memory back to their race's creation, and unique forms of racial magic; the latter arose at or aruond the same time and come with innate magic, breath weapons, incredible tankiness, and some of the highest CRs in the book; and neither aboleths nor evil dragons would "logically" let a couple of hairless apes exist for more than a few days after their patron deities plopped them on a given Prime world. :smallamused:

I don't think that's true. Humanoids are useful. They have opposable thumbs, there are a lot of them, they don't have the giant egos of Dragons or Aboleths, and they're (generally) not nearly so dangerous as others of your species. Aboleths in particular are likely to have the kind of culture that makes Primes or Prador look cuddly, and will be badly in need of expendable go-betweens for whatever political dealings they want to do.

So you'd probably have plenty of humanoids, they'd just be living as the slaves or servants of the horrifyingly powerful monsters that dominate the world. You'd get something like Dragons-timeline Tarkir (or the prehistory of the Elder Empire books), but with a wider variety of creatures at the top of the foodchain. And with human populations regularly getting culled so that no one could level up enough to be threatening to the rulers. Which is reasonably compelling as a campaign

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-07, 06:40 PM
I don't think that's true. Humanoids are useful. They have opposable thumbs, there are a lot of them, they don't have the giant egos of Dragons or Aboleths, and they're (generally) not nearly so dangerous as others of your species. Aboleths in particular are likely to have the kind of culture that makes Primes or Prador look cuddly, and will be badly in need of expendable go-betweens for whatever political dealings they want to do.

So you'd probably have plenty of humanoids, they'd just be living as the slaves or servants of the horrifyingly powerful monsters that dominate the world. You'd get something like Dragons-timeline Tarkir (or the prehistory of the Elder Empire books), but with a wider variety of creatures at the top of the foodchain. And with human populations regularly getting culled so that no one could level up enough to be threatening to the rulers. Which is reasonably compelling as a campaign

Perhaps. On the other hand, aboleths tend not to care about the surface world and their Enslave ability has a short range and allows ongoing attempts to break out of it, and evil dragons tend to be the "breathe fire first ask questions never" type and aren't guaranteed to have mind-control magic at their disposal given the unpredictability of sorcerer casting, so it's entirely possible that neither one would to let a bunch of humanoids stick around--let alone enough of them to form any sort of society--in the scenario proposed.

The scenario you posit would definitely and obviously make for a much more interesting campaign and fit the default-setting-as-actually-depicted much better, of course, but the point I was making was that the kinds of "creatures/people who got stronger earlier would obviously wipe out later creatures/people who might potentially surpass them later" and "casters only exist at the DM's sufferance because monsters would wipe them out otherwise" hypotheses being proposed would lead to a ridiculously reductive setting where basically everything dies off. You have to accept at least some level of ambiguity/rules difference/handwaving/etc. regarding the ancient history of a given setting for humanoids to exist at all in such a monster-filled world, and at that point quibbling about whether the first wizard existed before the first barbarian or the first dragon is pointless.

AdAstra
2020-06-07, 08:58 PM
If you want to assume that the default setting is operating under "Soft Safe Reality Rules" and/or arbitrary PC favoritism and you want to see what society would "logically" look like without those, well...society as we know it wouldn't exist at all, because the only sapient beings on the entire Prime Material Plane would be aboleths in the sea and dragons on land.

The former were the first Prime creatures to exist and come with innate psionics, mind control, perfect racial memory back to their race's creation, and unique forms of racial magic; the latter arose at or aruond the same time and come with innate magic, breath weapons, incredible tankiness, and some of the highest CRs in the book; and neither aboleths nor evil dragons would "logically" let a couple of hairless apes exist for more than a few days after their patron deities plopped them on a given Prime world. :smallamused:


The rules cover the "modern day" of the various D&D settings, so you can't really talk about what things would "really look like" in the setting's ancient past or when everyone was 1st level or whatever. The past could very well be treated as a different setting (like how the Dragon Magazine "planet of humanoids and dinosaurs living together" setting has a bunch of tweaked rules and race/class changes) or operate under different rules (like how editions changes are explicit in-world events in the Forgotten Realms), so any assertion you make about how things would "really be" is as valid as any other.

Barbarians, Rogues, and Sorcerers have the same starting ages, and maybe those three classes were the only ones around at "the beginning" and the sorcerers' supremacy let them stick around long enough for wizardry to be invented. Or maybe every class was around then, and the local God of Magic made it clear that offing all the apprentice wizards would be answered with divine smiting. Or maybe early humanoid settlements only survived because a Good-aligned dragon took each one under its literal and metaphorical wings, and wizards were the dragons' valued servants to whom the dragons taught magic.

Maybe there's no need for DM Gentlemen's Agreements to keep people alive because all the monsters that would otherwise eat all the low-level humanoids are busy fighting each other, the same way high-level casters tend to oppose each other and ignore any low-level future threats. Maybe any gentlemen's agreements are in-world ones, where LE Lich-Kings and CG King-Priests agree not to try to dethrone each other because every few decades there's another demonic invasion or whatever and society needs to be stable and full of well-trained casters to deal with them. Maybe there's no gentlemen's agreements at all, in- or out-of-game, and the world is a barren wasteland in which humans are barely clinging to survival Dark Sun-style because neither monsters nor evil wizards are pulling their punches.

Any attempt to go hard RAW in one area and handwave things in another is pointless, because the possibility space of "take rules A1, A2, A3, ... as-is and extrapolate B1, B2, B3, ..." is infinitely large and no one's going to make the same assumptions; for every "low-level martial jocks easily beat up low-level caster nerds" there's an equal and opposite "low-level casters have sleep and daggers and low-level martials have low Will saves," and so forth.



That assumption holds for magocracies, but not theocracies. In a theocracy:
Priests come with a built-in structure that wizards don't: Wizards might all be loners sequestered in their wizard towers eschewing the formation of wizard guilds, but even small-fry Chaotic Evil gods tend to have their followers gather in cults instead of sending lone mad priests to do their thing, and where non-wizard arcanists have no reason to take on apprentices because sorcery can't really be passed on the way wizardry can, clerics are encouraged to proselytize to gain their god more followers.
Priests have an excellent reason to be in positions of power: If you're a priest of a god of Justice or Community or Tyranny or Cities or the like, not only are you probably going to study government and politics as part of your religious devotions, but "I'm a high priest of the God of Governing Places Well" is likely to get you accepted by the public a lot better than "I'm a wizard and I have ideas!" would.
In a D&D-like system, divine magic is correlated with wisdom and force of personality such that a powerful cleric (or favored soul, or shugenja, or...) is necessarily going to be much more insightful and personable than the average non-caster politician; granted, "personable" could mean either "feared and beloved Priest-Tyrant" or "good and noble King-Priest" so the populace might not like their priestly ruler, but it's more than can be said for powerful wizards either way.
So in any magic system where magocracies are at all possible, theocracies are actively encouraged, I'd say. And once you have a bunch of theocracies around, well, magocracies might very well spring up in reaction to that: a group of people who aren't faithful enough to be a priest of an existing theocracy or don't like the religions in charge or whatever, but who still want both magic and political power, might be encouraged to go the magocracy route, giving rise to a bunch of magocracies even if they wouldn't have arisen naturally on their own.

Big issue for any theocracies is the fact that most Clerics are, in some form, actively beholden to their gods. And most Good and Neutral gods in DnD settings are fairly protective of the status quo. Theocracies are rarely all that accommodating to alternative faiths, and in a world where those alternative faiths have high level casters of their own, any attempt by a god, pantheon, or servants of such to seize control is going to be opposed by basically everyone else. The lack of theocracies is most likely an informal (or possibly formally declared) agreement between churches to avoid excessively destructive conflict. Servants of the gods in DnD have massive amounts of soft and hard power already, making it official just paints a giant target on your head.

Nifft
2020-06-07, 09:10 PM
Big issue for any theocracies is the fact that most Clerics are, in some form, actively beholden to their gods. And most Good and Neutral gods in DnD settings are fairly protective of the status quo. Theocracies are rarely all that accommodating to alternative faiths, and in a world where those alternative faiths have high level casters of their own, any attempt by a god, pantheon, or servants of such to seize control is going to be opposed by basically everyone else. The lack of theocracies is most likely an informal (or possibly formally declared) agreement between churches to avoid excessively destructive conflict. Servants of the gods in DnD have massive amounts of soft and hard power already, making it official just paints a giant target on your head.

Greyhawk had some status-quo gods who were evil, and some innovative good gods. Hextor (LE) was acceptable to the Great Kingdom because he supported the status quo; Heironeous (LG) in contrast had an order of Paladins which used revolvers (innovative technology) to dispense frontier justice.

Greyhawk's best-known theocracy (the Pale) was intolerant of other faiths, but would happily accept people from other racial groups if they converted (e.g. the "Faithful Flan").

----------

Eberron had pantheonic worship as the baseline (Sovereign Host). Their best-known theocracy (Thrane) isn't particularly intolerant, and the few canon NPCs which I remember seem to evangelize by doing good while being public about their own faith rather than by oppressing other faiths. (They do oppress and smite Shifters, who are the fur-zerker descendants of lycanthropes, but that's not a religious intolerance.)

Thrane's contemporary art is apparently a form of cubism, so their aesthetics aren't particularly static either.

Zarrgon
2020-06-07, 09:29 PM
If you want to assume that the default setting is operating under "Soft Safe Reality Rules" and/or arbitrary PC favoritism and you want to see what society would "logically" look like without those, well...society as we know it wouldn't exist at all, because the only sapient beings on the entire Prime Material Plane would be aboleths in the sea and dragons on land.


Well, your only giving one possible reality. In an infinite multiverse anything can and will happen.

Though I'm talking more about a world without all the Safe and Fair reality rules used by whinny players. Just think of anything a player would whine about and demand not be part of the game.

A great example is when a PC would go to sleep and the DM would just say "ok, your character is dead. Roll up a new character". A player would whine and scream endlessly and demand that any and all attacks on the character must be known to them and such attacks can only happen when the player and character are ready...and, of course, the attack must follow the silly challenge encounter rules and so on.

AdAstra
2020-06-07, 09:51 PM
Greyhawk had some status-quo gods who were evil, and some innovative good gods. Hextor (LE) was acceptable to the Great Kingdom because he supported the status quo; Heironeous (LG) in contrast had an order of Paladins which used revolvers (innovative technology) to dispense frontier justice.

Greyhawk's best-known theocracy (the Pale) was intolerant of other faiths, but would happily accept people from other racial groups if they converted (e.g. the "Faithful Flan").

----------

Eberron had pantheonic worship as the baseline (Sovereign Host). Their best-known theocracy (Thrane) isn't particularly intolerant, and the few canon NPCs which I remember seem to evangelize by doing good while being public about their own faith rather than by oppressing other faiths. (They do oppress and smite Shifters, who are the fur-zerker descendants of lycanthropes, but that's not a religious intolerance.)

Thrane's contemporary art is apparently a form of cubism, so their aesthetics aren't particularly static either.

Yeah I think I misspoke when I mentioned the status quo, please don't focus on that part. The point is that one god trying to form a straight up government, and thus implicitly taking away power/authority from other gods, is not going to go over well with those other gods. It's one thing to run around spreading the good word or even fighting with servants of other gods, it's another to try to acquire even more institutional power than a church normally has in this world.

As an example, let's say we've got two gods, Gork and Mork, and Generic Kingdom. Normally, the Generic Kingdom is led by a king, but that king is heavily dependent on the clerics of the two gods, and thus the churches of Gork and Mork have a lot of pull. But let's say that the church of Gork decides that they could rule better and depose the king with their Gorkly magics. That puts the church of Mork into an intensely vulnerable position. Even if the church of Gork is tolerant and allows the Morkians to continue doing their thing, now the government has all the clerical ability it needs. This means that the church of Mork has basically no pull in the Generic Kingdom anymore, no power other than their magical prowess. And what's to say the Gorkians stay tolerant? So in this scenario, the likely response from the Morkians is trying to stop the Gorkians, perhaps violently. And the Gorkians would be well aware of this. They'd be risking war for relatively minimal gain.

Now imagine that instead of two gods, it's 20. 20 individual churches all with their own clerics, goals, alliances, ideals, etc. Any church or alliance of churches taking control of the government is a huge threat to the power of all the others, and could easily piss off other groups entirely. This is usually how internecine wars start. Most well-entrenched political powers are going to be loathe to start anything, and especially unlikely to let anyone else start anything.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-08, 10:31 AM
And of course we do seem to arrive at the answer anyone really does when considering D&D world building:

It’s in no way actually consistent with even its most basic premises, because it explicitly exists to allow players to kill-level-repeat in a vaguely medieval/renaissance setting with magic (generic) or some off the wall settings (planescape?), and that is its sole purpose. In short, the writer’s may not suck at politics/economics/demographics/etc. but they sure don’t care about them because that’s not the game.

Rule of Cool and Aren’t You The Most Awesome is the game, and not surprisingly those don’t produce anything like a consistent setting. (They’re also one of the reasons why D&D is mostly just a bad game that somehow retains popularity due to crowding out a market thanks to being the first mover, but that’s another topic for another time)

So what are the baseline assumptions we’re working from here, given the writers are not incentivized to actually care to provide any?

King of Nowhere
2020-06-08, 12:06 PM
And of course we do seem to arrive at the answer anyone really does when considering D&D world building:

It’s in no way actually consistent with even its most basic premises, because it explicitly exists to allow players to kill-level-repeat in a vaguely medieval/renaissance setting with magic (generic) or some off the wall settings (planescape?), and that is its sole purpose. In short, the writer’s may not suck at politics/economics/demographics/etc. but they sure don’t care about them because that’s not the game.

that's... wrong. so wrong.

sure, some people play like that. some dm worldbuild like that.
most people i know cares about worldbuilding consistency. a well-considered campaign world will have satisfying answers to the obvious questions.

and the fact that so many people are around here debating fantasy politics proves it.

and it's also the reason d&d is not a bad game, and it's not even a game, but it's rather a framework to create your own games. one of the reasons it's still popular is that it can be modded so much. at least, i'd never cared to learn different systems because if i want to adapt to a different style or setting i find it more convenient to just use some houserules and homebrew over the same basic d20 framework

Also, i haven't seen the OP again in this thread. i wonder where he went

Willie the Duck
2020-06-08, 02:02 PM
Also, i haven't seen the OP again in this thread. i wonder where he went

They haven't posted elsewhere, so let's assume that life got in the way.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-08, 05:31 PM
The fact that people can world build hardly means the writers did, or that the writers provided those people with an internally consistent system to do it.

As for fantasy politics:

1) That you can debate it is not terribly relevant to D&D being good. I’m sure we could, the internet being what it is, argue the lines of succession for the Gumdrop Kingdom or the relative political merits of Disney princesses.

2) You might notice this particular fantasy politics debate started with “hey, I think D&D made a glaring internal consistency error in world building”. Which we’ve more or less all agreed is reasonable by this point, and are now at the point where we’re explaining the unique circumstances why in this particular case there is an exception and not a mageocracy. So using this debate as proof they really did try for an internally consistent world is a bit contradictory.

Now, this is probably because he writers just decided they didn’t care. They needed things for players to kill, they needed a kill-reward-repeat cycle, and they need a rule of cool place to do it in. It does make actually settling on “how things would be based on logic and what we know” a bit difficult though, on account of the writers basically said “no, that’s not how our game works. The world infinitely compensates to provide a series of level appropriate challenges, not because of an internal logic, but because that’s what we want players to deal with”.

Which brings us to “well it’s not a game, it’s a game engine for ANY setting, so it’s excellent.”

Only, it’s only even tolerable at its baseline high magic RAW method. It doesn’t handle low fantasy well, because the system is magic dominant. It doesn’t handle modern well, because ranged combat becomes a series of slugfest gunfights with no bearing on reality. It doesn’t handle melee well. It doesn’t handle human scale conflict well, or social systems, or diplomacy, or non violent solutions.

It handles one thing, and that’s High Magic power fantasy. Which is why it’s worlds aren’t ruled by world building, they’re rules by “what would look awesome and provide players both the feel of being hyper-cool-magic-users while providing a spiraling upward series of challenges”

Zarrgon
2020-06-08, 06:14 PM
So what are the baseline assumptions weÂ’re working from here, given the writers are not incentivized to actually care to provide any?

Well, youd need to get rid of all the Kids Glove Settings: Silly Game Rules, Gentleman's Fairness, Soft Safe Reality Rules, Low Magic Rules, Everyone is a Nobody World and the PC Privilege Rules. All the above alter a reality into easy mode, take them all away and you have a Reality of Hard Knocks. That would at least be a baseline.


that's... wrong. so wrong.

sure, some people play like that. some dm worldbuild like that.
most people i know cares about worldbuilding consistency. a well-considered campaign world will have satisfying answers to the obvious questions.

and the fact that so many people are around here debating fantasy politics proves it.

It is so right though. And the game rules are a big huge part of the problem.

Silly Game Rules, as in all the Game Rules. They have all got to go away. The baseline must be a reality where things function and make sense. Game rules are meant for a game, and for just about all RPGs that is a mostly combat adventure game. You can't take those Game Rules as Reality Rules. Even worse, most modern games have very player friendly rules, rules for any reality will never be like that.

Gentleman's Fairness This is simple enough: Games are Fair, Life is not Fair. So any Reality must be unfair.

Soft Safe Reality Rules This covers a lot. It's basically the soft reality of fiction vs the hard reality rules of a real world simulation. Basically, all the bad and negative stuff that is part of reality but gets glossed over or edited out of game worlds.

Low Magic Rules A staple of many types of fiction and a great many games. A world with even a little magic can become a problem, so many writers and DMs just do the obvious and make the world Low Magic.

Everyone is a Nobody World Another staple of many types of fiction and a great many games. A world with even a couple somebodies can become a problem, so many writers and DMs just do the obvious and make the world full of nobodies.

PC Privilege Rules THIS is the biggest one. Most often when someone talks about a Game World Setting, they are doing it from the High Seat of PC Privilege Rules. All the social things and game rules that make PCs "special" and "stars" and "beyond normal characters".

King of Nowhere
2020-06-08, 06:52 PM
The fact that people can world build hardly means the writers did, or that the writers provided those people with an internally consistent system to do it.

As for fantasy politics:

1) That you can debate it is not terribly relevant to D&D being good. I’m sure we could, the internet being what it is, argue the lines of succession for the Gumdrop Kingdom or the relative political merits of Disney princesses.

2) You might notice this particular fantasy politics debate started with “hey, I think D&D made a glaring internal consistency error in world building”. Which we’ve more or less all agreed is reasonable by this point, and are now at the point where we’re explaining the unique circumstances why in this particular case there is an exception and not a mageocracy. So using this debate as proof they really did try for an internally consistent world is a bit contradictory.

Now, this is probably because he writers just decided they didn’t care. They needed things for players to kill, they needed a kill-reward-repeat cycle, and they need a rule of cool place to do it in. It does make actually settling on “how things would be based on logic and what we know” a bit difficult though, on account of the writers basically said “no, that’s not how our game works. The world infinitely compensates to provide a series of level appropriate challenges, not because of an internal logic, but because that’s what we want players to deal with”.

Which brings us to “well it’s not a game, it’s a game engine for ANY setting, so it’s excellent.”

Only, it’s only even tolerable at its baseline high magic RAW method. It doesn’t handle low fantasy well, because the system is magic dominant. It doesn’t handle modern well, because ranged combat becomes a series of slugfest gunfights with no bearing on reality. It doesn’t handle melee well. It doesn’t handle human scale conflict well, or social systems, or diplomacy, or non violent solutions.

It handles one thing, and that’s High Magic power fantasy. Which is why it’s worlds aren’t ruled by world building, they’re rules by “what would look awesome and provide players both the feel of being hyper-cool-magic-users while providing a spiraling upward series of challenges”

ok, if you put it that way, the writers did a terrible job about making a consistent setting, i agree.
does anyone use that kind of settings? well, perhaps someone does. nobody doing it at any of my tables would be taken seriously, though.
the writers may not care about setting up a consistent economy, but the dungeon masters do care, and their players too. so the kind of worlds you see at tables are generally better thought out.
You might notice this particular fantasy politics debate started with “hey, I think D&D made a glaring internal consistency error in world building”, but is worldbuilding part of the rules? does anyone use the numbers and fluff in the dmg as actual rules? again, i must guess somebody does.
so yes, if you put it that way, if you take everything ever written in published books at face value, then yes, this game sucks.
which is why i keep being amazed that people would ever suggest taking stuff at face value. if you cut away all the obvious rubbish, the game is excellent.

also, all of those things you say the game does not support well, it actually supports them well, if you can make the right adjustments. again yes, if you try to play strict raw, then it crumbles apart pretty soon if you try to do those things.

finally, while we all agree that magocracies would exhist - indeed, there was never any disagreement about this point - we are not agreed at all on how likely, common or stable they would be. i keep thinking they would be fairly rare in the long run, because ruling takes time, and wizarding takes time, and unless you use crazy high op time dilation tricks, your wizard won't have time to do both. more important, a wizard does not get much benefits from ruling, and he gets more problems and nuisances than it's worth. a wizard in charge would either turn burocrat and stop being a wizard, or would delegate all the actual ruling to someone else and only dictated general policies, at which point it's not so much of a magocracy anymore.
again, i find the aes sedai a realistic approach to what would happen to a magocracy over time. as the magic users became politicians, they practiced their magic less to practice politics more. and they got away with it as long as they were the only magic users, but when they faced other people whose magic users actually practiced magic as their main skill, all their lack of preparation became obvious.

Asmotherion
2020-06-08, 07:50 PM
Setting Dependent.

In my custom setting, I have all noble houses of the civilised world secretly be Spellcasting Dragons, so there's my explanation, in addition to a rule of "maskarade" because the less common folk know, the better.

In most settings, most Rulers have their Wizard advisor, who, in a way, is responsible with dealing with major events, wile leaving mundane decisions to the less magical ruler. I mean, how much would a Wizars really care about wheat taxation or the proper protocol to get a hearing with the king? Not a whole lot I imagine.

Also, why bring instability to a town or citty when there is a Ruler with a rightful claim of power that the people respect (King or Otherwise)? If Roman History taught us anything is that Autocrats who rise in power via a Coup or via Force have short lived reigns, as people question their authority, and rebellion is more likelly to rise.

hungrycrow
2020-06-08, 08:50 PM
Yeah I think I misspoke when I mentioned the status quo, please don't focus on that part. The point is that one god trying to form a straight up government, and thus implicitly taking away power/authority from other gods, is not going to go over well with those other gods. It's one thing to run around spreading the good word or even fighting with servants of other gods, it's another to try to acquire even more institutional power than a church normally has in this world.

As an example, let's say we've got two gods, Gork and Mork, and Generic Kingdom. Normally, the Generic Kingdom is led by a king, but that king is heavily dependent on the clerics of the two gods, and thus the churches of Gork and Mork have a lot of pull. But let's say that the church of Gork decides that they could rule better and depose the king with their Gorkly magics. That puts the church of Mork into an intensely vulnerable position. Even if the church of Gork is tolerant and allows the Morkians to continue doing their thing, now the government has all the clerical ability it needs. This means that the church of Mork has basically no pull in the Generic Kingdom anymore, no power other than their magical prowess. And what's to say the Gorkians stay tolerant? So in this scenario, the likely response from the Morkians is trying to stop the Gorkians, perhaps violently. And the Gorkians would be well aware of this. They'd be risking war for relatively minimal gain.

Now imagine that instead of two gods, it's 20. 20 individual churches all with their own clerics, goals, alliances, ideals, etc. Any church or alliance of churches taking control of the government is a huge threat to the power of all the others, and could easily piss off other groups entirely. This is usually how internecine wars start. Most well-entrenched political powers are going to be loathe to start anything, and especially unlikely to let anyone else start anything.

Pitting the churches against each other seems inherently unstable. Gorkians or morkians would stand to win everything as soon as they had any advantage over the other. Even with 20 or more churches, the same would happen if a handful formed a faction. Eventually the ruler would fail to maintain balance between the churches and the whole system would collapse.

Cluedrew
2020-06-08, 09:16 PM
That assumption holds for magocracies, but not theocracies. In a theocracy:"]
Priests come with a built-in structure that wizards don't: Wizards might all be loners sequestered in their wizard towers eschewing the formation of wizard guilds, but even small-fry Chaotic Evil gods tend to have their followers gather in cults instead of sending lone mad priests to do their thing, and where non-wizard arcanists have no reason to take on apprentices because sorcery can't really be passed on the way wizardry can, clerics are encouraged to proselytize to gain their god more followers.
Priests have an excellent reason to be in positions of power: If you're a priest of a god of Justice or Community or Tyranny or Cities or the like, not only are you probably going to study government and politics as part of your religious devotions, but "I'm a high priest of the God of Governing Places Well" is likely to get you accepted by the public a lot better than "I'm a wizard and I have ideas!" would.
In a D&D-like system, divine magic is correlated with wisdom and force of personality such that a powerful cleric (or favored soul, or shugenja, or...) is necessarily going to be much more insightful and personable than the average non-caster politician; granted, "personable" could mean either "feared and beloved Priest-Tyrant" or "good and noble King-Priest" so the populace might not like their priestly ruler, but it's more than can be said for powerful wizards either way.
So in any magic system where magocracies are at all possible, theocracies are actively encouraged, I'd say. And once you have a bunch of theocracies around, well, magocracies might very well spring up in reaction to that: a group of people who aren't faithful enough to be a priest of an existing theocracy or don't like the religions in charge or whatever, but who still want both magic and political power, might be encouraged to go the magocracy route, giving rise to a bunch of magocracies even if they wouldn't have arisen naturally on their own.Quite right, in addition there is the whole issue of "what religion is it" which can make a whole lot of difference. You covered the main positive examples but one the other end: A religion of the god of gardening might not have an interest in national politics because that is a lot of non-gardening things to worry about. One of my favourite fictional religions has an anti-authoritarian aspect to it and choosing there leader has a round of "1 2 3 No Me!" in it.

The other personality thing I might add (other than wisdom) is I was sort of thinking of D&D CHA casters as well, who naturally have good people skills as well.


Pitting the churches against each other seems inherently unstable. Gorkians or morkians would stand to win everything as soon as they had any advantage over the other. Even with 20 or more churches, the same would happen if a handful formed a faction. Eventually the ruler would fail to maintain balance between the churches and the whole system would collapse.In a given area maybe that would happen, but there are limits to how much power you can consolidate on a broader scale. Consider the existence of multiple countries in real life.

mindstalk
2020-06-09, 12:03 AM
I take issue with a lot of arguments I'm seeing. My baseline for comparison is a 'typical' feudal society, of mostly hereditary mounted warriors.

* It takes lots of time to learn to be a wizard. -> It also takes lots of time to be a knight.

* Being smart at arcane power doesn't make you good at ruling. -> Being good at killing people with sword and lance doesn't make you good at ruling. Neither does having your father be such a person.

* You can't count on your orders getting obeyed. -> True conventionally as well. But scrying and mind-reading of subordinates would sure help!

* Can't single-handedly cure droughts and famines and disasters. -> Neither can ordinary people. But divine casters might get more divination warning about such things, and can offer relible cure magic to underlings to ensure loyalty.

Now, a valid counter is that feudal rulers were the best *generals*, leaders, not the best knights. But being able to be a passable warrior was typically a filter on getting to be a leader. What makes more sense in a magical world -- having your rulers be fighters or having them be people with at least some casting and good Will saves?

And of course there was Cha-based casters like sorcerers, with an intrinsic link between magical and social power.

* Having two jobs makes you worse at both -> Well, much of history could be described as "bad government"; the traits for getting power weren't the traits that made you good at wielding it.

* "Even if a wizard was to get to 10th level, and then decide they would want to rule the world, HALF of the world would still be more powerful them them." -> No, levels are uniformly distributed.

el minster
2020-06-09, 12:06 AM
due to their inherent power they find themselves as above thed position of ruler. Why be a ruler when you can do whatever you want anyway?

Vahnavoi
2020-06-09, 05:20 AM
I take issue with a lot of arguments I'm seeing. My baseline for comparison is a 'typical' feudal society, of mostly hereditary mounted warriors.

* It takes lots of time to learn to be a wizard. -> It also takes lots of time to be a knight.

By the rules of D&D, it takes less effort to become a fighter, barbarian, ranger or ranger, than it takes to become a wizard, druid or cleric. For example, the fastest learning human fighter will have 1 extra year to gain experience compared to the fastest learning wizard, and the slowest learning human fighter will have 6 extra years compared to the slowest learning wizard.

Sorcerers and like are a an exception to the rule that full casting takes longer to learn than no or partial casting, because they inherit their powers instead. But it just further emphasizes that classes and professions are not equal in the time and effort it takes to progress them.


Being smart at arcane power doesn't make you good at ruling. -> Being good at killing people with sword and lance doesn't make you good at ruling. Neither does having your father be such a person.

If your baseline is a feudal society, then who your parents are matters greatly. Before there were institutions of general learning and surplus of people and resources to run them, almost everybody had to be taught by their parents. Even today, a child born to wealthy academic parents might not inherit their IQ, but the fact that they're born and raised in an environment endorsing an academic mindset, with opportunities to pursue academic careers, makes them considerably more likely to continue their parents' success than a child born to non-intellectual poor parents.


* You can't count on your orders getting obeyed. -> True conventionally as well. But scrying and mind-reading of subordinates would sure help!

Sure it would. The joke is that the skills required to know where scrying and mindreading would be of most use has heavy overlap with skills required to give effective orders in the first place. But the same is not necessarily true for creating and using the spells. This is why people who build and maintain information networks in real life are rarely the same people who use those networks to employ political power.


* Can't single-handedly cure droughts and famines and disasters. -> Neither can ordinary people. But divine casters might get more divination warning about such things, and can offer relible cure magic to underlings to ensure loyalty.

Do you see medical doctors or weather forecasters holding political power as any kind of rule in real life? Same as above, just because a service would be useful, whether on individual or societal level, doesn't mean the people providing the service are the ones who end up with political power.


And of course there was Cha-based casters like sorcerers, with an intrinsic link between magical and social power.

Bards benefit from it more than sorcerers. The reason is that sorcerers get poorest skill progression and one of the poorest class skill lists. Because of this, a rogue or (NPC class) expert with average charisma who spends skill points on social skills, will outperform a sorcerer with 18 charisma at early levels. A bard vastly outperforms. Furthermore, due to not having focus on intelligence, a powerful sorcerer won't have equal edge in decision making compared to powerful wizard, druids or clerics.

This keeps in line with the idea that sorcerers are born with their power, with no or nearly no special training. This is both why they have earlier starting ages and worse class skill list compared to wizards. They have power and social appeal, yes, but all their other traits make them poor candidates for creating a magocracy.

hungrycrow
2020-06-09, 06:31 AM
Bards do seem to have the ideal mix of spells and skills for messing with politics.
With their mastery of narrative structure, they should be ruling the entire cosmos by now!

mindstalk
2020-06-09, 04:29 PM
People have addressed that multiple times already in the thread. No one is saying that wizards couldn't be rulers, only that they will not dominate because (using your example) the overall benefit of ruler doing the scrying compared to the ruler having a wizard to do the scrying for them is small (plus my side point that scrying, and lots of other spells in the books, aren't actually all that useful on a kingdom-ruling level).


The net benefit is small only if the king can trust the wizard. Looking at history, this is a great place for the wizard to control the king via controlling information going to the king. Politics is often not a high-trust environment.

"Ah, but then the wizard doesn't have to be king, they can just manipulate the king". But the manipulation takes work, and there are other manipulators at work, and the king gets the bulk of the taxes. Much easier in many ways to just *be* the king.

Likewise, the right scrying/divination/mind-reading can be really useful for letting the ruler 'trust' their subordinates, and keep power, even if it's not doing much to make them a "better ruler" from a peasant perspective.

This also touches on "why bother?": greed. Not just for power, but for all the resources extracted by the government, which exists largely to extract those resources.

"Oh, but the wizard can just make their own stuff and servants." How true is that really, at what level?



Long story short, and simplifying somewhat, a monarchy can be one of two things, an Absolute Monarchy where power flows from the monarch, or a Constitutional Monarchy where the power flows from the constitution or elected government.

That's simplifying far too much, into the realm of error.

mindstalk
2020-06-09, 04:43 PM
where people would oppose your declaration that you were king because your army is tougher and stronger than the other armies on moral grounds, but that simply does not exist in medieval societies.

Not really true; legitimacy has often mattered, though in different ways than in a nationalist-democratic society. I'm reading Alexander of Macedon, and aspects beyond brute military power come up a lot. The first Persian to conquer Egypt insulted the religion badly, which caused trouble for 200 years; Alexander was more respectful and was seen as a genuine liberator. In conquering Persia itself Alexander tried to slip into being the next Great King, but he wasn't Zoroastrian, nor of the Achmaenid dynasty, so it didn't work and he snapped.

Elsewhere, Augustus became a monarch while carefully avoiding the Roman trappings of kingship, presumably because he thought that would make his life easier. To get power you want an army, to keep power without constant struggle you want an army and the priests and people not being allergic to you.

That said, there are certainly also many cases where people don't care much who's on top as long as they're left alone (not overtaxed and making their own local decisions). Alexander in Asia Minor was like that; many cities swapped easily from paying tribute to the Great King to paying "contributions" to the Hegemon of the Hellenic League.

mindstalk
2020-06-09, 05:03 PM
Mageocracies, loosely speaking, and ranging beyond D&D:

Mystara had Glantri and Alphatia. In Glantri arcane casters (magic-users, elves) and gentry/nobility were 1-1: being arcane automatically gave you more legal privileges, obtainable only by being an arcane caster. I think Alphatia was roughly similar (though with a more monarchic government) but included clerics in the privileged class as well.

Eberron: I forget the country name, but the Inspired are a psionic ruling class. It's not just having psionics though, it's more like being ruled by extraplanar psionic Goa'uld.

Exalted: the Exalted (less like wizards, more like gishes who are sometimes also wizards or super-bards) are usually in charge, whether the current Dragon-blooded dynasty/nobility or the former rule of the Solar Deliberative. Dragon-bloods are largely hereditary though with a high chance of Squibs, Solars are kind of random but Just That Powerful (especially at killing people, or organizing people to kill people, or summoning demons to kill people.)

Darkover: the ruling class is a bunch of families of red-headed psions. In D&D terms it's kind of like rule by sorcerers if being a sorcerer was reliably hereditary.

Sharing Knife: the old world was ruled by sorcerers, things blew up, and the Lakewalkers still have the power to be in charge but have a mutually enforced dedication to not being lords again. Also they're busy keeping the detritus of the old world from waking up and eating all the survivors; it's a bit like Wraiths and (Tolkien) Rangers on hardcore mode. It may help that having non-Lakewalkers around an awakened malice is actively detrimental rather than helpful.

Paladin of Souls: one creative sorcerer did become a rapidly expanding hegemon, checked only by divine intervention.

Kencyr books: having enough Old Blood to make psychic bonds is absolutely essential to being a Highlord leader.

Real world: almost every king has claimed some sort of divine justification for being above everyone else. Descent from the gods, blessings (oracles, anointment by priests, curing "the king's evil"), being Defender of the Faith, *being* a high priest, some combination of the above. The big exception might be in elective monarchies and even then there was probably overlap (the Roman kings were high priests, the Kings of the Germans usually also became Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope is the Pope). In a D&D ish world where people with actual divine blessing or magical bloodlines run around, I would expect kings to have some actual thing going on, whether it was directly useful or useful only in providing 'glamour' and specialness.

mindstalk
2020-06-09, 05:14 PM
Do you see medical doctors or weather forecasters holding political power as any kind of rule in real life?

No, for the same reason we no longer see skilled warriors and people with royal parents having political power. Modern democracies run on wildly different rules. Most D&D societies are universal suffrage democracies.

Historically, convincing people you could forecast the weather and eclipses and such *did* lead to power, though more through the priest path than the king path. Medieval kings were believed to be able to cure a kind of illness by their blessed touch, though no one became king through their (non-existent) healing power.


Bards benefit from it more than sorcerers.

Hey, if your ruling class is all bards, I'd take that as a mageocracy.


For example, the fastest learning human fighter will have 1 extra year to gain experience compared to the fastest learning wizard, and the slowest learning human fighter will have 6 extra years compared to the slowest learning wizard.

I don't think that's a big difference, compared to adult lifespans. Especially in settings where upper class people are unlikely to be carried off by random disease, thanks to cure spells.


-----

If Good gods support the status quo, that implies a very different status quo than simply lifting from medieval history would get you.

Nifft
2020-06-09, 05:17 PM
Eberron: I forget the country name, but the Inspired are a psionic ruling class. It's not just having psionics though, it's more like being ruled by extraplanar psionic Goa'uld.

Sarlona is the country you're talking about. The common adage seems to be: "In Inspired Sarlona, nightmares have YOU."

It could be argued that Dragonmarked Houses (the local international guilds) form a kinda-sorta Mageocracy, in that they've got exclusive access to a form of magic, but they're mostly not actual mages.

AdAstra
2020-06-09, 06:50 PM
Not really true; legitimacy has often mattered, though in different ways than in a nationalist-democratic society. I'm reading Alexander of Macedon, and aspects beyond brute military power come up a lot. The first Persian to conquer Egypt insulted the religion badly, which caused trouble for 200 years; Alexander was more respectful and was seen as a genuine liberator. In conquering Persia itself Alexander tried to slip into being the next Great King, but he wasn't Zoroastrian, nor of the Achmaenid dynasty, so it didn't work and he snapped.

Elsewhere, Augustus became a monarch while carefully avoiding the Roman trappings of kingship, presumably because he thought that would make his life easier. To get power you want an army, to keep power without constant struggle you want an army and the priests and people not being allergic to you.

That said, there are certainly also many cases where people don't care much who's on top as long as they're left alone (not overtaxed and making their own local decisions). Alexander in Asia Minor was like that; many cities swapped easily from paying tribute to the Great King to paying "contributions" to the Hegemon of the Hellenic League.

Yup. While you can take over an area with pure military force, it's very difficult to maintain it with that. Armies are not very big and they require a lot of support to function. Even the Mongols, who were relatively self-sufficient by most standards, had to regularly loot and keep moving in order to keep their horses fed, have enough ammunition, replace lost weapons, etc. And along the same lines, even the Mongols, infamous for brutality, were actually very reasonable as long as you surrendered when they rolled up and didn't do anything to piss them off. And even if a force can keep fighting and putting down local revolts indefinitely, it won't necessarily want to, making decent governance critical to maintaining power.

If your fancy Wizards (And you do need Wizards) have to drop their business every week because some village off in the east refused to pay their taxes, or started starving because you neglected to send food aid last month, or no one was around to deal with the bandit problem they were having, then they will, eventually, get sick of it, and probably stop doing it. Fail to placate the mages, and they will quit or kill you, the same way that armies or nobility often turn on their rulers.

You don't have to be loved, but if people hate you, they will burn down their own cities and farms to keep you from having them. They will revolt the second you turn your back, or worse, they will let you believe them cowed, gradually build their strength, perhaps train up or hire their own high level casters, and have your key officials assassinated in their sleep. They will tire out your forces through sheer numbers if nothing else, and eventually, you'll either have no more subjects, no more mages to keep those subjects under control, or be dead because someone succeeded on their quest.

Tanarii
2020-06-09, 08:39 PM
Bards do seem to have the ideal mix of spells and skills for messing with politics.
With their mastery of narrative structure, they should be ruling the entire cosmos by now!
Yes, but they know what happens to someone that takes over by shenanigans. Narratively speaking. :smallamused:

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-09, 10:22 PM
In a given area maybe that would happen, but there are limits to how much power you can consolidate on a broader scale. Consider the existence of multiple countries in real life.

You mean a state of affairs dominated by a small number of superpowers with technological or resource advantages? I don't want to get too into real world politics, but looking at e.g. the Cold War as "there are limits to how much power you can consolidate" is not really accurate. The limit on the power of nations is other nations.


due to their inherent power they find themselves as above thed position of ruler. Why be a ruler when you can do whatever you want anyway?

A hands-off ruler is still a ruler. The president of the United States doesn't have a whole lot to do with the day-to-day operation of the government at a local or state level, but he's still in charge.


For example, the fastest learning human fighter will have 1 extra year to gain experience compared to the fastest learning wizard, and the slowest learning human fighter will have 6 extra years compared to the slowest learning wizard.

The Fighter can just multiclass into Wizard at 2nd level.


Do you see medical doctors or weather forecasters holding political power as any kind of rule in real life?

Can weather forcasters call down hurricanes on people who don't listen to them?


Yup. While you can take over an area with pure military force, it's very difficult to maintain it with that. Armies are not very big and they require a lot of support to function.

Your army doesn't need to be nearly as big if it's comprised of Dragons, Demons, high level adventurers, or any of the other numerous options D&D provides for extremely elite troops. And it doesn't require all that much support when you have access to Fabricate, Create Food and Water, and Remove Disease.


perhaps train up or hire their own high level casters

At which point the number of mageocracies does not change. If you push high level casters out of power with high level casters, the people in power are still high level casters. The only way to beat them is by joining them. Much as it was with agriculture, or the state, or technology.

KineticDiplomat
2020-06-09, 11:39 PM
There seems to be some confusion as to the execution of government versus its leadership. A mage-ocracy doesn’t mean every clerical position is filled by a mage, any more than medieval lords required the knightly class to be tax collectors. Or, if you prefer, Roman senators needed to be the ones tallying grain counts at the docks. Even the Persian empires, far flung and highly developed, were mostly ruled by a mounted warrior caste even as they were administered by other. Hell, even a modern president, congressman, MP or prime minister does very little actual administrative work and usually is rather ignorant of the actual cogs of the machine outside perhaps a few areas of experience. The idea that “mages wouldn’t be rulers because they wouldn’t want to be clerks” is somewhat undone when you consider it is a rare ruling class indeed that does its own chuck work.

What makes it a mage-based government (or real, no crap actual theocracy) is that the ruling elites are magic. The pre-req to being in the ruling elite is magic. Presumably just as a Doge had men who were not merchant princes to figure out how many yards of cloth his fleet needed for sales, or to collect his taxes, so to would mages have trusted mundanes to handle that sort of thing.

Vahnavoi
2020-06-10, 12:48 AM
No, for the same reason we no longer see skilled warriors and people with royal parents having political power. Modern democracies run on wildly different rules. Most D&D societies are universal suffrage democracies.

You are right that D&D societies tend to not be modern democracies (I am presuming you accidentally omitted "not"), but the phenomenom I outlined is not limited to democracies at all. I think we can all agree that weapons were important levers of political power going back to the stone age, but it was not a rule that producers of said weapons would also be the ruling elite.

So it isn't about anything to do with democracy; it's about whether the skills and time required to produce a service allow for or overlap with requirements of social power.


Historically, convincing people you could forecast the weather and eclipses and such *did* lead to power, though more through the priest path than the king path. Medieval kings were believed to be able to cure a kind of illness by their blessed touch, though no one became king through their (non-existent) healing power.

The very fact that you are dismissing kingly healing powers as non-existent should tell you that this tells us more about how what people believe of their rulers is sometimes of greater influence than what said rulers can actually do. In D&D terms, if a caster fails enough Will saves or Sense Motive checks against a non-caster's intimidate, diplomacy or bluff checks at early levels, said caster can remain subservient to those non-casters well past the point where the caster's personal power eclipses the non-casters.


I don't think that's a big difference, compared to adult lifespans. Especially in settings where upper class people are unlikely to be carried off by random disease, thanks to cure spells.

It is a big difference given D&D's rules are in effect. I already explained this. By ignoring it, you're allowing casters to both literally and figuratively to skip level 1. You are assuming casters already have all the tools required to take over without going through or examining the intervening steps they'd need to take to get there.

---


The Fighter can just multiclass into Wizard at 2nd level.

Sure they can. They don't have to and they don't need to. Furthermore, why would they? The benefits of multiclassing into wizard are not obvious in a setting where non-wizards killed all the wizards before the wizards could get off the ground. :smalltongue:


Can weather forcasters call down hurricanes on people who don't listen to them?

No. Neither can low-level casters. You're doing the same thing I warned mindstalk of: letting the casters literally and figuratively skip level 1. I said it already: yes, high-level casters can dominate low-level non-casters. It doesn't follow that said scenario is the one that happens.


Your army doesn't need to be nearly as big if it's comprised of Dragons, Demons, high level adventurers, or any of the other numerous options D&D provides for extremely elite troops. And it doesn't require all that much support when you have access to Fabricate, Create Food and Water, and Remove Disease.

This is true, but how do you get there from being a teenager who is just starting their wizard apprenticeship?

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-10, 07:16 AM
Sure they can. They don't have to and they don't need to. Furthermore, why would they? The benefits of multiclassing into wizard are not obvious in a setting where non-wizards killed all the wizards before the wizards could get off the ground. :smalltongue:

If the Fighters are killing all the Wizards to avoid competition, clearly they recognize the power of being a Wizard. You can't have it both ways.


No. Neither can low-level casters. You're doing the same thing I warned mindstalk of: letting the casters literally and figuratively skip level 1. I said it already: yes, high-level casters can dominate low-level non-casters. It doesn't follow that said scenario is the one that happens.

A Dragon is never level one. A level one Beguiler or Bard is perfect capable of wielding social power. The idea that high level casters will simply globally not appear is absurd. There are lots of people who might become Wizards. Even if only one in a thousand succeeds, that's still more than enough when an individual Wizard stands a good chance of conquering most countries, at which point he can protect all the chump Wizards.

Telok
2020-06-10, 10:37 AM
Wasn't ancient Egypt under the pharaohs a thousand year plus theocracy even without actual divine magic and d&d demigod rulers?

Vahnavoi
2020-06-10, 12:49 PM
Wasn't ancient Egypt under the pharaohs a thousand year plus theocracy even without actual divine magic and d&d demigod rulers?

I'm not an expert on Egypt specifically, but yes, theocracies have existed and they can be very long lasting.

So what?


If the Fighters are killing all the Wizards to avoid competition, clearly they recognize the power of being a Wizard. You can't have it both ways.

The fighters only need to notice that wizards are competing for the same resources, such as food or wealth, to recognize them as rivals or a threat to be eliminated. They can even decide to kill the wizards purely for moral reasons, without it having anything to do with the wizards' perceived power. They don't need to know anything about magic or its potential - in fact, by the rules, they probably can't. Decipher script, use magic device, knowledge (arcane) and spellcraft are all cross class skill for fighters. Furthermore, each level of spells requires a tresshold of intelligence that a fighter doesn't need to pass to be a successfull fighter. By the rules, they can't read a wizard's spellbook and extrapolate that learning magic missile today will get them wish later.


A Dragon is never level one.

That's because they're first eggs and then hatchlings. :smalltongue:

Less tongue-in-cheek, I was thinking of revisiting the "aboleths and dragons" argument anyway. More on that below.


A level one Beguiler or Bard is perfect capable of wielding social power.

And? You think I'm in disagreement when I pointed out the same about bards myself? That's not what the argument is about. It's about whether this inevitably leads to magocracy - and it doesn't because members of both classes can still fail to set it up.


The idea that high level casters will simply globally not appear is absurd.

It's not absurd at all. Something being possible doesn't make it inevitable when dealing with non-infinite time and non-infinite people. To give a reasonable argument why a setting wouldn't be a magocracy, one doesn't need to provide an argument why the world would never be a magocracy - and on the flipside, an argument for why the world would become a magocracy given arbitrary amount of time and people, doesn't necessarily prove why it should be one right now.


There are lots of people who might become Wizards. Even if only one in a thousand succeeds, that's still more than enough when an individual Wizard stands a good chance of conquering most countries, at which point he can protect all the chump Wizards.

"If only one in a thousand"? Why'd it even be one of a thousand? Furthermore, what's the seed population for these thousand wizard aspirants? Why'd people keep trying to be those, if the first wizards got crushed?

In a dynamic system, the likelihood of something happening doesn't stay constant. You say that if one wizard gets through, they can protect all the chump wizards - but the reverse of that is that if the barbarians, or fighters, or whoever, win the first round, that nets them extra years to gain experience, and allows them to become better at oppressing aspiring wizards, if they feel like it.

If the mob with torches and pitchforks keeps burning at the stake anyone who spends too many gold pieces on fancy inks and parchment, at some point intelligent people - you know, the kind who'd make good wizards - will realize that in a fighter-dominated society they're more likely to survive if they become something that's not a wizard. This will limit both numbers and power of aspiring wizards, which will make them even easier to oppress.

In that kind of scenario, the potential rise of a magocracy no longer has anything to do with mechanical power of casters, and everything to do with the unsurprising fact that yes, non-caster societies can catastrophically fail too.

---

Now back to "aboleths and dragons".

If your counter-argument to me is that "well, by lore, aboleths and dragons get a headstart on everyone, so they'd win", you're technically correct, but you're not actually talking about mechanical power of magic anymore, or even mechanical power of those creatures.

Why? Because those creatures starting first is not mechanically derived from any rule - instead, it's a rule-in-itself that exists by arbitrary authorial decision, and their mechanical powers are derived from it (based on whatever mechanics the authors decided would suit their arbitrarily-powerfull-and-ancient creatures).

You could as well talk about elves instead - it's a classic trope that elves had these super-awesome magical societies before, but don't right now. If you look at how elf characters are mechanically presented in the system, they aren't all that great. Arguably, vanilla elves are worse than vanilla humans as a character option, given equal playing ground humans could outcompete them.

So why would elves dominate? They just did, because they came first by arbitrary authorial decision. The conclusion is baked in the setting premise.

The same applies to aboleths and dragons. If you want to discuss reasonable explanations for why something wouldn't happen, maybe don't assume from the get go things that'd make such an explanation unreasonable. The starting age tables at least leave something up for discussion, because they're random. You can actually make a simulation of 100 starting characters of each class and see if, for example, those 25 barbarians can defeat 3 wizards, and how often. The initial inputs may still be arbitrary, but they won't dictate the end result beforehand.

HeraldOfExius
2020-06-10, 01:01 PM
Adding to the previously given examples of theocracies and magocracies, there's Razmiran from Pathfinder. It's officially defined as a "Theocratic Dictatorship," since it's ruled by a "god" and his "priests" help make sure everybody stays in line. Except Razmir is just an ordinary mortal wizard (well, a high level mortal wizard), and his priests are also arcane spellcasters. So the end result is a country where being in a position of authority requires arcane power (a magocracy) and government and religious authority are linked (a theocracy).

Of course, Razmir's success with setting up his own magocracy/theocracy can be attributed to being a high level character that managed to gain enough loyal followers that he could intimidate people into accepting his government. Being a wizard undoubtedly made it easier to get started, but being high level and having loyal enforcers aren't exclusive to spellcasters.

mindstalk
2020-06-10, 04:25 PM
A dystopian setting where a cabal of fighters uniformly murders level 1 wizards does nothing to explain why an ordinary D&D setting isn't a mageocracy.

----

Another 'mageocracy': the world of Girl Genius, where Mad Science Rules!... poorly!

Powerful Sparks can make terrible weapons and/or people-substitutes, giving them a basis for further power. (It's easier to rule by death ray if loyal clanks guard your sleep.) They're not so powerful or versatile that rule and taxation are worthless to them, especially since most Sparks face a tradeoff in their people-substitutes: loyal but stupid clanks (clockwork robots), or smart constructs who have all the vagaries of normal people but might feel gratitude for being created or like no one else will feed them.

A new Spark ruler probably has little legitimacy other than power, but older families acquire some through nobility-marriage, longevity, or sheer competence and benefit. Also legitimacy in the eyes of the people and in the eyes of nobles can be different... Klaus showed an odd (given his usual social adeptness) contempt for legitimacy in the eyes of the ruling class, and it bit his empire in the ass.

Zarrgon
2020-06-10, 06:57 PM
What makes it a mage-based government (or real, no crap actual theocracy) is that the ruling elites are magic. The pre-req to being in the ruling elite is magic.

That is not a Mageocracies though. That is just any government of people who happen to be spellcasters. A Mageocracy is a government run by spellcasters that use magic to govern and rule. That is the single thing that makes a Mageocracy unique.



Now back to "aboleths and dragons".

Though in a reality anything could happen. You say X, I say Y.

But even if it did happen, it can unhappen....that is exactly how reality works. Say like just after the dawn of time aboleths did take over a world. Ok. Fine. Lets say they rule that world with an iron tentacle for X years. Say until a meteor strike obliterates their civilization or maybe a solar flare or maybe a revolt or any of an endless of world ending things. Eventually, everything falls. Then enter, eventually, the normal world.

AdAstra
2020-06-10, 07:10 PM
You mean a state of affairs dominated by a small number of superpowers with technological or resource advantages? I don't want to get too into real world politics, but looking at e.g. the Cold War as "there are limits to how much power you can consolidate" is not really accurate. The limit on the power of nations is other nations.
Modern Nations are completely irrelevant to this discussion since that's not even close to the world of DnD. A tank is not a Dragon and Sending is not the Internet.




A hands-off ruler is still a ruler. The president of the United States doesn't have a whole lot to do with the day-to-day operation of the government at a local or state level, but he's still in charge.



The Fighter can just multiclass into Wizard at 2nd level.



Can weather forcasters call down hurricanes on people who don't listen to them?



Your army doesn't need to be nearly as big if it's comprised of Dragons, Demons, high level adventurers, or any of the other numerous options D&D provides for extremely elite troops. And it doesn't require all that much support when you have access to Fabricate, Create Food and Water, and Remove Disease.



At which point the number of mageocracies does not change. If you push high level casters out of power with high level casters, the people in power are still high level casters. The only way to beat them is by joining them. Much as it was with agriculture, or the state, or technology.

The problem isn't that you army can't control all that territory. The Mongols definitely proved you can. The problem is that eventually your troops will get tired, degrade, integrated enough with the locals, or get pissed off enough that they stop following your orders. Dragons, Demons, and especially high-level adventurers are not going to tolerate long term occupation duty. They are not going to tolerate eating the explicitly bland rations of Create Food and Water for years. And they are not going to tolerate you if you keep making decisions that force them to do more boring work. They will get sick of you, and chances are, you will not be able to stop them from, at the very least, ruining whatever plans you have.

Also, it's absolutely possible for high level casters to depose a government without becoming the new government. Adventurers do that on a regular basis. Make the Super Wizard mad, he annihilates you and all your works, and then he goes back to his study. He's not obligated to fill the spot you leave behind.

There seem to be a lot of assumptions here that because governments hold most of the power in our world, that everyone in DnD land who has power wants to be in the government. But that's blatantly false. The universe of DnD is one where there are countless mind-bogglingly powerful creatures who could not care less about ruling a kingdom, and a lot who have a vested interest in killing anyone of similar power who starts trying to acquire more. It's a world where it's not just governments with nukes and armies, but random citizens working out of their backyards.

Cluedrew
2020-06-10, 07:28 PM
You mean a state of affairs dominated by a small number of superpowers with technological or resource advantages? I don't want to get too into real world politics, but looking at e.g. the Cold War as "there are limits to how much power you can consolidate" is not really accurate. The limit on the power of nations is other nations.Yes it is a soft limit where situations allow it to consolidate more than usual. But without going into detail that rivalry is not nearly as important in the world as it was and it will probably get less significant as time goes on.

So even if a global wizard-state appeared it would probably collapse (actually something like that is the back drop in more than one setting), maybe through infighting of the rulers, maybe by an rebellion of the non-magic folk. Maybe part way through its not really a magorcracy because leadership gets lazy and slowly hands off the work of spell casting.

But really I think is a magocracy will not happen for a very simple reason: Wizards are better off casting their spells than making political decisions. A nation with spell-casters in its public service will probably do very well. But taking those spell-casters out of the service so they aren't using magic and instead participating in political debates isn't going to help that.

mindstalk
2020-06-10, 07:53 PM
Another Magocracy:

the Black Company books. TV Tropes might say this is less of a magocracy and more of a Sorcerer King setup, it's not that only magic-users have legitimacy (as in Glantri or Alphatia), but that some wizards are powerful enough to rule by sheer power. They can still use armies, but if it's them vs. the army, they probably win.

It seems to be a global universal where there are sufficiently powerful wizards, which isn't everywhere. The Domination, then a long interregnum, then the Lady and the Taken vs. the Circle of Eighteen. From various hints later I think the Dominator had tried to suppress magical knowledge outside his slaves, and maybe there was a pogrom too, so knowledge only built back up after a few centuries. A wizard became powerful enough to let the Lady free ("oops"), and 100 years later more wizards were capable of giving her a fight or becoming new Taken.

The middle South simply didn't have living god-wizards, but when one showed up, she took over, on the classic "do what I say and give me tribute or I kill you all" model.

Which would be a pretty good model for evil dragons to follow. jhubert's Urbis has some desert kingdom run by a family of blue dragons to increase their hoards via taxes, but it doesn't seem a common model.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-10, 09:08 PM
The fighters only need to notice that wizards are competing for the same resources, such as food or wealth, to recognize them as rivals or a threat to be eliminated.

People don't behave that way. They generally don't turn on their neighbors for resources, and when they do they sure as hell aren't drawing lines over profession. Moreover, even if you accept total self-interest, it's not even a smart strategy. Groups beat individuals. The Fighters would be better off recruiting some Wizards, just as they're better off forming into groups of Fighters.


In a dynamic system, the likelihood of something happening doesn't stay constant. You say that if one wizard gets through, they can protect all the chump wizards - but the reverse of that is that if the barbarians, or fighters, or whoever, win the first round, that nets them extra years to gain experience, and allows them to become better at oppressing aspiring wizards, if they feel like it.

It's not happening iteratively, it's happening in parallel. The population of the planet was already in the tens of millions by the rise of Rome, and by the Middle Ages, it was in the hundreds of millions. Maybe the Fighters beat up the Wizards in some places. But they won't do it everywhere, and that means at some point a nation of people without magic collides with a nation of people with it. That one does not go so well for the Fighters.


Modern Nations are completely irrelevant to this discussion since that's not even close to the world of DnD. A tank is not a Dragon and Sending is not the Internet.

Of course a Dragon isn't a tank. A Dragon is better than a tank. It flies, spreads terror, uses magic, has genius-level intelligence, and doesn't require logistical support. Every general in the world would kill to be able to replace their tanks with an equivalent number of Dragons.


Dragons, Demons, and especially high-level adventurers are not going to tolerate long term occupation duty.

Why should they need to? You seem to have this weird assumption that a mageocracy would be inherently illegitimate and hated. But that's not based on anything. Magic feeds the hungry, heals the sick, and provides a higher standard of living for everyone. Sure, no one likes being conquered. But it's going to be awfully hard to muster up an insurgency with a rallying cry of "kill the people who are giving us free food".


He's not obligated to fill the spot you leave behind.

But someone will. And if the incentives point towards "Wizard" (and they do), it'll be a Wizard. If you don't change the incentives, you can't effect lasting change. All you can do is select for leaders who are able to stop you from killing them, or you don't hate enough to kill. If you were to kill the king of England or France or Spain in the Middle Ages, that wouldn't have stopped those nations from having kings.


The universe of DnD is one where there are countless mind-bogglingly powerful creatures who could not care less about ruling a kingdom, and a lot who have a vested interest in killing anyone of similar power who starts trying to acquire more.

Then they do have an interest in ruling a kingdom. If it's worth killing your rivals over, it's worth taking for yourself, if only to keep from them. Especially if you can get the other powerful people to join your government (perhaps by giving them positions of power, in some kind of "mageocracy"). Just as a nation of people is vastly stronger than any individual person, a nation of Dragons is vastly stronger than any individual Dragon. There's a reason "work together" conquered the world and "murder everyone else" didn't, and it applies in D&Dland too.


So even if a global wizard-state appeared it would probably collapse (actually something like that is the back drop in more than one setting), maybe through infighting of the rulers, maybe by an rebellion of the non-magic folk. Maybe part way through its not really a magorcracy because leadership gets lazy and slowly hands off the work of spell casting.

Sure, it might collapse. But that doesn't mean magocracy goes away, just as the collapse of a nation doesn't mean the abolition of the nation-state. Technologies spread far beyond the nations that develop them. Gunpowder was invented in an empire that's long gone. But it's used everywhere today. The first nation to figure out "hey, magic makes us better at everything, let's use a bunch of magic" might fall. On a long enough time scale it almost certainly will. But just as the fall of the societies that invented fire, or writing, or agriculture didn't result in those technologies disappearing, the fall of one mageocracy won't make people abandon magic.

AdAstra
2020-06-10, 09:48 PM
People don't behave that way. They generally don't turn on their neighbors for resources, and when they do they sure as hell aren't drawing lines over profession. Moreover, even if you accept total self-interest, it's not even a smart strategy. Groups beat individuals. The Fighters would be better off recruiting some Wizards, just as they're better off forming into groups of Fighters.



It's not happening iteratively, it's happening in parallel. The population of the planet was already in the tens of millions by the rise of Rome, and by the Middle Ages, it was in the hundreds of millions. Maybe the Fighters beat up the Wizards in some places. But they won't do it everywhere, and that means at some point a nation of people without magic collides with a nation of people with it. That one does not go so well for the Fighters.



Of course a Dragon isn't a tank. A Dragon is better than a tank. It flies, spreads terror, uses magic, has genius-level intelligence, and doesn't require logistical support. Every general in the world would kill to be able to replace their tanks with an equivalent number of Dragons.



Why should they need to? You seem to have this weird assumption that a mageocracy would be inherently illegitimate and hated. But that's not based on anything. Magic feeds the hungry, heals the sick, and provides a higher standard of living for everyone. Sure, no one likes being conquered. But it's going to be awfully hard to muster up an insurgency with a rallying cry of "kill the people who are giving us free food".



But someone will. And if the incentives point towards "Wizard" (and they do), it'll be a Wizard. If you don't change the incentives, you can't effect lasting change. All you can do is select for leaders who are able to stop you from killing them, or you don't hate enough to kill. If you were to kill the king of England or France or Spain in the Middle Ages, that wouldn't have stopped those nations from having kings.



Then they do have an interest in ruling a kingdom. If it's worth killing your rivals over, it's worth taking for yourself, if only to keep from them. Especially if you can get the other powerful people to join your government (perhaps by giving them positions of power, in some kind of "mageocracy"). Just as a nation of people is vastly stronger than any individual person, a nation of Dragons is vastly stronger than any individual Dragon. There's a reason "work together" conquered the world and "murder everyone else" didn't, and it applies in D&Dland too.



Sure, it might collapse. But that doesn't mean magocracy goes away, just as the collapse of a nation doesn't mean the abolition of the nation-state. Technologies spread far beyond the nations that develop them. Gunpowder was invented in an empire that's long gone. But it's used everywhere today. The first nation to figure out "hey, magic makes us better at everything, let's use a bunch of magic" might fall. On a long enough time scale it almost certainly will. But just as the fall of the societies that invented fire, or writing, or agriculture didn't result in those technologies disappearing, the fall of one mageocracy won't make people abandon magic.

A tank will not run away because it gets bored, and it will certainly not eat you unless you have some very poorly trained drivers.

Magicians can do all those things, but they are limited in what they can do any given day. You need administrators to do all the number crunching so that you actually have enough spells for everyone and mages are where they need to be. In addition, while Cure Wounds and Create Food and Water are useful, you can’t rely on them unless you want your mages to be nothing more than medicine and food machines (and even then they’ll probably be insufficient). You use magic when it’s *actually* a good tool for the job, otherwise you’re wasting so many valuable spell slots and mages. Yeah, you can relieve a famine for a while with enough mages, but if you’re having too many famines that’s just a waste of good mages. And that requires people to do the job of administration, of logistics. And if we go by the very reasonable assumption that magic is a difficult skill to learn, one can also make the very reasonable inference that giving the magicians administrative and logistical jobs would be using time they could be learning more magic, or relaxing, or doing whatever other things they might want, since there aren’t many efficient ways to control them.

And I should be clear, the point I am making is not that magicians aren’t useful to a government. It’s that the THREAD TOPIC (sorry if that sounds confrontational, on mobile so I can’t use italics), which specifically posits that all DnD governments should be mageocracies or theocracies, doesn’t take into account the myriad reasons why a government won’t necessarily have mages in charge, and why magic will not necessarily be the primary metric by which authority is assigned.

mindstalk
2020-06-10, 10:24 PM
why magic will not necessarily be the primary metric by which authority is assigned.

Well, the key question is what *is* the metric by which authority is assigned? Historically it's most often "whoever leads the most powerful warband", with some religious/nationalist legitimacy sometimes being a factor. The king can kill or intimidate anyone else who wants to be king. And this applies both outside and inside the warband: the king has to avoid getting offed by one of his immediate underlings.

So what will tend to be more stable: the king having levels in Fighter or Aristocrat and having caster underlings, or the king being a caster?

Of course, there's also succession, especially with D&D's traditional hostility to life extension so the immortal wizard-king is out (unless you go elf or dragon[1]). But the stability of supposedly hereditary monarchy has been highly variable *anyway*, down to new generals taking over every generation or two.

[1] Unrelated to magocracy, I would kind of expect to see a fair number of human populations with elf lords or rulers. Not because elves are necessarily better, but because if populations mix then I'd expect you'd sometimes get such -- elf leader of a warband -- who then sticks around due to the long lifespan. They'd accrete.

Or dragon or demon kings, many of which do have an advantage in taking over...

Telok
2020-06-10, 10:45 PM
And I should be clear, the point I am making is not that magicians aren’t useful to a government. It’s that the THREAD TOPIC (sorry if that sounds confrontational, on mobile so I can’t use italics), which specifically posits that all DnD governments should be mageocracies or theocracies, doesn’t take into account the myriad reasons why a government won’t necessarily have mages in charge, and why magic will not necessarily be the primary metric by which authority is assigned.

Italics, bold, etc., can be done with brackets [ and ] with an i or b in them before the words, and the same but with a slash-letter like / and i coming after the words.

And the reasons a gov might not have wizards in charge is generally being given as the same sort of reasons they wouldn't have any other particular classes in charge.

You can't have fighter rulers becaise they dont have the skills for it. Or if they stop fighting they go soft and get taken over. Or a caster or monster will mind control them. Or they swording ability won't be the primary metric by which authority is assigned. Or. Or...

AdAstra
2020-06-10, 11:04 PM
Well, the key question is what *is* the metric by which authority is assigned? Historically it's most often "whoever leads the most powerful warband", with some religious/nationalist legitimacy sometimes being a factor. The king can kill or intimidate anyone else who wants to be king. And this applies both outside and inside the warband: the king has to avoid getting offed by one of his immediate underlings.

So what will tend to be more stable: the king having levels in Fighter or Aristocrat and having caster underlings, or the king being a caster?

Of course, there's also succession, especially with D&D's traditional hostility to life extension so the immortal wizard-king is out (unless you go elf or dragon[1]). But the stability of supposedly hereditary monarchy has been highly variable *anyway*, down to new generals taking over every generation or two.

[1] Unrelated to magocracy, I would kind of expect to see a fair number of human populations with elf lords or rulers. Not because elves are necessarily better, but because if populations mix then I'd expect you'd sometimes get such -- elf leader of a warband -- who then sticks around due to the long lifespan. They'd accrete.

Or dragon or demon kings, many of which do have an advantage in taking over...

Kinda depends on how good the would-be fighter/aristocrat king is able to rally people to their cause. People have ascended to power for reasons other than being personally good at doing much of anything other than talking to people (Bardocracies baby).

Heck, sometimes, a leader is chosen just because they wouldn't upset the current balance of power and they/their family have shown good enough rulership. Many real-world countries have imported kings for this reason. Perhaps the reason why most DnD governments have nonmagical rulers, is because they are the choice that every caster can tolerate.

The Wizards might not want the Clerics to rule because they'll take a lot of taxes for the church and probably impose certain brands of worship. The Clerics might not want the Wizards to rule because they get distracted too easily and spend too much time in their books rather than leading. Wizards and Clerics don't want the Sorcerers to rule because they're all bloodline no discipline, and not really as good anyhow. And everyone already has other priorities anyhow. A competent muggle, though? They can do all the boring administrative stuff, the casters can do their magic and some government work on the side, and if the ruler gets too big for their britches? Casters just kill em and get a new one.

I think a big issue withany DnD government is going to be stability. How do you even run a functioning kingdom when you have random individuals who are basically mini-gods? Even if you manage to get most of the casters on board with your leader, all it takes is one sufficiently wily person with class levels, or particularly powerful and clever monster, to do a whole lot of damage. For a government to even hang on, it probably has to be really well-managed. Petty squabbles and power struggles will put you in an Imperium of Man situation rather quickly.


Italics, bold, etc., can be done with brackets [ and ] with an i or b in them before the words, and the same but with a slash-letter like / and i coming after the words.

And the reasons a gov might not have wizards in charge is generally being given as the same sort of reasons they wouldn't have any other particular classes in charge.

You can't have fighter rulers becaise they dont have the skills for it. Or if they stop fighting they go soft and get taken over. Or a caster or monster will mind control them. Or they swording ability won't be the primary metric by which authority is assigned. Or. Or...

And for this reason, yeah, you're right, Fighter rulers don't make much sense either. Mages are certainly more likely rulers than most of the mundanes.

The Glyphstone
2020-06-10, 11:23 PM
If we're assuming a rule-by-skill rather than rule-by-tyranny/mind control, wouldn't a Rogue/Bard make the most sense? Both have the sheer skill-points to max out their relevant skills with average or even low Int, letting them max the Cha stat. Obviously the Bard is better than the rogue if you can choose between the two because that Cha also gives magic, but the mundane Rogue will still be superior than the magical Wizard, or even the Sorcerer.

mindstalk
2020-06-10, 11:31 PM
I just like how we're debating actual class warfare.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-10, 11:53 PM
A tank will not run away because it gets bored, and it will certainly not eat you unless you have some very poorly trained drivers.

Tank operators have, in fact, rebelled against their governments. Governments still field tanks, because if you don't, you get conquered by the people who do. A Dragon is, at the end of the day, a person. You can inspire it to believe in your cause or just pay it in money.


Yeah, you can relieve a famine for a while with enough mages, but if you’re having too many famines that’s just a waste of good mages.

The idea that mages could do things for society that are more useful than preventing famines doesn't really seem like a compelling argument against the position that mages provide value to society.


And if we go by the very reasonable assumption that magic is a difficult skill to learn

That seems like a rather unreasonable assumption actually, seeing as levels in casting classes take (in editions released after 2000) exactly as much XP as levels in non-casting classes. And casters will have more administrative skills, both in terms of literal skill points and in terms of more abstract ability, than the vast majority of non-casters.


Of course, there's also succession, especially with D&D's traditional hostility to life extension so the immortal wizard-king is out (unless you go elf or dragon[1]).

The "hostility" is kind of overblown. Being a Lich or a Vampire just means you ping on Detect Evil. It's not like you're forced to start eating babies for breakfast (Vampires can feed safely with the help of Clerics that can cast Restoration). After the Vampire nobles turn back a couple of invasions on their own, the people will come around to having immortal super-soldiers as nobles. There are even non-Evil methods you could use, like a circle of Druids that use Reincarnate to reset their aging. I'd expect that in the long run, every nation would figure out some way of getting immortal rulers, because someone with centuries of experience is going to be better than any mortal king. Since those methods are most often available to casters, that's going to look a lot like mageocracy.


A competent muggle, though? They can do all the boring administrative stuff, the casters can do their magic and some government work on the side, and if the ruler gets too big for their britches? Casters just kill em and get a new one.

You are describing a form of government in which the casters are in charge. If someone kills you if you give them an order they don't like, you are not in any meaningful sense in charge of them.


If we're assuming a rule-by-skill rather than rule-by-tyranny/mind control, wouldn't a Rogue/Bard make the most sense?

Beguiler. You get all the relevant skills, and since you want to max Intelligence, you'll likely end up with more skills than a Rogue. Plus you get more magic than the Bard.

mindstalk
2020-06-11, 12:15 AM
The "hostility" is kind of overblown. Being a Lich or a Vampire just means you ping on Detect Evil. It's not like you're forced to start eating babies for breakfast


I go with RAI over RAW here. Immortality via becoming evil undead means you *are* evil, not that you just 'ping' it.


After the Vampire nobles turn back a couple of invasions on their own, the people will come around to having immortal super-soldiers as nobles.

One *could* make the case that an evil lich or vampire might not be worse than a bunch of evil warlords.


There are even non-Evil methods you could use, like a circle of Druids that use Reincarnate to reset their aging. I'd expect that in the long run, every nation would figure out some way of getting immortal rulers, because someone with centuries of experience is going to be better than any mortal king. Since those methods are most often available to casters, that's going to look a lot like mageocracy.

Casters, or member of long-lived species. But an interesting point. It also doesn't have to be a matter of "figuring out" or deliberate choice for competence (or more likely, stability). As I mentioned before: if we assume that competent power-grabbers are rarely overthrown in the first generation, then mortal ones churn as their children or grandchildren fight to retain (and often lose) power, while long-lived ones just stick around. The "low energy state" is most rulers being Philips of Macedon or Williams the Bastard who are long-lived and just keep going, at least until they lose to another conqueror.

I think D&D is hostile among fantasy RPGs to non-evil paths to longevity. Especially outside BECMI where potions of youth or wish spells were pretty useful (not to mention the whole endgame of becoming Immortals, open to non-casters); 3e was very big on not living past your normal lifespan. Vs. RuneQuest having an immortality spell, Ars Magica having longevity potions and various Mystery Cult alternatives, Exalted has Wyld mutations and other means, I'm pretty sure Mage had one or more ways, the low-magic RPG Qin had a couple different ways I think

AdAstra
2020-06-11, 12:17 AM
Tank operators have, in fact, rebelled against their governments. Governments still field tanks, because if you don't, you get conquered by the people who do. A Dragon is, at the end of the day, a person. You can inspire it to believe in your cause or just pay it in money.
If you have competent internal security, you replace the disloyal tank operators with ones more amenable to your interests. The tank itself has no agency. Replacing and training a dragon to work with your military is a whole lot more difficult, not least because a dragon can do nasty things to people on purpose. I should of course also point out that military equipment has far more diversity than just tanks, and with competent preservation efforts can be kept in minimally costly storage en masse for decades, with only the crews needing replacement and training, again unlike a dragon. I think I can fairly state that DnD dragons, which tend to have an independent streak at the best of times, are far more likely to leave or rebel than soldiers.


The idea that mages could do things for society that are more useful than preventing famines doesn't really seem like a compelling argument against the position that mages provide value to society.
Again, never argued mages have no use to society. It's that the people who do things, and the people who tell the doers what to do, are not always the same people. Our society is highly dependent on plumbers, sewage workers, roadworkers, engineers, construction workers, secretaries, soldiers, and all sorts of other professions. That does not mean that those people functionally hold all power in our society. In fact, those professions tend to have disproportionately low power in our society relative to their importance/murdering ability.



That seems like a rather unreasonable assumption actually, seeing as levels in casting classes take (in editions released after 2000) exactly as much XP as levels in non-casting classes. And casters will have more administrative skills, both in terms of literal skill points and in terms of more abstract ability, than the vast majority of non-casters.
The rules that delineate PC advancement are very different from the ones delineating NPC advancement, even in 3e. It's not as if a country's level 20 aristocrats got all their xp from personally killing mountains of creatures. If going by the fluff, most of the caster classes take far more time to even get to the point where you qualify as that class.



The "hostility" is kind of overblown. Being a Lich or a Vampire just means you ping on Detect Evil. It's not like you're forced to start eating babies for breakfast (Vampires can feed safely with the help of Clerics that can cast Restoration). After the Vampire nobles turn back a couple of invasions on their own, the people will come around to having immortal super-soldiers as nobles. There are even non-Evil methods you could use, like a circle of Druids that use Reincarnate to reset their aging. I'd expect that in the long run, every nation would figure out some way of getting immortal rulers, because someone with centuries of experience is going to be better than any mortal king. Since those methods are most often available to casters, that's going to look a lot like mageocracy.

Vampirism isn't really a caster-exclusive thing, unless you count vampire powers as spells.


You are describing a form of government in which the casters are in charge. If someone kills you if you give them an order they don't like, you are not in any meaningful sense in charge of them.

You do realize that there is a middle ground between "absolute power" and "literally cannot order you to do anything", right? As long as there are enough casters who want the current leader to keep them alive, then the leader will stay in place. It's like the places where the nobles elected the king. The king was still in charge so long as the nobles supported him. And of course, that's not counting the myriad nonmagical administrators who are also critical to the government.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-11, 01:04 AM
Now back to "aboleths and dragons".

If your counter-argument to me is that "well, by lore, aboleths and dragons get a headstart on everyone, so they'd win", you're technically correct, but you're not actually talking about mechanical power of magic anymore, or even mechanical power of those creatures.

Why? Because those creatures starting first is not mechanically derived from any rule - instead, it's a rule-in-itself that exists by arbitrary authorial decision, and their mechanical powers are derived from it (based on whatever mechanics the authors decided would suit their arbitrarily-powerfull-and-ancient creatures).

You could as well talk about elves instead - it's a classic trope that elves had these super-awesome magical societies before, but don't right now. If you look at how elf characters are mechanically presented in the system, they aren't all that great. Arguably, vanilla elves are worse than vanilla humans as a character option, given equal playing ground humans could outcompete them.

So why would elves dominate? They just did, because they came first by arbitrary authorial decision. The conclusion is baked in the setting premise.

The same applies to aboleths and dragons. If you want to discuss reasonable explanations for why something wouldn't happen, maybe don't assume from the get go things that'd make such an explanation unreasonable. The starting age tables at least leave something up for discussion, because they're random. You can actually make a simulation of 100 starting characters of each class and see if, for example, those 25 barbarians can defeat 3 wizards, and how often. The initial inputs may still be arbitrary, but they won't dictate the end result beforehand.

The entire point of the aboleths-and-dragons example is not to say that those two races coming first means that therefore aboleth-and-dragon-only worlds are a natural consequence of the rules, but rather that "Well, aboleths arose earlier so aboleths would kill off or dominate over any creatures that arose later" and "Well, fighters have earlier starting ages so fighters would kill off or dominate over wizards and other later-starting-age classes" are both equally ridiculous statements.

Sure, at the current point in time 1st-level fighters are on average younger than 1st level wizards, but that means basically nothing at a societal level because...
...starting ages might have been different in Ye Olden Days (e.g. back before most spells were invented, wizards might have had the same starting age as fighters, or even lower!);
...starting ages are averages, so it's entirely possible to have a tribe containing wizards who rolled 2 on the +2d6 and fighters who rolled 3 on the +1d4 so some of the wizards came first;
...different races have different starting ages, so it's entirely possible to have a tribe where the wizards are humans and the fighters are dwarves so all of the wizards came first;
...sorcerers and fighters have the same starting ages, so it's entirely possible for all the sorcerers to have killed off all the fighters instead;
...smart fighters might realize that if your tribe is N fighters + M wizards and other tribes are [N+M] fighters, you have a tactical, strategic, and logistical advantage against them;
...smarter fighters might realize that having at least one wizard on your side is better than not having at least one wizard on your side in pretty much all cases;
...Good-aligned fighters do not, as a general rule, commit mass wizard-ocide on teenage apprentices (or mass murder of anyone, in fact);
...and so on and so forth.
Trying to extrapolate from a single data point to an entire society is going to give you ridiculous answers, especially when that single data point doesn't actually have the fixed and unambiguous effect that you're implying it has.


I think D&D is hostile among fantasy RPGs to non-evil paths to longevity. Especially outside BECMI where potions of youth or wish spells were pretty useful (not to mention the whole endgame of becoming Immortals, open to non-casters); 3e was very big on not living past your normal lifespan. Vs. RuneQuest having an immortality spell, Ars Magica having longevity potions and various Mystery Cult alternatives, Exalted has Wyld mutations and other means, I'm pretty sure Mage had one or more ways, the low-magic RPG Qin had a couple different ways I think

There are actually a bunch of different non-evil immortality options in 3e: elans, killoren, and warforged are naturally immortal; there are multiple non-evil undead varieties, including explicitly-Good deathless; druids can sequentially reincarnate regardless of alignment; arcanists can become Incantifiers or Green Star Adepts or other classes that grant immortality; anyone can pick up immortality for a price with kissed by the ages; and more.

Not to mention that liches weren't Always Evil in AD&D (or even necessarily necromatically-inclined, as the old lichification ritual was more Transmutation than Necromancy), so for anyone who keeps using the old flavor (and for any liches old enough to have lichified themselves before the switchover, in settings where the rules change is an in-setting thing) becoming a lich is still a great non-Evil non-god-dependent form of immortality.

Satinavian
2020-06-11, 01:32 AM
I'm quite surprised at people saying "why aren't most scientists/engineers/etc. politicians, presidents and rulers?". The answer is simple. It's not about them not feeling up to it - everyone at some point had a "hey, if I were in charge, I'd do this..." thought, and might've followed on it, if not for one factor. They don't have any world-bending, almost instantly summonable power to circumvent normal processes, and use the same rules as everyone else, so it would take a gigantic amount of work and luck to get to a point where they could affect the situation.

That is an interesting side topic.

If you look at various parliaments and the professions of the parlamentarians, there is always a lot of people with a degree or background in law. Which makes sense. People who are knowledgeble about and invested in laws are more likely to get involved in drafting/amending laws.

But aside from law there are differences from country to country. Countries where scientists/engeneers have a high social status tend to get more of them elected as well. Countries that champion entrepreniership and the free market tend to have more people with a buissness background in the parliaments. There are countries where "being wealthy" helps you get elected and others where you should better hide your wealth to not turn voters away.

In a parlamentarian democracy, the parliament does tend to highlight the values of the society.



Of course, there's also succession, especially with D&D's traditional hostility to life extension so the immortal wizard-king is out (unless you go elf or dragon[1]). But the stability of supposedly hereditary monarchy has been highly variable *anyway*, down to new generals taking over every generation or two.
I would expect any gouvernment where immortals hold positions for really long times to show nearly all the problems of a gerontocracy. Even without explicit senility older people tend to get stuck in their ways and beholden to methods and experiences from their youth. And if all the major contacts of the people in power are as old as well and remember the same things, those tendencies get reinforced and the whole gouvernment stuck in the past. Sure, stability is nice but there comes a point where it becomes a problem.

mindstalk
2020-06-11, 01:34 AM
I suspect the electoral system also matters. Plurality can get you very different demographic results than party list, especially if parties make an effort to make diverse lists.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-11, 02:53 AM
I would expect any gouvernment where immortals hold positions for really long times to show nearly all the problems of a gerontocracy. Even without explicit senility older people tend to get stuck in their ways and beholden to methods and experiences from their youth. And if all the major contacts of the people in power are as old as well and remember the same things, those tendencies get reinforced and the whole gouvernment stuck in the past. Sure, stability is nice but there comes a point where it becomes a problem.

That really depends on what kinds of immortals you're talking about. Humans get stuck in their ways after a certain age as a quirk of humanity, but naturally-longer-lived races like elves and dwarves may not suffer the same handicap because they naturally tend toward a longer-term mindset and are used to drastic changes happening in their lifetimes, and particularly Chaotic-aligned beings might retain a certain flexibility of mind even after thousands of years, so turning either of those immortal might avoid the whole issue.

The method of immortality might matter as well. A druid who constantly reincarnates himself might find that ending up with a fresh young adult body might also give him a more youthful outlook on life that allows him to more easily consider new ideas; warforged are effectively unchanging on a mental level and one that develops a more curious and thoughtful personality relative to its kin might retain that indefinitely.

And of course "immortal rulers" doesn't necessarily imply "static rulership." A council of 5 immortal liches might actually consist of a rotating group of 30 liches that rule for a century or so, retire to their secret lairs to do arcane research for a millennium or two, and then come back to the world to rule again when they want to debut their latest experiments, and in that case newly-returned liches might be happy to go with whatever the current trends are for laws and religion and such because they've been away for so long that they appreciate the novely.

Basically, it's hard to generalize what rule by immortals would look like, you really need to take things on a case-by-case basis and two different Wizard-King-ruled nations might end up looking dramatically different based on the Wizard-Kings in question.

Nifft
2020-06-11, 08:56 AM
If we're assuming a rule-by-skill rather than rule-by-tyranny/mind control, wouldn't a Rogue/Bard make the most sense? Both have the sheer skill-points to max out their relevant skills with average or even low Int, letting them max the Cha stat. Obviously the Bard is better than the rogue if you can choose between the two because that Cha also gives magic, but the mundane Rogue will still be superior than the magical Wizard, or even the Sorcerer.

Finally, an explanation for why the true king was Aragorn: as a Ranger, he had more skill points.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-11, 05:24 PM
Casters, or member of long-lived species. But an interesting point. It also doesn't have to be a matter of "figuring out" or deliberate choice for competence (or more likely, stability). As I mentioned before: if we assume that competent power-grabbers are rarely overthrown in the first generation, then mortal ones churn as their children or grandchildren fight to retain (and often lose) power, while long-lived ones just stick around. The "low energy state" is most rulers being Philips of Macedon or Williams the Bastard who are long-lived and just keep going, at least until they lose to another conqueror.

Yes. In general, there's a very strong push towards having as many casters as possible in your government. That means a government that makes policies that favor casters, and is very likely lead by casters. In the long run, every caster means more magic items, more permanent magical effects, and more long-term infrastructure growth. Whereas putting non-casters in charge just gets you the regular middle ages.


If you have competent internal security, you replace the disloyal tank operators with ones more amenable to your interests.

Again, nations totally have civil wars. That is a thing that actually happens. Even to governments that are very powerful. The idea that Dragons might rebel is not a novel downside of Dragons. Especially when you consider how massively more effective they are than non-Dragons as a military. When the enemy is fielding flying tanks that your soldiers won't stand against, it doesn't matter a whole lot if their internal politics are slightly less stable.


In fact, those professions tend to have disproportionately low power in our society relative to their importance/murdering ability.

Yes, because the political systems of the modern world are fundamentally different from medieval ones.


The rules that delineate PC advancement are very different from the ones delineating NPC advancement, even in 3e. It's not as if a country's level 20 aristocrats got all their xp from personally killing mountains of creatures. If going by the fluff, most of the caster classes take far more time to even get to the point where you qualify as that class.

The rules really don't suggest that you need to spend a bunch of time doing magic study to be a Wizard. You can be a Wizard and an expert in politics, urban planning, or whatever, you just buy the relevant Knowledge skills.


As long as there are enough casters who want the current leader to keep them alive, then the leader will stay in place. It's like the places where the nobles elected the king. The king was still in charge so long as the nobles supported him.

Again, that is a system where the casters hold the power. It's also a system where they could just elect a caster. And why wouldn't they? A caster would have the relevant interests.


And of course, that's not counting the myriad nonmagical administrators who are also critical to the government.

Why should any of those exist? Casters are better at administration. They get better mental stats, and there are spells that are useful for administration. A Wizard with Divinations, Knowledge skills, and 20+ Intelligence is more efficient than any real-world bureaucrat.

Zarrgon
2020-06-11, 08:38 PM
You can't have fighter rulers becaise they dont have the skills for it. Or if they stop fighting they go soft and get taken over. Or a caster or monster will mind control them. Or they swording ability won't be the primary metric by which authority is assigned. Or. Or...

This does depend on the reality though. In D&D 0E, 1E, 2E and BECMI you sure can have fighter rules and spellcasters can't just "take over".



I think D&D is hostile among fantasy RPGs to non-evil paths to longevity.

It's not that hostile?

2E had tons of characters that lived long lifetimes. Other then undead. Chosen stay alive forever. There were plenty non undead "spirits''. Some races are immortal, plus of course outsiders. Plenty of people in high magic societies lived long times, if not "forever". Plus you always had the mystery ones too.

Even 3E has tons of classes that transform a person into an outsider.




The rules really don't suggest that you need to spend a bunch of time doing magic study to be a Wizard. You can be a Wizard and an expert in politics, urban planning, or whatever, you just buy the relevant Knowledge skills.


Depends on the "Rules" you use. D&D before 3E not only "suggested" that, but has a lot of rules that say that.



Again, that is a system where the casters hold the power. It's also a system where they could just elect a caster. And why wouldn't they? A caster would have the relevant interests.

Maybe not though? Is I like X so I will vote for person that likes X enough? They might not have your "exact" relevant interests after all. And even if they do have such interests for themselves, they might not have it for all the voters. Many a spellcaster or such has said : "I have banned all hostile attack magic for the safety of all and only me, my bodyguards, enforces, secret police and army can use hostile attack magic forevermore!"



Why should any of those exist? Casters are better at administration. They get better mental stats, and there are spells that are useful for administration. A Wizard with Divinations, Knowledge skills, and 20+ Intelligence is more efficient than any real-world bureaucrat.

Well....maybe not.

Sure, in theory they...might...have lots of nice tools, BUT.... just having the tools is not always enough. A wizard can do a bit well if they use lots of divinations, but note the "if". They have to both use the divination and then use that information. And simply put, not everyone will do that. Just getting people to use a useful tool often does not work, but you also have to "listen" to the advice/warnings/predictions/etc.

And this is on top of the People are People problem. Zorg is a high level diviner, but he still goes out and gets black out drunk every day....so his spellcasting and administration is not exactly the best.

Naja is obsessed with womens clothing to the exceptions of all else. Her city is full of poor starving homeless people, and yet ALL she cares about is opening "clothing check points" on every corner to measure women's dresses to make sure they are not "too short".

Not to mention "just being smart" does not equal "is good at anything". Just picture a character from the Big Bang Theory for some examples.

mindstalk
2020-06-11, 10:14 PM
Sure, there were a few immortal races, but if you were mortal, it seemed pretty hard to live past your species lifespan. Like the monk:

Timeless Body: After achieving 17th level, a monk no longer suffers ability penalties for aging and cannot be magically aged. (Any penalties she may have already suffered remain in place.) Bonuses still accrue, and the monk still dies of old age when her time is up.

Level 20 makes you count as an outsider for spell targets, but doesn't obviously make you immortal.

Druid also has Timeless Body with the death at old age. I dimly recall a bunch of other instances of such things.

mindstalk
2020-06-11, 10:16 PM
Sure, in theory they...might...have lots of nice tools, BUT.... just having the tools is not always enough. A wizard can do a bit well if they use lots of divinations, but note the "if". They have to both use the divination and then use that information. And simply put, not everyone will do that. Just getting people to use a useful tool often does not work, but you also have to "listen" to the advice/warnings/predictions/etc.

And this is on top of the People are People problem. Zorg is a high level diviner, but he still goes out and gets black out drunk every day....so his spellcasting and administration is not exactly the best.

Naja is obsessed with womens clothing to the exceptions of all else. Her city is full of poor starving homeless people, and yet ALL she cares about is opening "clothing check points" on every corner to measure women's dresses to make sure they are not "too short".

That's an argument that not all diviners make good high level administrators. It's not an argument that most rulers wouldn't be diviners.

AdAstra
2020-06-11, 10:22 PM
Not to mention "just being smart" does not equal "is good at anything". Just picture a character from the Big Bang Theory for some examples.

Heck, if we're going by mechanics, being able to make good decisions and understand things, being good at attracting followers and diplomacy, and being smart are all separate stats.

Alcore
2020-06-12, 06:02 AM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanation. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

[Lengthy part snipped]

I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.in game or in setting? The first i will answer but the second i will not touch. You make it sound like you want to build your own world so an in setting answer might provoke answers that can be answered the other way.


Theocracies do have merit but they fail to get an headway. Traditionally in D&D a god is a singular entity that, while occasionally counting other gods as family, stands alone and religous sects also do so. So with nine alignments (and assuming no gods share alignment due to godly plenitude) that leaves only eleven percent of the population per god. Only three alignments truly care about being lawful with three more able to form fully stable governments of a size needed to rival the lawful. That leaves about half as pro Theocracy.

Then you have holy wars, crusades and so much more. All these atrocities that people have to grow up around will disenfranchise some from the gods weakening their governments (if they bother with one). Allowing more and more non religious governments that will defend all of its people from any religion providing a safe haven for the weary, the broken and the helpless. Less radical priests will also find peace there being allowed to practice without the more negative baggage.



Magocracies are much easier to answer to answer for. The government will, in all likelihood, be built just to help fund research and collect specimens. Unless 'good' is in their alignment ulterior motives will be quite common. (Since you said 'overpowered' i assume we are going for optimization so wizards.) And then you have the numbers. Not only must you have a high intelligence but you must actually want to be a wizard.

and that last line in setting dependent.

In my settings... most mortals rarely gain more than three class levels. The number of those of level ten can be counted on one hand. Most spellcasters lack the levels and slots to control a thorp. Those that do migh tap out at a whole thorp. A normal ability array taps out at thirteen so by level twenty they only have eighth level spells. Some rulers might have the elite array which maxes out at fifteen.

A king needs more than power. They need personality, they need people skills and the ability to rally the common man around them. A wizard tends to fail at all three and a sorcerer can pass it but he/she often rules through non magical means. A Magocracy typically needs enough spellcasters to form a ruling caste. A single caster is just a dictator/overlord that happens to be magical.

Then... a caster just might not care to rule

Zarrgon
2020-06-12, 08:42 AM
That's an argument that not all diviners make good high level administrators. It's not an argument that most rulers wouldn't be diviners.

Well if the diviner ruler does not use their magic at all or worse chooses to ignore the results of the magic, are they still really "diviners"? Or are they just diviners in name only?

How about a ruler that just fakes all the magic; where the ruler just says "oh my divinations said" whatever the ruler wanted them to say.....

AdAstra
2020-06-12, 10:00 AM
Well if the diviner ruler does not use their magic at all or worse chooses to ignore the results of the magic, are they still really "diviners"? Or are they just diviners in name only?

How about a ruler that just fakes all the magic; where the ruler just says "oh my divinations said" whatever the ruler wanted them to say.....

Diplomancer Rogue pulling a Wizard of Oz sounds about right.

"Hey a lot of these divinations seem... wrong"
"WORRY NOT. COME BEHIND THE CURTAIN AND I SHALL SHOW YOU YOUR FUTURE"
*snick*
"I HAVE PLANESHIFTED THIS LUCKY SUBJECT TO ELYSIUM. OBEY ME AND YOU TOO MAY RECEIVE THIS BLESSING"

mindstalk
2020-06-13, 02:59 AM
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/09/collections-war-elephants-part-iii-elephant-memories/


The warrior-aristocrat needs to be seen being a warrior aristocrat. For this purpose the elephant (much like its chariot forerunner) is perfect. Fighting from the back of an animal is a difficult skill which requires a lot of training the common folk do not have time to do. It also requires being able to afford and maintain a very expensive military asset commoners cannot afford. And not only does it allow the warrior-aristocrat to have an out-sized impact on the battle, but it literally elevates him over his fellow men so he can be seen (and it could not have escaped anyone that this was a physical realization of his actual high status). So long as the elephant remained even moderately militarily valuable, it was a perfect vehicle for a warrior-aristocrat to display his power and prowess.

Assuming wizard-aristocrats could reliably train up to casting fly and fireball, that would be a great basis for an arcane aristocracy.

BitVyper
2020-06-13, 03:19 AM
Without immortality, your mageocracy lasts like two generations before the ruling class gets super indolent and experiences all the normal generational problems. If you're in some kind of meritocracy where you take tests to get governing positions, pretty much exactly the same thing happens just with a thin veneer of legitimacy. In either scenario, all the normal power dynamics are still happening and the same pressures still exist. You may be the council of 9 super powerful wizards, but there's like a hundred other slightly less powerful wizards that will make you share authority and then pressures from beneath them, because they still need things like farms and houses, and ultimately the merchant class is still going around doing its usual thing of gradually buying all the power until the government works for them. Being good at magic is by no means going to make you a good ruler; even something like being able to see the future won't because the problem is very rarely an inability to see a crisis coming; governments will build whole suburbs in places they know literally 100% for sure are going to experience massive floods.

WITH immortality, well like half of all fantasy stories are about overthrowing those guys.

Personally, I bet wizard kings all end up summoning a boatload of devils to handle various administrative tasks for them because infrastructure planning and maintenance is a boring waste of a wizard education and oops now all the roads form a portal to hell.

Tanarii
2020-06-13, 08:40 AM
i
Theocracies do have merit but they fail to get an headway. Traditionally in D&D a god is a singular entity that, while occasionally counting other gods as family, stands alone and religous sects also do so. So with nine alignments (and assuming no gods share alignment due to godly plenitude) that leaves only eleven percent of the population per god. Only three alignments truly care about being lawful with three more able to form fully stable governments of a size needed to rival the lawful. That leaves about half as pro Theocracy.Assuming that only 33% of the population worships Good gods or (a partially overlapping) 33% worships Lawful gods probably isn't realistic in most settings.

Even if we assume alignment of the god somehow was reflected in their portfolio, I'd expect a large majority of D&D populations to worship LG-LN-LE-TN gods. And of course, that's not necessarily a safe assumption. The god of magic might be CE. (Looking at you Math Mathonwy.)

Similarly it's a pretty huge assumption that worshippers only worship one god. And also maybe placating with offerings for evil / destructive gods counts as worship.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-13, 05:23 PM
WITH immortality, well like half of all fantasy stories are about overthrowing those guys.

Personally, I bet wizard kings all end up summoning a boatload of devils to handle various administrative tasks for them because infrastructure planning and maintenance is a boring waste of a wizard education and oops now all the roads form a portal to hell.

Fantasy stories are about overthrowing immortal wizard-kings because the author decided that those immortal wizard-kings were doing things that needed them to be overthrown (and because "immortal warrior-kings" aren't really a thing when warrior-kings don't have a good way to achieve immortality on their own sans magic), but "corrupt wizards guild" and "idiot who puts devil in charge" aren't the only two possibilities.

For instance, a scenario where a LG wizard-king summons boatloads of archons to handle administrative tasks would solve both of the scenarios you indicated. Archons are zealously LG, immortal, and opposed to chaotic and evil behavior like selfishness and bribery and such, so archons in the government would be trying to improve the populace rather than corrupt them and would hold any wizard-beaurocrats to a high standard and prevent them from taking advantage of the situation.

A society of CG wizard-aristocrats calling a bunch of eladrin, a society where the wizards do everything themselves but are held to a high moral standard (like the Order of the White Robes in Dragonlance, where members must be Good-aligned), or the like would be more hands-off than the archon scenario but be similarly moral and accountable. There are plenty of options that don't just devolve to "corrupt Medieval/Renaissance government expy but with magic."

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-13, 07:24 PM
That's an argument that not all diviners make good high level administrators. It's not an argument that most rulers wouldn't be diviners.

Also it's an argument against anyone ever being a good ruler. Someone who is smart could choose to make dumb decisions. Someone who is persuasive could choose to alienate people. And so on for every possible positive trait in a ruler. It's not an argument against Wizard-kings in particular.


Assuming wizard-aristocrats could reliably train up to casting fly and fireball, that would be a great basis for an arcane aristocracy.

3e has the Mentor/Apprentice set of feats, which allow this. Inherited magic items are another strong candidate for why mages might become an aristocracy. Once a 20th level Fighter dies, he's dead. But a 20th level Wizard could leave behind Headbands of Intellect, Pearls of Power, and Metamagic Rods that give his heirs a leg up.


Without immortality, your mageocracy lasts like two generations before the ruling class gets super indolent and experiences all the normal generational problems.

Now, I'm not a professional historian, but I'm pretty sure there were kingdoms that lasted more than two generations in the real world.


the merchant class is still going around doing its usual thing of gradually buying all the power until the government works for them.

I would expect that those guys are also casters. After all, the most valuable goods (magic items) can only be created by casters. And if you think divinations are good for ruling, holy crap are they good for merchants.


Being good at magic is by no means going to make you a good ruler

No, but every casting class has at least one mental stat they want to boost. It seems hard to make the argument that people who are encouraged to be wise, smart, and persuasive will be worse rulers than those encouraged to be tough, quick, and strong. Even if you completely ignore class features, casters are quite likely to simply be the most competent administrators.


all the roads form a portal to hell.

First: as Dice mentions, you can totally summon other kinds of outsiders. You could also use Awakened creatures of various types.

Second: D&D postulates that Evil governments are a thing that exists. If your people are on Team Evil, no one's going to object to Evil government employees. So if this is how things work, it's just another in the long list of reasons why ever setting gets conquered by specifically an LE Magocracy.


Fantasy stories are about overthrowing immortal wizard-kings because the author decided that those immortal wizard-kings were doing things that needed them to be overthrown (and because "immortal warrior-kings" aren't really a thing when warrior-kings don't have a good way to achieve immortality on their own sans magic)

Also because "and the good king ruled well and proactively diffused crises before they threatened the kingdom" is not an especially interesting story. You need a driving conflict, and "an ancient evil rules" is a very well-established one.

Tanarii
2020-06-13, 07:26 PM
(and because "immortal warrior-kings" aren't really a thing when warrior-kings don't have a good way to achieve immortality on their own sans magic)
Curse by the gods/fey/eldritch powers/infernal being? It's not on their own, and in D&D that's technically magic because the term is a catch all term. But certainly something that can happen.

I'm specifically thinking of the Knight of the Black Rose.

mindstalk
2020-06-13, 07:32 PM
Now, I'm not a professional historian, but I'm pretty sure there were kingdoms that lasted more than two generations in the real world.

And even when you did have very rapid turnover between dynasties, the incomers were the same sort of power-grabbers. Is the son or grandson of a great general not a good leader? They get replaced by another great general.


And if you think divinations are good for ruling, holy crap are they good for merchants.

Merchants would look at the communication magic of most fantasy RPGs and probably go "really? this is the best you can do? really?"

dancrilis
2020-06-13, 08:33 PM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?


Theocracies: Very few gods are outright interested in direct rule (and those who are often have theocracies in place), as such forming a theocracy is difficult - and if you to your clerics then have to spend time running the show rather then advancing themselves in the faith.
Magocracies: Mages are likewise not overly interested in running the show - if they do try to impose they will likely have push back from others (including mages, clerics, druids etc) - and they will have less time to solve arcane mysteries.

No sane ruler wants to annoy the High Priest of the God of Luck - for a number of reasons, so the High Priest will be left alone to do what they want without needing to worry about anything.
No sane ruler wants to annoy the Archmage conducting - perhaps questionable - research in a secluded Wizard Tower - for a number of reasons, so the Wizard will be left alone to do what they want without needing to worry about anything.

Neither of these people want a Magocracies/Theocracies estiblished as such would mean that the people in power have more ability to interfere with them - so the upstart politician who has taken a few levels in the relevant classes and tries to get it off the ground will likely find themselves in a level inappropriate encounter (if they don't have a run in with the assassins guild first).

None of which says that the Drow or the Red Wizards of Thay haven't achieved such governments but they hardly act as a model that would encourage others to follow.

AdAstra
2020-06-13, 08:36 PM
Fantasy stories are about overthrowing immortal wizard-kings because the author decided that those immortal wizard-kings were doing things that needed them to be overthrown (and because "immortal warrior-kings" aren't really a thing when warrior-kings don't have a good way to achieve immortality on their own sans magic), but "corrupt wizards guild" and "idiot who puts devil in charge" aren't the only two possibilities.

For instance, a scenario where a LG wizard-king summons boatloads of archons to handle administrative tasks would solve both of the scenarios you indicated. Archons are zealously LG, immortal, and opposed to chaotic and evil behavior like selfishness and bribery and such, so archons in the government would be trying to improve the populace rather than corrupt them and would hold any wizard-beaurocrats to a high standard and prevent them from taking advantage of the situation.

A society of CG wizard-aristocrats calling a bunch of eladrin, a society where the wizards do everything themselves but are held to a high moral standard (like the Order of the White Robes in Dragonlance, where members must be Good-aligned), or the like would be more hands-off than the archon scenario but be similarly moral and accountable. There are plenty of options that don't just devolve to "corrupt Medieval/Renaissance government expy but with magic."

I get the feeling that even a Lawful Good god might not take kindly to their servants being used as bureaucrats by some wizard. It's one thing to bring in the holy flashlights for disaster response and assisting some mortal allies, but being semi-permanently seconded to a mortal for basic administration doesn't really seem like something the gods would tolerate unless they had an angle. As far as I'm aware non-evil gods in the DnD universe tend not to want to directly manage the affairs of mortals, mostly just giving some assistance to people who deserve it. And that sounds dangerously close to the god controlling your country and not you.

As for Lawful Neutrals, I'm pretty sure Modrons follow some grand design for which deviation is punished by annihilation. Even assuming that "being summoned as secretaries" was part of the plan, at that point you're definitely marching to Mechanus's drum, not yours.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-13, 08:42 PM
Curse by the gods/fey/eldritch powers/infernal being? It's not on their own, and in D&D that's technically magic because the term is a catch all term. But certainly something that can happen.

I'm specifically thinking of the Knight of the Black Rose.

It's the "on their own" bit that's important, narratively-speaking. Rulers of any kind can achieve immortality thanks to all manner of outside influences, but "immortal wizard-king BBEG" is a trope while "immortal warrior-king BBEG" is not because the former is generally a villain who achieves immortality under their own power to continue their mustache-twirling villainy and is therefore the main villain to be defeated, while the latter is generally either gifted immortality by some other entity (and so the other entity is then viewed as the "real" villain) or cursed into immortality by some other entity (and so the immortal warrior-king is instead a tragic figure to be saved or redeemed), Lord Soth in Knight of the Black Rose being an example of the latter case.


I get the feeling that even a Lawful Good god might not take kindly to their servants being used as bureaucrats by some wizard. It's one thing to bring in the holy flashlights for disaster response and assisting some mortal allies, but being semi-permanently seconded to a mortal for basic administration doesn't really seem like something the gods would tolerate unless they had an angle. As far as I'm aware non-evil gods in the DnD universe tend not to want to directly manage the affairs of mortals, mostly just giving some assistance to people who deserve it. And that sounds dangerously close to the god controlling your country and not you.

Note that archons aren't the servants of any gods in particular, they're exemplars of the LG planes in general and the Celestial Hebdomad in particular, in the same way that demons aren't servants of CE gods but rather exemplars of the CE planes and minions of Demon Princes. How the gods feel about meddling in mortal affairs isn't really relevant regardless of which slice of the alignment pie you're pulling outsiders from.

And note that I just said calling outsiders, not binding them into involuntarily servitude. I could totally see a circle of wizards getting together and making fair bargains with powerful archons to help govern their nation, with the wizards getting some divine spellpower to compensate for their lack of it and the archons getting to ensure peace and stability in a certain region and maybe getting a bunch of new paladins out of the deal. Obviously this arrangement couldn't be endorsed at the level of Celestia or the Hebdomad as a whole, lest Baator and the Abyss do the same and create an arms race on the Prime, but being the Lawful Good anti-Narfell wouldn't be problematic at all.


As for Lawful Neutrals, I'm pretty sure Modrons follow some grand design for which deviation is punished by annihilation. Even assuming that "being summoned as secretaries" was part of the plan, at that point you're definitely marching to Mechanus's drum, not yours.

Modrons definitely aren't suitable as mid-tier bureacrats, not least because they tend to have communications issues with non-modrons and even modrons of a much higher tier. But there are plenty of other options for LN types: a few inevitables called to help out with security and law enforcement (which would likely help out with the understanding that the inevitables will then in turn be aided in their own missions) bladelings from acheron to supplement the army (which don't tend to do the same scheming and backstabbing that devils do and so are relatively safe), and so on.

And LN magocrats don't have to go for summoned/called help at all, of course, my point was just to show that there are non-evil non-society-imploding options for wizards who do want to go that route.

mindstalk
2020-06-13, 10:08 PM
but "immortal wizard-king BBEG" is a trope while "immortal warrior-king BBEG" is not because the former is generally a villain who achieves immortality under their own power to continue their mustache-twirling villainy

Immortal or long-lived wizards are a trope even without evil (or kingship). Taoist immortals, philosopher's stone, Robin McKinley's Luthe and Agsded (and other master mages). Black Company wizards and their March North equivalents (granted, both *tending* to evil, but March has ethical ways to become immortal.) Twelve Kingdoms has immortals via divine bureaucracy but apparently also through self-achievement. I already listed various RPGs where at least longevity is a standard option for mage: RuneQuest, Ars Magica, Mage, Qin.

If a warrior achieves long life on their own, it's probably via meditative exercises that also give them chi-like powers so that they're not 'just' a warrior. (Qin might qualify. Weapons of the Gods too perhaps?)

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-13, 10:59 PM
And even when you did have very rapid turnover between dynasties, the incomers were the same sort of power-grabbers. Is the son or grandson of a great general not a good leader? They get replaced by another great general.

That's kind of the big issue. Sure, a mage empire might collapse. But there's not a whole lot of reason to expect it to be replaced by something other than "more mages". When medieval dynasties failed, they were almost always pushed out by other monarchs, not some completely different form of government.


I get the feeling that even a Lawful Good god might not take kindly to their servants being used as bureaucrats by some wizard.

Why on earth not? They're incarnations of goodness. Of course they're in favor of a government that's more effectively able to help people. You think the God of Justice is going to be upset that you have his minions dishing out Justice?

mindstalk
2020-06-13, 11:07 PM
Why on earth not? They're incarnations of goodness. Of course they're in favor of a government that's more effectively able to help people. You think the God of Justice is going to be upset that you have his minions dishing out Justice?

Well, if your using his minions is tantamount to slavery. Do the summons want to be there, are they getting payment or time off, what do in fact they want out of their lives, what does their god want out of them? Maybe your bureaucracy is weakening Good's defenses against a spillover from the Blood War!

AFAIK D&D is generally quiet on how/why summoning works, leaving a lot of dangling questions. Compare to Exalted, which spells (hah) out why demons and elementals can be summoned, and also that yes you are breaking their minds into temporary slavery. But it's so *flexible*, one spell can do so much, doing things ethically would take so much more XP...

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-14, 01:07 AM
Immortal or long-lived wizards are a trope even without evil (or kingship).

Definitely, but the post I was responding to was talking about them in the context of "fantasy stories about overthrowing immortal wizard-kings." Outside of that context the narrative lines between various kinds of immortals are much more blurry.


Well, if your using his minions is tantamount to slavery. Do the summons want to be there, are they getting payment or time off, what do in fact they want out of their lives, what does their god want out of them? Maybe your bureaucracy is weakening Good's defenses against a spillover from the Blood War!

Again, outsiders aren't divine servants. Some archons serve LG gods, certainly, but they're by far the minority. And there are enough of them out there that if you're really concerned about a handful of archons being absolutely key in the Blood War then you can research some who are on light duty for the next century and give them a call instead of calling up archons at random.


AFAIK D&D is generally quiet on how/why summoning works, leaving a lot of dangling questions. Compare to Exalted, which spells (hah) out why demons and elementals can be summoned, and also that yes you are breaking their minds into temporary slavery. But it's so *flexible*, one spell can do so much, doing things ethically would take so much more XP...

D&D is pretty specific about how summoning works, actually. Summoning effects bring "manifestations" of creatures to the caster (so summoning a Celestial Eagle, for instance, whips up a form based on the Platonic ideal of Celestial Eagles rather than an actual Celestial Eagle from somewhere in the multiverse), and ordering them around is no more like slavery than using an unseen servant or other non-sentient spell effect.

Calling effects bring actual creatures to the caster, and whether and to what extent the caster can control them varies by spell. The planar binding line can be used to yank an outsider to your plane and stick them in a magic circle until they agree to obey you (and even then it's much closer to a magically-enforced contract than mind control), but it can also be used to simply give a willing outsider a way to get to your plane when they couldn't do so under their own power. A wizard who researches a hound archon's name, negotiates a deal via sending, and calls them to the Prime with a diagram-less planar binding and lets them out immediately can have a nicely mutually profitable arrangement with said hound archon, no compulsions required.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-14, 09:42 AM
Why on earth not? They're incarnations of goodness. Of course they're in favor of a government that's more effectively able to help people. You think the God of Justice is going to be upset that you have his minions dishing out Justice?

Yes.

You'll rarely find a mythology, real-world or fictional, in which that's something that the gods or THE god would be cool with.

In most, the summoner would quickly be told that those entities have "far more important" things to do in the cosmic scheme than file paperwork and settle disputes over whose pig it is. And often, mortals having some celestial entity doing everything for them would often be accused of getting lazy and greedy.

Zarrgon
2020-06-14, 10:29 AM
D&D is pretty specific about how summoning works, actually. Summoning effects bring "manifestations" of creatures to the caster (so summoning a Celestial Eagle, for instance, whips up a form based on the Platonic ideal of Celestial Eagles rather than an actual Celestial Eagle from somewhere in the multiverse), and ordering them around is no more like slavery than using an unseen servant or other non-sentient spell effect.

This is only true in the Politically Correct D&D editions starting with 3E. 0E, 1E, 2E and BECMI D&D all have summoning spells enslave the creature. And in 2E, you could summon a demonic cow and drop it on top of a foe! There were even fun creatures like Blink Cows...and 'blinked' to fall on targets.




Calling effects bring actual creatures to the caster, and whether and to what extent the caster can control them varies by spell. .

Again, your not talking about all editions of D&D here. 0E, 1E, 2E and BECMI D&D were much different.

Alcore
2020-06-14, 11:39 AM
Assuming that only 33% of the population worships Good gods or (a partially overlapping) 33% worships Lawful gods probably isn't realistic in most settings.

Even if we assume alignment of the god somehow was reflected in their portfolio, I'd expect a large majority of D&D populations to worship LG-LN-LE-TN gods. And of course, that's not necessarily a safe assumption. The god of magic might be CE. (Looking at you Math Mathonwy.)

Similarly it's a pretty huge assumption that worshippers only worship one god. And also maybe placating with offerings for evil / destructive gods counts as worship.
Yep. And we are having a conversation on a topic people can write full books on and still leave much to assumptions. A lot of assumptions need to be made. Also setting dependent.

jh12
2020-06-14, 03:09 PM
Archons are zealously LG, immortal, and opposed to chaotic and evil behavior like selfishness and bribery and such, so archons in the government would be trying to improve the populace

And if the populace doesn't want to be "improved"? Do you really want a bunch of zealots running the day-to-day operations of your government?


I could totally see a circle of wizards getting together and making fair bargains with powerful archons to help govern their nation, with the wizards getting some divine spellpower to compensate for their lack of it and the archons getting to ensure peace and stability in a certain region and maybe getting a bunch of new paladins out of the deal.

If the archons are interested in ensuring the peace and stability of a certain region, why couldn't an ordinary ruler make an even better deal (simply by not selfishly asking for additional powers), or at least as good of a deal? I don't see anything in the negotiations dependent on the ruler being a wizard.

kieza
2020-06-14, 03:24 PM
Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

I know that people like to bring up two points in rebuttal:
1. Feudal tradition (people identify with certain rulers in certain regions)

For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).

In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.

Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.

2. Lack of stability/continuity issues

For theocracies, those clerics of major gods have an inherent hierarchy (and other spellcasters of the same faith) to tap onto. I understand that there are limitations (e.g good gods may not want their clerics to slaughter innocents to take over a city), but even if they are unable to take over a city-state, won't it make sense to found/create a city where the church is the major power (after all one of the main objectives of the clerics is to bring more believers for their god)?

For magocracies, admittedly it is more difficult to ensure a steady supply of mages, but there are always training schools (and also a lot of ways for mages to prolong their lives and solidify their rule).

I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

My world's answer: they do, but magocracies are inherently unstable. The type of wizards who use magic to gain political power are also the type of wizards who don't share power easily: they don't have competent administrators or successors, so the moment they get incapacitated, the magocracy starts falling apart.

End result: there are lots of little magocracies run by tin-pot wizard dictators, but all of the successful, stable nations have power structures that select for competence at politics and governance, not competence at magic. (Which is not to say that politicians there can't also be wizards; they just have to be good at politics independently of their magic.)

Alcore
2020-06-14, 03:30 PM
Yes.

You'll rarely find a mythology, real-world or fictional, in which that's something that the gods or THE god would be cool with.

In most, the summoner would quickly be told that those entities have "far more important" things to do in the cosmic scheme than file paperwork and settle disputes over whose pig it is. And often, mortals having some celestial entity doing everything for them would often be accused of getting lazy and greedy.
No. I don't agree.

One of the chief methods of devils getting souls is sending one to corrupt goodness of man and lead them into evil. I feel a good god might approve of a few good outsiders running around promoting good. Spreading the good word, being the voice of reason or even picking up a flaming sword in the direst emergencies. I can also see them stepping back from time to time to allow humanity the chance to rise above evil.

I picture most outsiders have OCD geared towards their alignment. Shove a succubus into a room and it will debase it and any poor sap who wanders in will risk losing their soul. Shove an angel in instead and it will likely tidy up the room out of habit. Both will try to make the room and anyone in it more in line with its home plane.

I feel it is better for their sanity too.

Zarrgon
2020-06-14, 04:06 PM
My world's answer: they do, but magocracies are inherently unstable. The type of wizards who use magic to gain political power are also the type of wizards who don't share power easily: they don't have competent administrators or successors, so the moment they get incapacitated, the magocracy starts falling apart.

None of this is true in any absolute sense. All magocracies are not inherently unstable, the same way no other type of government is inherently unstable. Depending on what you think is "unstable". Any type of wizard or spellcaster might want political power for any of a hundred reasons.

You can say in your ONE example of "Your World" things are or even "must" be like that, but the Multiverse will have a trillion trillion others that are nothing like your world.



End result: there are lots of little magocracies run by tin-pot wizard dictators, but all of the successful, stable nations have power structures that select for competence at politics and governance, not competence at magic. (Which is not to say that politicians there can't also be wizards; they just have to be good at politics independently of their magic.)

Well, any ruler needs to be "good a politics"

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-14, 07:31 PM
Do the summons want to be there, are they getting payment or time off, what do in fact they want out of their lives, what does their god want out of them?

One would assume the thing creatures made of order and justice want is to promote order and justice. If your incarnations of good would prefer to hang around on the celestial planes playing harps rather than lift people out of medieval poverty, I question the degree to which you can meaningfully call them good.


Maybe your bureaucracy is weakening Good's defenses against a spillover from the Blood War!

The planes are supposed to be infinite. You can't really weaken an infinite army by recruiting a finite number of its members. Also, in the long run, a powerful empire of people aligned with Good is way more useful than a couple Archon-years.


You'll rarely find a mythology, real-world or fictional, in which that's something that the gods or THE god would be cool with.

Yes, most gods are not Good. Someone who spends their free time turning into animals for sex is probably not super interested in how to promote human flourishing. The Good gods in D&D explicitly are. If you want to jettison that assumption, that's fine, but it is the assumption the game makes.


And if the populace doesn't want to be "improved"? Do you really want a bunch of zealots running the day-to-day operations of your government?

Well, that would be bad. But it would also be bad if a non-mage leader did that, and seeing as whatever his plan was would not have the benefit of being implemented by creatures that are explicitly Good and have superhuman mental abilities, it seems unfair to try to frame this as a disadvantage of celestial administrators. If anything, having the intermediate bureaucrats be angels seems like to reduce the risk of misgovernence.


I don't see anything in the negotiations dependent on the ruler being a wizard.

That would be the ability to summon Archons. I suppose you could have a setup where Wizards summon Archons, and Clerics cast Plant Growth, and Artificers craft magical items, and so on, and the guy in charge is a random Aristocrat. The question is why would you do that? People keep saying he'd "be a better administrator" or something, but there's no reason to believe that -- casters are very likely going to be the smartest, wisest, and most persuasive people around anyway.


My world's answer: they do, but magocracies are inherently unstable. The type of wizards who use magic to gain political power are also the type of wizards who don't share power easily: they don't have competent administrators or successors, so the moment they get incapacitated, the magocracy starts falling apart.

That's not really how a magocracy works. That's how a regular king who happens to be a Wizard would work, but in an actual magocracy you'd have institutions in place to produce Wizards (and other spellcasters) and train them for leadership roles. And that model of government is both pretty stable (as it's not dependent on any particular person), and likely to be enormously effective (as it produces large amounts of magic, which is very useful for solving all kinds of problems). In particular, having casters that can produce magical items or persistent enchantments is basically the industrial revolution, and we all know how huge of an advantage that was.

mindstalk
2020-06-14, 07:42 PM
The planes are supposed to be infinite.


One of the worst ideas in D&D.



You can't really weaken an infinite army by recruiting a finite number of its members. Also, in the long run, a powerful empire of people aligned with Good is way more useful than a couple Archon-years.

If the planes are infinite, that powerful empire has infinitesimal significance.

AdAstra
2020-06-14, 08:58 PM
The reason why Good outsiders would be unlikely to be okay with mortals using them for their mundane affairs is that that's dependency, not assistance. If your government is pulling in Archons to do its paperwork and take out the trash, that's pretty much the stereotypical sign of hubris and sloth. Lawful Good outsiders generally don't use the same tactics as Devils, and if they do, you should probably take a good look at your "Lawful Good outsiders".

Of course, then you get into the problems of the DnD cosmology, where Good outsiders don't actually seem to do a whole lot of things to help those on the Material, but in general they're supposed to be spending most of their time fighting the far more numerous and powerful Evil ones. Regardless, it's not their MO in DnD, so it doesn't really fit their character to be all that willing to be glorified bureaucrats.

jh12
2020-06-14, 09:05 PM
Well, that would be bad. But it would also be bad if a non-mage leader did that, and seeing as whatever his plan was would not have the benefit of being implemented by creatures that are explicitly Good and have superhuman mental abilities, it seems unfair to try to frame this as a disadvantage of celestial administrators. If anything, having the intermediate bureaucrats be angels seems like to reduce the risk of misgovernence.

There's nothing unfair about it. This is how you described Archons: "Archons are zealously LG, immortal, and opposed to chaotic and evil behavior like selfishness and bribery and such, so archons in the government would be trying to improve the populace." Other descriptions I've seen say "they were easily provoked by acts of evil and lawlessness, and their rage has been described as 'vengeance itself.'" That's not how I would describe ordinary government bureaucrats. And when ordinary government bureaucrats do get overzealous, well they are limited by their human capabilities.

Also, I didn't say anything about misgovernance. According to the archons, they are providing good governance. But can they understand that the measures it takes to stamp out all corruption are worse than allowing some to remain?


That would be the ability to summon Archons. I suppose you could have a setup where Wizards summon Archons, and Clerics cast Plant Growth, and Artificers craft magical items, and so on, and the guy in charge is a random Aristocrat. The question is why would you do that?

No, the question is why the Archons would need to be summoned by a wizard if they wanted to get involved in mortal affairs. Why wouldn't they just show up, or respond to a prayer, if they wanted to be there?


People keep saying he'd "be a better administrator" or something, but there's no reason to believe that -- casters are very likely going to be the smartest, wisest, and most persuasive people around anyway.

There is absolutely no reason to think that would be true.

mindstalk
2020-06-14, 09:16 PM
There is absolutely no reason to think that would be true.

There's some reason: in 3e at least, casters *have* to be in the upper half of Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma just to do their thing at all, and higher level ones will need high stats to make use of their spells. In Basic they would be driven by Prime Requisites.

jh12
2020-06-14, 09:26 PM
There's some reason: in 3e at least, casters *have* to be in the upper half of Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma just to do their thing at all, and higher level ones will need high stats to make use of their spells. In Basic they would be driven by Prime Requisites.

Upper half isn't very high, but it doesn't matter what the casters stats are. Nothing prevents non-casters from having equally high stats.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-14, 09:41 PM
The reason why Good outsiders would be unlikely to be okay with mortals using them for their mundane affairs is that that's dependency, not assistance.

That seems like a distinction without a difference. What's the point where you're relying too much on Archons? Why does summoning an Archon to solve a problem not count as solving that problem yourself? After all, the gods solve plenty of problems through intermediaries. If Pelor is allowed to solve his problems by sending in some Clerics, it seems unreasonable for him to get his knickers twisted over you roping in some Hound Archons.


Lawful Good outsiders generally don't use the same tactics as Devils

Again, that doesn't really solve the problem. It just means that Evil countries are able to be fundamentally more efficient than Good ones. Geopolitics doesn't care what Detect spell you ping. If the Hobgoblins get outsider administrators, immortal rulers, and undead labor, while the Elves are stuck singing to trees, all that means is that the Hobgoblins end up ruling the world. As a result, one would expect that even if the Archons are initial unwilling to help out, they'd change their tune once they realized it meant the other guys would win.


But can they understand that the measures it takes to stamp out all corruption are worse than allowing some to remain?

I mean, one would assume so, what with their superhuman intelligence and being inherently moral. The line you're pushing just doesn't make sense. They are creatures that are made of Good. They are are not going to start brutally repressing people to root out bribery. It's like expecting Demons to open an orphanage that nurtures kids and encourages their flourishing. If you take the D&D alignment system at its word, the various celestials should be falling over each other for the chance to come help out people living in grinding medieval poverty (and also being attacked by manticores, if the child morality and malnutrition wasn't bad enough).


No, the question is why the Archons would need to be summoned by a wizard if they wanted to get involved in mortal affairs. Why wouldn't they just show up, or respond to a prayer, if they wanted to be there?

Because they (mostly) can't? A Hound Archon has no way of getting to the Prime on its own. A Trumpet Archon might be able to, but it's much harder for it to find people who need help than for a Wizard to call something.


There is absolutely no reason to think that would be true.

Yes there is. Casters depend on mental stats. Literally every single caster. So the Wizards, Druids, Clerics, and Sorcerers of the world make better leaders, administrators, or politicians than the Fighters, Barbarians, or Rangers do. Rogues are a tossup, but lose to skill-based casters like Beguilers or Bards.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-14, 10:37 PM
Yes, most gods are not Good. Someone who spends their free time turning into animals for sex is probably not super interested in how to promote human flourishing. The Good gods in D&D explicitly are. If you want to jettison that assumption, that's fine, but it is the assumption the game makes.


Even in those in which the god(s) are explicitly supposed to be good, it doesn't fly -- it is often such that evil has its active agents, good demands mortals stand on their own. Obviously we can't discuss the examples.

(We're not going to derail the thread with good vs "Good" alignment nonsense.)

Nifft
2020-06-14, 10:46 PM
I mean, ignoring real life entirely, there are excellent GAME and/or FICTION reasons why the various good powers are non-interventionist and distant while the evil ones are active and present.

It's so the characters have something to do.

One might even say the characters have an important role to play.

There's no point in making a traditional combat-oriented RPG game or setting where the various good powers have taken care of everything and eternal prosperity reigns. So, that doesn't happen. We can judge the in-universe excuses about why it doesn't happen, but no matter how bad an excuse might be, it's never the actual reason. The actual reason is so the characters can be the stars of the show.

If the actual stars descended from the heavens and stole the spotlight, that wouldn't be fun for the players.

mindstalk
2020-06-14, 11:06 PM
The setting logic problem is having Good powers who don't intervene when there's lots of good they could be doing. Standard Problem of Evil stuff. To avoid lots of pointed questions you need to either tone down their Goodness, reduce their intrinsic power, or reduce their effective power (they're spending all they have preserving the world from threats, or are outnumbered by Evil gods and so a divine non-intervention pact is the optimal outcome).

AdAstra
2020-06-15, 12:52 AM
That seems like a distinction without a difference. What's the point where you're relying too much on Archons? Why does summoning an Archon to solve a problem not count as solving that problem yourself? After all, the gods solve plenty of problems through intermediaries. If Pelor is allowed to solve his problems by sending in some Clerics, it seems unreasonable for him to get his knickers twisted over you roping in some Hound Archons.



Again, that doesn't really solve the problem. It just means that Evil countries are able to be fundamentally more efficient than Good ones. Geopolitics doesn't care what Detect spell you ping. If the Hobgoblins get outsider administrators, immortal rulers, and undead labor, while the Elves are stuck singing to trees, all that means is that the Hobgoblins end up ruling the world. As a result, one would expect that even if the Archons are initial unwilling to help out, they'd change their tune once they realized it meant the other guys would win.



I mean, one would assume so, what with their superhuman intelligence and being inherently moral. The line you're pushing just doesn't make sense. They are creatures that are made of Good. They are are not going to start brutally repressing people to root out bribery. It's like expecting Demons to open an orphanage that nurtures kids and encourages their flourishing. If you take the D&D alignment system at its word, the various celestials should be falling over each other for the chance to come help out people living in grinding medieval poverty (and also being attacked by manticores, if the child morality and malnutrition wasn't bad enough).



Because they (mostly) can't? A Hound Archon has no way of getting to the Prime on its own. A Trumpet Archon might be able to, but it's much harder for it to find people who need help than for a Wizard to call something.



Yes there is. Casters depend on mental stats. Literally every single caster. So the Wizards, Druids, Clerics, and Sorcerers of the world make better leaders, administrators, or politicians than the Fighters, Barbarians, or Rangers do. Rogues are a tossup, but lose to skill-based casters like Beguilers or Bards.

- There is a massive difference between “call in some divine help to assist during a battle” and “call in divine help 24/7 to do your government’s paperwork for you”, both in terms of number of archons, time required, and justifiability of the request. If a cleric couldn’t summon archons anymore, he’d be in a tough spot, but he’d most likely do well enough with his other tools, even if he’d previously used the archons heavily. If this proposed government were to stop getting archons, it would pretty rapidly collapse. That kinda tells you the difference between assistance and dependency.

If the Good outsiders/gods were willing to come down to the Material Plane to help run the government, why would they leave the leadership of that government to a fallible mortal? They could probably run the kingdom themselves, and probably do a better job of it than the Wizard. If we follow your logic, then you’re definitely not going to have a mageocracy anymore, because it’ll be the gods and their servants in charge.

Well, at the very minimum, “noncombat” classes don’t need to worry too much about Str, Dex, or Con, so they can really afford to pump the remaining stats. Plus not having to spend the time learning magic, which can be devoted to more relevant aspects of rulership.

Alcore
2020-06-15, 04:56 AM
The setting logic problem is having Good powers who don't intervene when there's lots of good they could be doing. Standard Problem of Evil stuff. To avoid lots of pointed questions you need to either tone down their Goodness, reduce their intrinsic power, or reduce their effective power (they're spending all they have preserving the world from threats, or are outnumbered by Evil gods and so a divine non-intervention pact is the optimal outcome).

Or instead of good vs evil have law vs chaos. Have rebels- *ahem* activists running around illegally to prove a point, fight the power. In a realm so good that likely leans heavily into lawful artistic expression and freedom is vary likely being repressed.


The irony is that most lawful good outsiders are pro chaotic for the morality sound idea of good mental health. Humans are not archons and i would expect an archon to get that; they would want the humans to choose. I would also expect the laws to be more laxed. Remember when Roy was in heaven? The elevator was employee use only and was only enforced by honor system. They want you to want to follow the law not because it is a law but that it is the right thing to do so (which is the underlying difference between LG and NG) and to bend/break the law if it might mean evil will win if not done so.


Any Theocracies or Magetocrocies that lean too heavily into law while forgetting goodness is likely to face a subtle but morally sound rebellion of archons; who will happily preach to their faces in the hopes that they get it before things get out of hand. (This scenario is likely why they might refuse to serve. A called creature is not compelled to agree to serve)

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-15, 02:51 PM
One of the worst ideas in D&D.

If the planes are infinite, that powerful empire has infinitesimal significance.

The planes may be infinite, but an infinite plane doesn't entail infinite inhabitants and resources; outsiders arise from the plane and from mortal souls, after all, so they're bounded by the number of mortals and the time since the creation of the multiverse. It also doesn't entail physical infinity, as the Outer Planes are more conceptual than physical (as can be especially seen in the Hinterlands) so the planes are "infinite" in the sense that you can keep walking and won't ever run into an edge of the plane rather than the sense that there's endless amounts of empty space full of demons.


There's no point in making a traditional combat-oriented RPG game or setting where the various good powers have taken care of everything and eternal prosperity reigns. So, that doesn't happen. We can judge the in-universe excuses about why it doesn't happen, but no matter how bad an excuse might be, it's never the actual reason. The actual reason is so the characters can be the stars of the show.

If the actual stars descended from the heavens and stole the spotlight, that wouldn't be fun for the players.

Such a setting element can make for some great plot hooks without overshadowing the players. If a setting has a single polity where good outsiders ensure endless peace and prosperity, sure, intrigue-based plots don't make much sense there, but you can have it threatened by outside forces and need the PCs to save it or have a polity full of evil outsiders rise up to counter it and need the PCs to defeat it...or simply present it with a perfectly straight face and watch your group scramble around to uncover the evil conspiracy that obviously must exist behind such a utopia and possibly put their collective foot in their mouth in the process. :smallamused:


If the Good outsiders/gods were willing to come down to the Material Plane to help run the government, why would they leave the leadership of that government to a fallible mortal? They could probably run the kingdom themselves, and probably do a better job of it than the Wizard. If we follow your logic, then you’re definitely not going to have a mageocracy anymore, because it’ll be the gods and their servants in charge.

There's a difference between Good outsiders and gods coming down to the Prime and Good outsiders and gods being called or invited down. Under Planescape rules outsiders can't willingly come to the Prime without being summoned and Prime inhabitants can't be summoned away, and in many settings there's some sort of divine agreement/contract/etc. preventing gods from intervening directly and forcing them to rely on intermediaries.

So in such situations it's entirely possible that the Good gods might want to send a bunch of Good outsiders to help mortals out but simply can't do so on their own for a variety of reasons. And it's entirely possible that said Good outsiders might not want to rule, because they view ruling over mortals as prideful or the Good outsider being sent are usually lower in the hierarchy and have no rulership experience or the bargain they struck prevents them from ruling and they obviously want to honor their word or whatever, resulting in the outsiders ending up in an advisory role in a way that works for both them and the calling magocrats.

Zarrgon
2020-06-15, 03:29 PM
Yes there is. Casters depend on mental stats. Literally every single caster. So the Wizards, Druids, Clerics, and Sorcerers of the world make better leaders, administrators, or politicians than the Fighters, Barbarians, or Rangers do. Rogues are a tossup, but lose to skill-based casters like Beguilers or Bards.

Well, remember that in any game style other then Optimization Roll Playing, a character can have any stats. It's is possible to have a wizard with an intelligence of 11 or a cleric with a wisdom of 13. It's only the Optimization Roll Playing Style that demands a character must have super high ability scores always. Again, before 3E, this was very common.

Segev
2020-06-15, 03:56 PM
Well, remember that in any game style other then Optimization Roll Playing, a character can have any stats. It's is possible to have a wizard with an intelligence of 11 or a cleric with a wisdom of 13. It's only the Optimization Roll Playing Style that demands a character must have super high ability scores always. Again, before 3E, this was very common.

Ehhhh...

It's unlikely that anybody with 11 int would become a wizard. It's nearly impossible that somebody with a lower int would. And if somebody wtih 11 int did become a wizard, he would certainly get to 12 by level 4, meaning he'd barely be a level behind on level 2 spells. And at that point, he'd be feeling the pinch of his limitations, and looking for solutions, which would guide him to craft wondrous item and building his own headbands of intellect if he couldn't find them.

There might be some hedge wizards and multiclass wizards with 11 int who never "need" more, but they're not going to be particularly common, because it would take a strange combination of drive and yen for magical knowledge and inability to grasp it beyond its first mysteries to get into it. Very few wizards would take on so stupid an apprentice.

mindstalk
2020-06-15, 04:17 PM
That depends on how hard it is to become a wizard, vs. how useful cantrips and first level spells are. Or theoretical such spells more geared toward daily life than adventuring. Whether you can learn the basics in a year of high school vs. 5 years of hard study, whether you're in an edition where cantrips can be cast all day. Even in 3.5 you get prestidigitation 3/day plus a familiar, and any of the bird familiars are automatically useful for carrying messages back and forth. Getting prest, mending, light, and mage hand at will is pretty awesome -- light at will alone would save a lot of money in candles. Comprehend Language is more limited in duration but still has high potential.

Imagine a society where half the population is a level 1 wizard, in addition to whatever else they do.

Zarrgon
2020-06-15, 07:07 PM
Ehhhh...
It's unlikely that anybody with 11 int would become a wizard.

It's not as unlikely as you might think.

Note your only thinking of the Optimization Roll Playing Style Game. And sure it's a big deal, if you say so, that the Int 11 wizard can't cast high level spells......but just try to imagine that that does not matter. So the character will never be an all powerful demi god user of magic, so what? Again, try to imagine that that does not matter.

Maybe, for example, a player that makes a whole role playing point about it: the average intelligence wizard. Maybe the plan is to just be clever, find ways to use the magic they have to get effect. Maybe the player has worked out a story arc where their character tries a way or two to get more power.

And in any Reality Simulation Fictional Non Game world, such characters and wizards would be very common. Lots of weak characters would fill up the world. A LOT of people would "try" to be spellcasters...you know, for the cool power...and a LOT of them will fail.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 07:52 PM
It's not as unlikely as you might think.

Note your only thinking of the Optimization Roll Playing Style Game.


To me it sounded more like people with 11 INT don't become wizards for the same reason people with the equivalent of 11 INT in the real world don't become theoretical mathematicians.

Zarrgon
2020-06-15, 09:28 PM
To me it sounded more like people with 11 INT don't become wizards for the same reason people with the equivalent of 11 INT in the real world don't become theoretical mathematicians.

Yea, but that is a bit apples and oranges though.

Wizard is much more generic then "theoretical mathematicians". A "theoretical mathematician" is a bit more like saying "Archmage".

Oh about "wizard" for "scientist" or "engineer" or "computer programmer". You might find a couple million people with 11 Int in such jobs.

You know some programmers are making quantum virus artificial intelligence networks.....and some make internet click bait with a little flashing box that says "click here".

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-15, 09:32 PM
Yea, but that is a bit apples and oranges though.

Wizard is much more generic then "theoretical mathematicians". A "theoretical mathematician" is a bit more like saying "Archmage".

Oh about "wizard" for "scientist" or "engineer" or "computer programmer". You might find a couple million people with 11 Int in such jobs.

You know some programmers are making quantum virus artificial intelligence networks.....and some make internet click bait with a little flashing box that says "click here".

With magic, the guy who makes internet click bait blows himself up sometime in the first couple years of meddling with things he's not capable of handling.

Segev
2020-06-15, 11:10 PM
It's not as unlikely as you might think.

Note your only thinking of the Optimization Roll Playing Style Game. And sure it's a big deal, if you say so, that the Int 11 wizard can't cast high level spells......but just try to imagine that that does not matter. So the character will never be an all powerful demi god user of magic, so what? Again, try to imagine that that does not matter.

Maybe, for example, a player that makes a whole role playing point about it: the average intelligence wizard. Maybe the plan is to just be clever, find ways to use the magic they have to get effect. Maybe the player has worked out a story arc where their character tries a way or two to get more power.

And in any Reality Simulation Fictional Non Game world, such characters and wizards would be very common. Lots of weak characters would fill up the world. A LOT of people would "try" to be spellcasters...you know, for the cool power...and a LOT of them will fail.


To me it sounded more like people with 11 INT don't become wizards for the same reason people with the equivalent of 11 INT in the real world don't become theoretical mathematicians.

As Max says, that's more my point.

The idea that the guy with average intelligence would spend all the years of his apprenticeship and then some on becoming able to use a few spells, rather than learning a trade more suited to his talents and abilities, is a strange one. Stranger still that a wizard would choose to take on an apprentice who can never get more.

This might work! If...he's the smartest...person...in town and the town wizard is a semi-official position that the town really really wants. But if he's 11 Int and the smartest person in town, are we dealing with a down of dullards?

Why are both the prospective 11-Int wizardling and whoever is training him for a decade or more willing to spend all that time and effort on it, rather than training him to do something more to his aptitude?

Maybe there are family reasons: it's the wizard's son who desperately wants to be like his father (or mother), and his wizardly parent either can't bear to disappoint the boy and is impressed by how hard the child works at this. Such, however, would probably be fewer than those who "play the optimization game" in their own lives, seeking to get an apprenticeship to which they're well-suited so they can advance far in it. Which maybe means an 11-int character with nothing else even that high, but again, he'd need some impressive connections to gain a master who will take him on despite barely being smart enough to figure out the basics of arcane magic.

NigelWalmsley
2020-06-15, 11:35 PM
We can judge the in-universe excuses about why it doesn't happen, but no matter how bad an excuse might be, it's never the actual reason.

That's not an excuse for having bad reasons. People should be able to pull on the setting assumptions for at least a couple of layers before you have to start saying "it's a genre convention". And it's really not even that hard. There are a lot of reasons why powerful people might not be here right now. Most obviously (and as I initially suggested), you can simply postulate that the campaign happens before mageocracies take over the world. Just as if you wanted a historical wargame with no tanks, you would simply set it in the Napoleon Wars, rather than insisting that tanks are actually strategically useless.

There are lots and lots of reasons why any particular place might still be adventureland. The empire could still be expanding to there. The empire could not care about there. The empire could have fallen. The empire could not exist yet. There might be multiple competing empires. But people don't seem to be satisfied with those answers, and instead seem to really want "guy who's grandfather conquered the country" to be a better ruler than "super-genius who can cause the industrial revolution himself". That doesn't make any sense, and even if you need an explanation, having that be the explanation is insulting.


To avoid lots of pointed questions you need to either tone down their Goodness, reduce their intrinsic power, or reduce their effective power (they're spending all they have preserving the world from threats, or are outnumbered by Evil gods and so a divine non-intervention pact is the optimal outcome).

The single biggest problem with D&D is the Good alignment. A lot of these arguments fall apart if you don't have explicitly Good people to call on. If Pelor is just a sun god, who only really cares about the sun and crops and maybe killing undead, but has no particular mandate to help people, the question of why Pelor and his clergy don't do anything about the fact that being stuck in the middle ages is miserable basically goes away. D&D would be in all ways improved if you replaced alignment with MTG's Color Wheel or abolished it entirely.


- There is a massive difference between “call in some divine help to assist during a battle” and “call in divine help 24/7 to do your government’s paperwork for you”, both in terms of number of archons, time required, and justifiability of the request.

No there isn't. It's not even necessarily more archons. You don't need that many administrators when they're all superhumans with magic to call on, and a live saved from dying of starvation is just as saved as one saved from dying of being eaten by demons. Again, we are talking about creatures that are explicitly and unalterably Good. Their fundamental goals are to help people. They want that in the same way you or I want food. You don't have to justify to them why they should help you stop people from starving.


If this proposed government were to stop getting archons, it would pretty rapidly collapse.

It wouldn't collapse, it would run less efficiently. You could have a normal bureaucracy. It would be less efficient than one run by archons, and that loss of efficiency would lead to people's lives being worse, but you can totally do that. In fact, literally every government that has ever existed in the entire world has done that. Magic makes your government more efficient, but insofar as that is "dependency" it's not something anyone is going to be worried about. The government also depends on farmers to produce more food than can be found by hunter-gatherers, but no one thinks that's a moral failing.


Well, at the very minimum, “noncombat” classes don’t need to worry too much about Str, Dex, or Con, so they can really afford to pump the remaining stats. Plus not having to spend the time learning magic, which can be devoted to more relevant aspects of rulership.

What noncombat classes? Expert? Aristocrat? Yeah, sure, put those guys in charge, why would we want a leader who can see the future or heal the sick when we could have a leader with *checks notes* no relevant abilities?

Also, time spent learning magic is a relevant aspect of rulership. More magic directly and obviously betters your nation in everything from economics to warfare. The way D&D works, the ruler of a nation is probably that nation's single most valuable strategic asset. The time a Wizard spends summoning outsiders, creating magic items, or researching new spells very likely brings more to the table than the time an Aristocrat spends arguing about land distribution. You could imagine a setting where that wasn't the case, but it would have to be one where magic was so common that individual spellcasters weren't influential, and that tends to look a lot like a mageocracy.


If a setting has a single polity where good outsiders ensure endless peace and prosperity, sure, intrigue-based plots don't make much sense there, but you can have it threatened by outside forces and need the PCs to save it or have a polity full of evil outsiders rise up to counter it and need the PCs to defeat it

Really, that's very much what you'd expect. Just as in the real world there are multiple technological nation-states, in a fantasy world you'd expect there to be plenty of magical empires. The only thing that's really unlikely is the persistence of non-magical empires in the face of magical ones, just as in the real world there is no major power that gets by without partaking in the benefits of the industrial revolution. Magic Cold War, Magic Old West, Magic World War II, and Magic Age of Exploration are all plausible themes under which to adventure. Or, again, you could just have your game happen before the magic empires and have a completely standard setting, just as the existence of the industrial revolution doesn't mean that every society was always industrialized.


Well, remember that in any game style other then Optimization Roll Playing

Oh, look, Zarrgon is doing the thing Zarrgon always does where he divides the world into Good People (who agree with Zarrgon) and Bad People (who disagree with him). Regardless, this is wrong. It's not "optimization" to make life choices that play to your strengths, unless it's also "optimization" to not repeatedly stab yourself in the balls. People in the real world choose careers that they are talented at. The guy who's 4' 8" and has ALS isn't going to be trying to get into the MBA. The assumption you have to justify is that people are going to choose to do things at random, not that they are going to choose to do things they are good at.

AdAstra
2020-06-16, 01:50 AM
No there isn't. It's not even necessarily more archons. You don't need that many administrators when they're all superhumans with magic to call on, and a live saved from dying of starvation is just as saved as one saved from dying of being eaten by demons. Again, we are talking about creatures that are explicitly and unalterably Good. Their fundamental goals are to help people. They want that in the same way you or I want food. You don't have to justify to them why they should help you stop people from starving.
You, do realize what administration actually entails, right? It's secretarial work, paperwork, number-crunching, signing and writing documents, keeping track of manifests, and making sure people's schedules line up. A lantern archon has literally no abilities that would help with that save for Tongues for translation. They have an Int of 6 and no skills. To use their "superhuman" status to claim that they would be able to somehow magically obviate administrative tasks is like saying that a gorilla would be a good driver.



It wouldn't collapse, it would run less efficiently. You could have a normal bureaucracy. It would be less efficient than one run by archons, and that loss of efficiency would lead to people's lives being worse, but you can totally do that. In fact, literally every government that has ever existed in the entire world has done that. Magic makes your government more efficient, but insofar as that is "dependency" it's not something anyone is going to be worried about. The government also depends on farmers to produce more food than can be found by hunter-gatherers, but no one thinks that's a moral failing.
If all the farmers in a society decided to up and quit, that society would most likely collapse. That is a dependency, and your archon-based government would have a similar dependency, because you can't just instantly replace all your country's administrators. You'd be better off setting up a conventional bureaucracy and using LG outsiders for what they're actually good at, which for lantern archons is pretty much just communication and transporting objects. Which given the speed and capacity of archon-mail, would definitely also be a dependency.




What noncombat classes? Expert? Aristocrat? Yeah, sure, put those guys in charge, why would we want a leader who can see the future or heal the sick when we could have a leader with *checks notes* no relevant abilities?
So being smart, wise, and charismatic aren't relevant abilities to the leader of a country? You do realize that a leader's primary job is to make decisions and talk to people, not slay monsters, right?


Also, time spent learning magic is a relevant aspect of rulership. More magic directly and obviously betters your nation in everything from economics to warfare. The way D&D works, the ruler of a nation is probably that nation's single most valuable strategic asset. The time a Wizard spends summoning outsiders, creating magic items, or researching new spells very likely brings more to the table than the time an Aristocrat spends arguing about land distribution. You could imagine a setting where that wasn't the case, but it would have to be one where magic was so common that individual spellcasters weren't influential, and that tends to look a lot like a mageocracy.
It's not relevant to rulership, it's relevant to solving problems. But being a king isn't just a matter of people coming to you with problems and then you personally solving those problems. That's what lackeys are for. Your job is to appoint the right people to relevant positions, communicate with people in your government and others, manage internal and external politics, and in general make decisions and find people who are also good at making decisions. In the case of a DnD kingdom, your main task would be finding and hiring trustworthy mages and assigning them tasks that help the populace. Having the ruler themselves be a mage doesn't actually add much if anything to the problem-solving capacity of the kingdom. If I had to choose between a kingdom with a high-level Wizard and a kingdom whose king WAS a high-level Wizard, I'd probably pick the former, since that lets the high-level Wizard actually do Wizard things.

Zarrgon
2020-06-16, 08:00 AM
With magic, the guy who makes internet click bait blows himself up sometime in the first couple years of meddling with things he's not capable of handling.

Well, this never happens in any D&D edition after 3E as D&D is all soft and safe.



The idea that the guy with average intelligence would spend all the years of his apprenticeship and then some on becoming able to use a few spells, rather than learning a trade more suited to his talents and abilities, is a strange one. Stranger still that a wizard would choose to take on an apprentice who can never get more.


But this is the Optimized Power Game view point. It's only true with that single view point.

Also, where do you get the "years of his apprenticeship" from? Is that a rule somewhere? For what game and what edition of that game? I know it's classic fluff, but that is it. And a LOT of game rules, like say 3.5E, have wizards just instantaneously become perfect masters all knowing masters of magic and spellcasting.



Oh, look, Zarrgon is doing the thing Zarrgon always does where he divides the world into Good People (who agree with Zarrgon) and Bad People (who disagree with him). Regardless, this is wrong. It's not "optimization" to make life choices that play to your strengths, unless it's also "optimization" to not repeatedly stab yourself in the balls. People in the real world choose careers that they are talented at. The guy who's 4' 8" and has ALS isn't going to be trying to get into the MBA. The assumption you have to justify is that people are going to choose to do things at random, not that they are going to choose to do things they are good at.

Have you been to the Real World? If you have, you'd know that is not true. Not everyone always picks the prefect life and job that perfectly fits their abilities. Not even close.

And people that want to do jobs they don't physically or mentally have the ability scores for is just about the definition of human. Have their been or are their short NBA players?

It's not random, it's just what people like or want to do.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-16, 08:37 AM
But this is the Optimized Power Game view point. It's only true with that single view point.


No, it's the "kinda like real life since the start of specialized skills, trades, and careers 1000s of years ago" viewpoint, and repeatedly trying to make it fit some misbegotten hobbyhorse about gaming styles won't make it otherwise. Stop trying to tell other people what they're thinking and what their reasoning is.




Have you been to the Real World? If you have, you'd know that is not true. Not everyone always picks the prefect life and job that perfectly fits their abilities. Not even close.

And people that want to do jobs they don't physically or mentally have the ability scores for is just about the definition of human. Have their been or are their short NBA players?


But people heavily tend to not pick careers they're highly unsuited for, and if they do try, they very much tend to fail at it. People with 11 INT rarely if ever become theoretical physicists, people with 11 DEX rarely if ever become top-tier professional athletes.

The existence of one or two short NBA players every decade doesn't demonstrate that height isn't a huge factor in basketball, it demonstrates that a handful of short people are so insanely talented and determined as to overcome the drawback of being short in a sport that favors height.

Intelligence for wizards here doesn't parallel with height for basketball players, it is the core raw talent necessary to even hope to succeed.

Segev
2020-06-16, 10:22 AM
But this is the Optimized Power Game view point. It's only true with that single view point.No, it's true of people in general. You're getting hung up on the fact that we're assigning a number to the Int and claiming "that's playing the optimization game." In reality, in real life, in everyday life, people play the optimization game all the time, trying to do the best they can with what they have.


Also, where do you get the "years of his apprenticeship" from? Is that a rule somewhere? For what game and what edition of that game? I know it's classic fluff, but that is it. And a LOT of game rules, like say 3.5E, have wizards just instantaneously become perfect masters all knowing masters of magic and spellcasting.I'll just point to 3e and PF for now, but I'm pretty sure other editions also have it: see the "starting ages" based on class.

Yes, multiclassing into wizard means you just "suddenly pick it up," but that's gameplay/story segregation, and even the comic to which this forum is attached calls out both how silly that is if you look too closely at it AND that there's a hand-wave underlying assumption to explain that, no, the guy "suddenly picking up" a level of wizard hasn't started from nothing and in one day learned to be a master of 1st level spells, but rather is assumed to have been studying it on the side. (The fact that this can still lead to a very young adventurer who had a "less training" class at level 1 being a 1st level wizard years before the guy who started as a wizard is a bug, and a known and mostly-ignored one because it doesn't mater much in terms of game balance.)

If you want to argue that becoming a wizard is trivially easy, such that anybody who has the aptitude shoudl take at least one level of it, go ahead, but now you are playing the optimization game, not me.

In real life, historically speaking, unless there was a lot of patronage and bribery going on, people ill-suited to prestigious and highly-lucrative jobs didn't have masters of the profession wasting their time on training them to be barely-passable. They were turned out to go learn a trade more suited to their talents. Or simply turned out in favor of more promising students.


Have you been to the Real World? If you have, you'd know that is not true. Not everyone always picks the prefect life and job that perfectly fits their abilities. Not even close.

And people that want to do jobs they don't physically or mentally have the ability scores for is just about the definition of human. Have their been or are their short NBA players?

It's not random, it's just what people like or want to do."Want to?" "Pick?" Sure, people decide to be professional athletes all the time...and most of them don't make it into the pro leagues. People decide they want to get into Harvard, Yale, or MIT and can't make the cut against all the others competing for the positions because there are limited spaces. I could decide that I want to be a movie producer or an actor, but I would be hard-pressed to make any money at it given my lack of skill or talent or connections in the field. I could decide I want to run for office in two years, but I doubt I would succeed because I lack the skills, talents, temperament, and charisma to win a position as STUCO rep for a high school class, let alone a serious position where professional politicians are out advertising for people's votes. Heck, I probably couldn't raise $5000 for a campaign, because my Charisma is just too low.

And before the USA came along, with its vast freedom to try anything you wanted, getting training was even harder with fewer "slots" for students.

The 11-int Wizard needs special circumstances to even be given the chance to learn: he needs either to be trying to be self-taught (in which case it probably does take him much longer than if he were being trained by a master) or to find a master who will bear with his rather dunce-like nature compared to said master and most of the other apprentices. A master who is desperate for a student might take him on, but how many wizards are desperate for students and can't find anybody smarter than the average human?

The point being: yes, you can construct scenarios where 11-int Wizards pop up, but they're special cases and circumstances. You have to justify it. And unless wizardry is as common as carpentry in the setting, it is highly unlikely that anybody gets to "pick" it and keep at it when they're barely able to keep up with the other apprentices in the basic skills associated with the study. When they fail far more often to transcribe spells into their spellbook, when they get basic Knowledge(Arcana) and Spellcraft checks wrong more often... they'll be back-of-the-pack and the first ones ousted for more promising apprentices.

I'd go further and argue that even a 12-int wizard would be RARE because they're about where the ability to keep up with the 16-Int apprentice is only a 10% behind-the-curve difference, and most settings have wizardry be sufficiently rare that getting that 16-int apprentice is just barely where the wizard masters start even considering having to compete with each other for them. 14 to 15 int is likely the average, and 12 is "barely passing." 11 int is 10% behind the curve of the average and 15% behind the curve of the "good students." (The prodigies or "promising students" will be 20% ahead of them.) You can assert that that's not a big deal, but consider again how limited the placement is. Just how many apprentice wizards do you think there are?

Perhaps you're imagining a world with enough 11-int wizards that they would be the ones to take on 11-int apprentices, and pass the tradition along. Tell me: do settings tend to support there being wizards as common or more common than carpenters and blacksmiths? Wizards being where the guys who fail out of blacksmithing for being too weak and frail go because it's easier to get into with an intellect to match your strength and constitution?

mindstalk
2020-06-16, 10:46 AM
Well, historically occupations were often hereditary by default. So the easy way to be an 11 Int wizard would be to have a wizard parent. You might be a disappointment but at least you're still a wizard.

Then there's being an 11 Cha sorcerer, a class explicitly about bloodlines.

Clistenes
2020-06-16, 12:22 PM
While I wouldn't play an INT 11 Wizard, I think you can pull it if you need it for a build.

The character wanted to be a Wizard, and started training, but they realized they weren't good at it and gave up, and picked a new job. So the character starts as a Fighter or Rogue or whatever.

Later they realized that even cantrips and first level spells can help them survive, so they made an effort to use what they learnt about magic before giving up, and they took a level of Wizard.

I used something similar to justify a character multiclassing from Paladin to Bard. The character wanted to be a Wizard, but he didn't have the required intelligence, so he trained as a Bard because hey, magic is magic. Later, before completing his Bardic training he was conscripted for war and put under the command of a Paladin, who saw in him the qualities of a Paladin and trained him as one. So he got a few levels as Paladin, and afterwards self-trained in order to recover his half-forgotten skills as a Bard, slowly becoming better at it, until he became able to take levels as Bard.

Alcore
2020-06-16, 02:18 PM
While i can see a dosen uses for an Int11 wizard i just don't see them as common. And its not really optimization thinking (not completely) that would ban a person from becoming a wizard...


Que a long rant that follows...


Congratulations! Me and my friends have conquered the Stolen Lands! We want to establish a Magocracy with ruler a sorcerer and as my usual necromancer (by picking divination and conjuration as banned i am gimped that i don't, usually, overshadow the others. Plus favorite school of magic). I just reached 6th level and i have taken the "recruits" feat. The DM has given me the go ahead to make them all wizards too. We operate out of the village Stageton that has a population of 200 but i want my apprentices to be young and malleable so I'll choose from the 100 unlisted non combatants. Before i use the retaining rules they were all (at least) commoners so we're looking at 100 nine to twelve year olds.


Instead of rolling I'm going to account for how most of them are not PC material. We'll say that half have solid tens in everything but human heritage feature gives a +2 to one ability score of your choice; we'll now assume those fifty have a one in six chance of putting it in intelligence. Thirty percent have the basic npc array which means a two in three chance of getting intelligence to ten or higher. Twenty percent (minus one person) use the elite array. Five in six chance of getting intelligence to ten or higher. Unfortunately there is some rounding in there. That last person is a PC who rolled an 18 and put human heritage into intelligence. (Lets roll some quick d100s to see where human heritage went on the 12,13,14,15 intelligence people)

Here is a breakdown of our possible students;
50 int10
13 int12
5 int13
4 int14
6 int15
1 int16
1 int20

82 of 100 kids. Not bad. All human (or having human heritage as a racial feature) but i can only pick three. The problem? As a player i do not have access to their sheets. In real life not everyone wants to be a wizard. There are ten other core classes so lets knock a digit off the top two and round up;

Here is a breakdown of our possible students who want to be wizards;
5 int10
2 int12
5 int13
4 int14
6 int15
1 int16
1 int20


Now we just need a test and i have just the thing; a test of intelligence made out of Contrivium. A special material that is easily malleable to anyone with int10 or higher (handy, right?). This ensures that the other eighteen muggle kids who might show will auto fail and the intelligent ones won't feel like they are singled out.

A simple DC12 int check to pass. Our worst kids have a 45% chance of passing. It's not a race where i pick the first three; i will test them all.

(My dice roller program is so handy here, mods included)

Int10: 20, 17, 16, 12, 7
Int12: 18, 7
Int13: 16, 12, 12, 7, 4
Int14: 22, 13, 9, 3
Int15: 18, 17, 15, 14, 14, 3
Int16: 5
Int20: 9


....

Alrighty... i have 3 apprentices. One of int 14, another at 10 with the last at 15

Everyone else must wait for the next time or try it on their own

Zarrgon
2020-06-16, 02:37 PM
No, it's the "kinda like real life since the start of specialized skills, trades, and careers 1000s of years ago" viewpoint, and repeatedly trying to make it fit some misbegotten hobbyhorse about gaming styles won't make it otherwise. Stop trying to tell other people what they're thinking and what their reasoning is.

But again, not everyone who has a job or trade or career has 100% perfectly optimized ability scores. It would be great if someday when you were say 13, you'd wake up and know your ability score numbers and then you could pick a career based off those numbers. Of course, you'd still have millions of people saying they don't care how low their score is and they want to be take whatever career anyway.



But people heavily tend to not pick careers they're highly unsuited for, and if they do try, they very much tend to fail at it. People with 11 INT rarely if ever become theoretical physicists, people with 11 DEX rarely if ever become top-tier professional athletes.

Well, notice your moving the goal posts. It was just generic jobs, but now you want to say top tier? And, yes it's true that a person with the stats of 11, won't become top-tier professional athlete. BUT they can still become an athlete. They might not make it to theoretical physicists, but might make it to just regular physicist. And like I said, you need to compare your top tier professional to an archmage.

And no one with ability scores of between 8-12 is "highly unsuited" for most jobs, as that range does make up a lot of people. The 11 character, will in fact, just be average.



No, it's true of people in general. You're getting hung up on the fact that we're assigning a number to the Int and claiming "that's playing the optimization game." In reality, in real life, in everyday life, people play the optimization game all the time, trying to do the best they can with what they have.

I'm sure that no one except the RPG Optimization fans play the optimization game. But optimization is a far cry from "trying to do the best they can with what you have".

When an Optimization Fan builds a Optimized Character, yes, all they care about is "making the best optimized character they can with what they have".

When any other play makes(note not "build") a character they most often care about making a fun character to play.




I'll just point to 3e and PF for now, but I'm pretty sure other editions also have it: see the "starting ages" based on class.

Ok, sure, starting ages....can you point to the part that says learning magic is hard and difficult and takes years of apprenticeship?



Yes, multiclassing into wizard means you just "suddenly pick it up,"

Yup, silly game rules.



If you want to argue that becoming a wizard is trivially easy, such that anybody who has the aptitude shoudl take at least one level of it, go ahead, but now you are playing the optimization game, not me.

I'm not saying it's easy, I just asked for a rule that makes it so hard. And how hard is it?




In real life, historically speaking, unless there was a lot of patronage and bribery going on, people ill-suited to prestigious and highly-lucrative jobs didn't have masters of the profession wasting their time on training them to be barely-passable. They were turned out to go learn a trade more suited to their talents. Or simply turned out in favor of more promising students.

Er, historical speaking this happens everyday. Most people training and teaching are average and they are teaching average students. And bribery to get into a school.....humm, check the recent news.



"Want to?" "Pick?" Sure, people decide to be professional athletes all the time...and most of them don't make it into the pro leagues. People decide they want to get into Harvard, Yale, or MIT and can't make the cut against all the others competing for the positions because there are limited spaces. I could decide that I want to be a movie producer or an actor, but I would be hard-pressed to make any money at it given my lack of skill or talent or connections in the field. I could decide I want to run for office in two years, but I doubt I would succeed because I lack the skills, talents, temperament, and charisma to win a position as STUCO rep for a high school class, let alone a serious position where professional politicians are out advertising for people's votes. Heck, I probably couldn't raise $5000 for a campaign, because my Charisma is just too low.

But does this not prove my point? Obviously most of these people don't have ability scores of like 18 or 25, but they sure do jobs they are not "optimized too". Some fail, but most can just make it through as average or below average. After all the world is full of producers, actors and writers that are just objectively "not that good"; and yet they make whole carries and lifetimes doing that and "just" get by.



The 11-int Wizard needs special circumstances to even be given the chance to learn: he needs either to be trying to be self-taught (in which case it probably does take him much longer than if he were being trained by a master) or to find a master who will bear with his rather dunce-like nature compared to said master and most of the other apprentices. A master who is desperate for a student might take him on, but how many wizards are desperate for students and can't find anybody smarter than the average human?

Intelligence of 11 is not "that low". It's average. If a wizard was to sit around and wait only for geniuses with a sing saying "you must have an Intelligence of 18+ to be my apprentice", they will be sitting around for a long time.




The point being: yes, you can construct scenarios where 11-int Wizards pop up, but they're special cases and circumstances.

Oddly I see it the other way around. Wizards of Lower Intelligence would be quite common, but it's the wizards of high and super high intelligence that are rare. Plus you'd have plenty of high intelligence characters of other classes that chose that class because they were not optimizing.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-16, 03:25 PM
But again, not everyone who has a job or trade or career has 100% perfectly optimized ability scores. It would be great if someday when you were say 13, you'd wake up and know your ability score numbers and then you could pick a career based off those numbers. Of course, you'd still have millions of people saying they don't care how low their score is and they want to be take whatever career anyway.


And those who can't cut it in a demanding field, don't get the career they want. It doesn't matter how much you want it, if you can't hack it.




Well, notice your moving the goal posts. It was just generic jobs, but now you want to say top tier? And, yes it's true that a person with the stats of 11, won't become top-tier professional athlete. BUT they can still become an athlete. They might not make it to theoretical physicists, but might make it to just regular physicist. And like I said, you need to compare your top tier professional to an archmage.

And no one with ability scores of between 8-12 is "highly unsuited" for most jobs, as that range does make up a lot of people. The 11 character, will in fact, just be average.


Goalposts are firmly planted, we've always been discussing wizards, not ditch-diggers etc.

mindstalk
2020-06-16, 03:58 PM
Goalposts are firmly planted, we've always been discussing wizards, not ditch-diggers etc.

But what "being a wizard" means, in training requirements and social role, is *not* firmly planted.

I note that a first level spell cast by an 11 Int wizard is *just as good* as one cast by a 20 Int wizard, unless you need high DC, which for civilian purposes you don't. Depending on edition Int can matter for speed of advancement, or how many spells you get per day, or how easily you can learn a spell, or the highest level spell you can learn and cast, but in D&D it has never mattered for the actual spell cast.

Also edition details can matter a lot. In 3.5 a 1st level bard gets a handful of cantrips; in Pathfinder she gets infinite cantrip slots *and* potential access to Cure Light Wounds. In the latter game it would make more sense for your entire 11+ Cha nobility to have dipped into a level of Bard just for easy access to curative magic. In the former game it's less appealing, in AD&D the question doesn't even make sense.

Alcore
2020-06-16, 05:36 PM
Also edition details can matter a lot. In 3.5 a 1st level bard gets a handful of cantrips; in Pathfinder she gets infinite cantrip slots *and* potential access to Cure Light Wounds. In the latter game it would make more sense for your entire 11+ Cha nobility to have dipped into a level of Bard just for easy access to curative magic. In the former game it's less appealing, in AD&D the question doesn't even make sense.also in pathfinder...


A witch (an arcane class) can select the healing hex (at 1st level). All day long she can cast cure light wounds. The catch is that it only works once per person per 24 hours. That won't typically matter in a city; you only need to stabilize before better help can be found. Upgrades to cure moderate wounds at 5th level. Witches also have a few contrips that used to be restricted to divine casters.

A Magocracy with unlimited, if conditional, healing...

Psyren
2020-06-16, 05:42 PM
I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.

1) Gods don't want it that way: It might feel like a cop-out answer to some, but you're specifically asking about D&D settings - and all of them except for Eberron do possess deities that can outmuscle any wizard long before they achieve demigod status. Several of these deities have a vested interest in non-magocratic societies - whether they are typical pseudo-medieval feudal states, honorable warrior-tribes, And even Eberron, while lacking deities in the traditional sense, instead has a global prophecy that dictates the overall progress

2) The mages themselves don't want it that way: Think of someone like Elminster or Raistlin or Manshoon. Yeah they could easily rule a city or a country, but why would they? All that administration is useless time they could otherwise spend researching, adventuring, crafting, or just plain kicking back.

3) The people don't want it that way: No matter how powerful someone is, they can't be a leader with no one to lead. Whether its a general distrust of magic, specific bad examples in the past, or both - if people want to prevent or curtail mages from having too much political power, that's generally what will happen. Mages are more often key advisors or agents than the rulers themselves, both because that is more in line with their own goals (see #2) and because they usually don't have to worry about pitchfork-wielding mobs that way, since there is another ruler taking the fall.

4) The mages already run things and nobody knows it: This is an offshoot of the last two - if you can accomplish just as much ruling from behind the scenes with far less risk, there's little reason not to. A "mageocracy" doesn't have to mean the monarch or ruling class are all mages - it could mean that they install a non-mage into whatever positions of power are needed and just direct that individual - willingly or non-wilingly.

mindstalk
2020-06-16, 06:17 PM
All that administration is useless time they could otherwise spend researching, adventuring, crafting, or just plain kicking back.

People keep saying this but I'm not sure it holds up. The office of grand vizier/prime minister/Hand of the King exists for reasons, one of which is to offload the boring administrative work onto someone else. Someone who might be better qualified at that job than the person who is "the last king's eldest son" or "the most powerful wizard". And someone who can be blamed for unpopular decisions -- even if you're the one who forced those decisions through. In the meantime you the king get the nice feeling of being In Charge and rolling around in as much tax money as you can siphon off from the military and roads and bribes. All the benefit, little of the work.

Have you ever wished you could tell the government what to do? It's like that. The king does what they want while living in luxury, offloading the gruntwork, but gets to override the government if it does something they disagree with.

Zarrgon
2020-06-16, 06:48 PM
And those who can't cut it in a demanding field, don't get the career they want. It doesn't matter how much you want it, if you can't hack it.

True for demanding fields, but there are tons of less demanding fields. A average score character can't be a, as you say, a top tier pro athlete, but they can still be a professional athlete. Same way the average score character can be a wizard, but not be an archmage.




Goalposts are firmly planted, we've always been discussing wizards, not ditch-diggers etc.

Ok, good to know then that you agree that characters of at least average stats like intelligence can be a wizard.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-16, 06:52 PM
True for demanding fields, but there are tons of less demanding fields. A average score character can't be a, as you say, a top tier pro athlete, but they can still be a professional athlete. Same way the average score character can be a wizard, but not be an archmage.


Wizardry IS a demanding field.

And no, an "average score character" CANNOT be a professional athlete. Even a single-A baseball player toiling away in the minor leagues is still in the 99th percentile of human beings athletically. Or higher.




Ok, good to know then that you agree that characters of at least average stats like intelligence can be a wizard.


If you're not going to argue in good faith, don't bother.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-16, 07:52 PM
You, do realize what administration actually entails, right? It's secretarial work, paperwork, number-crunching, signing and writing documents, keeping track of manifests, and making sure people's schedules line up. A lantern archon has literally no abilities that would help with that save for Tongues for translation. They have an Int of 6 and no skills. To use their "superhuman" status to claim that they would be able to somehow magically obviate administrative tasks is like saying that a gorilla would be a good driver.

Lantern archons, being archons, have at-will greater teleport in addition to their constant tongues, making them a classic option for casters wanting easy transportation and communication and an excellent choice for messengers, couriers, translators, concierges, and other public-facing roles where being fast and multilingual helps. Not having to sleep plus having Darkvision plus having the ability to make continual flames plus literally being a ball of light makes them good night shift workers, too, improving the efficiency of your bureacracy.

Far from having "no skills," outsiders like archons have 8+Int skills, so even with a 6 Int that lets them max out 6 skills; the standard stat block even has them train Diplomacy, so by default they're people persons archons.

And finally, the best thing about lantern archons is that you don't need to call up a few hundred of them and deprive Celestia and Bytopia of their gifts, you can just make them (http://dnd.arkalseif.info/spells/champions-of-valor--28/create-lantern-archon--307/index.html)! They only last for a short time, but (A) an infinitely-teleporting archon can get a lot done in 1 hour and (B) you're actually increasing the number of archons in the multiverse by spamming that spell, something that might help persuade more powerful archons to lend you a hand.


The single biggest problem with D&D is the Good alignment. A lot of these arguments fall apart if you don't have explicitly Good people to call on. If Pelor is just a sun god, who only really cares about the sun and crops and maybe killing undead, but has no particular mandate to help people, the question of why Pelor and his clergy don't do anything about the fact that being stuck in the middle ages is miserable basically goes away. D&D would be in all ways improved if you replaced alignment with MTG's Color Wheel or abolished it entirely.

Without straying too far into real-world religion territory, I'd point out that "omnibenevolent deity vs. Problem of Evil" is an unsolved issue in philosophy and there's an entire field of theodicy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy) devoted to solving it, and there are a lot more valid reasons why a Good D&D deity might be otherwise occupied (dealing with stronger opposing gods, handling stuff on other Prime worlds, etc.).

Zarrgon
2020-06-16, 08:13 PM
Wizardry IS a demanding field.

It is? Based on what?

The D&D rules sure don't say anything about spellcasting being demanding.



And no, an "average score character" CANNOT be a professional athlete. Even a single-A baseball player toiling away in the minor leagues is still in the 99th percentile of human beings athletically. Or higher.

99% or higher for the minors leagues sounds a bit high.



If you're not going to argue in good faith, don't bother.

Well, I'm pointing out that even average people can be wizards. There is nothing about wizards that makes them only the top 99% of people. That would be saying what, all wizards must have a minimum intelligence of 18?

No edition of D&D ever had a rule that all wizards must be way above average. Maybe there is a game out there that only always wizards that were born demi gods that your thinking of?

Psyren
2020-06-16, 09:57 PM
People keep saying this but I'm not sure it holds up. The office of grand vizier/prime minister/Hand of the King exists for reasons, one of which is to offload the boring administrative work onto someone else. Someone who might be better qualified at that job than the person who is "the last king's eldest son" or "the most powerful wizard". And someone who can be blamed for unpopular decisions -- even if you're the one who forced those decisions through. In the meantime you the king get the nice feeling of being In Charge and rolling around in as much tax money as you can siphon off from the military and roads and bribes. All the benefit, little of the work.

Have you ever wished you could tell the government what to do? It's like that. The king does what they want while living in luxury, offloading the gruntwork, but gets to override the government if it does something they disagree with.

You know what lets you offload even more work? Telling the king what to do. All putting your name over the door does is tell the rivals/revolutionaries who to go after.


It is? Based on what?

The D&D rules sure don't say anything about spellcasting being demanding.

This a thread about settings, not RAW.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-16, 10:25 PM
It is? Based on what?

The D&D rules sure don't say anything about spellcasting being demanding.


Most of the text for D&D (both for the settings and and for its implicit setting), and many other game settings, make it quite clear that wizardry is an intellectually challenging pursuit that is not just unsuited for the average intellect, but quite potentially dangerous.

Even in 5th edition, INT controls how many spells the wizard can prepare, the effectiveness of some spells, the saving throw imposed on targets, etc -- that is, even an edition where the rules sometimes deeply fail to embrace the "fluff" (hate that word) an average or low INT makes for a poor wizard indeed. And there is a min INT still for multi-classing as a Wizard, at least.




99% or higher for the minors leagues sounds a bit high.


There are roughly 6500 minor league baseball players each season. Even if we ignore how many of them are from other countries and pretend they're all Americans, that's about 0.002% of the US population playing minor league baseball each season. So if anything, 99th percentile is being conservative.

It doesn't matter how much the average person wants to engage in one of these highly demanding pursuits we're discussing, they're simply not equipped.




Well, I'm pointing out that even average people can be wizards.


I was referring to the "thank you for agreeing with me" when you know damn well I don't, and that my statement expressed no agreement.

AdAstra
2020-06-17, 02:10 AM
Lantern archons, being archons, have at-will greater teleport in addition to their constant tongues, making them a classic option for casters wanting easy transportation and communication and an excellent choice for messengers, couriers, translators, concierges, and other public-facing roles where being fast and multilingual helps. Not having to sleep plus having Darkvision plus having the ability to make continual flames plus literally being a ball of light makes them good night shift workers, too, improving the efficiency of your bureacracy.

Far from having "no skills," outsiders like archons have 8+Int skills, so even with a 6 Int that lets them max out 6 skills; the standard stat block even has them train Diplomacy, so by default they're people persons archons.

And finally, the best thing about lantern archons is that you don't need to call up a few hundred of them and deprive Celestia and Bytopia of their gifts, you can just make them (http://dnd.arkalseif.info/spells/champions-of-valor--28/create-lantern-archon--307/index.html)! They only last for a short time, but (A) an infinitely-teleporting archon can get a lot done in 1 hour and (B) you're actually increasing the number of archons in the multiverse by spamming that spell, something that might help persuade more powerful archons to lend you a hand.


Where are you getting that from? At least in the OGL stat block no skills are listed. (EDIT: Ah, okay, outsider rules. Still not sure where the diplomacy is coming from though). How would cross-class skill rules and max ranks interact with that? And even when maxed out, any intelligence skills will still only be at a +0 pretty sure. Charisma and Wisdom skills would be +2?

In addition, that spell says "You sacrifice a small part of your own life force to create a new lantern archon". That doesn't sound like the sort of spell you can spam if we're taking spell descriptions with any in-universe weight. Of course, we could also go with a Tippyverse setup, but that's a far more comprehensive interpretation of the setting beyond just having mageocracies and such.

mindstalk
2020-06-17, 03:13 AM
"You sacrifice a small part of your own life force to create a new lantern archon". That doesn't sound like the sort of spell you can spam if we're taking spell descriptions with any in-universe weight.

But mechanically it's just Con drain.

Alcore
2020-06-17, 07:47 AM
There are roughly 6500 minor league baseball players each season. Even if we ignore how many of them are from other countries and pretend they're all Americans, that's about 0.002% of the US population playing minor league baseball each season. So if anything, 99th percentile is being conservative.

It doesn't matter how much the average person wants to engage in one of these highly demanding pursuits we're discussing, they're simply not equipped.

Problem is that while minor leagues is conservative it can be spot on for the demographs of population centers. If you roll high on the "highest wizard level" table in 3.5 you can often reach 1 or 2% arcane intelligence based casters if you keep doubling wizard numbers for each lower level (a common trend). Add in artifcers or warmages (both intelligence based) and you might make 5%. Add the spellcaster npc class in Eberron and double digit percentage arcane casters is not terribly unreasonable.


I feel wizards (or any intelligence based arcane caster) are more common than most people think yet it is harder to be one than what other people think.

Friv
2020-06-17, 01:15 PM
There are roughly 6500 minor league baseball players each season. Even if we ignore how many of them are from other countries and pretend they're all Americans, that's about 0.002% of the US population playing minor league baseball each season. So if anything, 99th percentile is being conservative.

That assumes that everyone who is capable of playing in the minor leagues wants to. For example, a lot of athletes playing in other sports would be capable of playing minor league baseball if they shifted their training regimens to that, and lots of people who are capable of minor league baseball have chosen to be software developers, or lawyers, or cashiers. Ultimately speaking, how much someone wants to be involved in these occupations is one of the primary drivers of whether they do.

For example, the average salary of a minor league baseball player is $1,100 per month, which is only $7.25 per hour if you're training full-time for games - and then clubhouse fees are taken out. You literally make more money working at McDonalds. I don't think the primary barrier to participation in the minor leagues is your physical ability to play baseball.

And it calls into question how you're defining capability. If I were capable of playing in the minor leagues, provided that I was willing to spend 2-3 hours a day training to be in the minor leagues, but since I am not currently spending 2-3 hours a day exercising I would not currently be able to play in the minor leagues - are you excluding me from the list? If most people could learn wizardry, but they don't have time because the hours required to be a farmer preclude the hours involved to be a wizard, would you say that those people can't learn to be wizards, or merely that they don't?

prabe
2020-06-17, 01:48 PM
That assumes that everyone who is capable of playing in the minor leagues wants to. For example, a lot of athletes playing in other sports would be capable of playing minor league baseball if they shifted their training regimens to that, and lots of people who are capable of minor league baseball have chosen to be software developers, or lawyers, or cashiers. Ultimately speaking, how much someone wants to be involved in these occupations is one of the primary drivers of whether they do.

For example, the average salary of a minor league baseball player is $1,100 per month, which is only $7.25 per hour if you're training full-time for games - and then clubhouse fees are taken out. You literally make more money working at McDonalds. I don't think the primary barrier to participation in the minor leagues is your physical ability to play baseball.

And it calls into question how you're defining capability. If I were capable of playing in the minor leagues, provided that I was willing to spend 2-3 hours a day training to be in the minor leagues, but since I am not currently spending 2-3 hours a day exercising I would not currently be able to play in the minor leagues - are you excluding me from the list? If most people could learn wizardry, but they don't have time because the hours required to be a farmer preclude the hours involved to be a wizard, would you say that those people can't learn to be wizards, or merely that they don't?

A way to look at this: If there are ~6500 players in the Minors (I have no reason to doubt the number, but I haven't checked it, but the total number of players under contract in all leagues maxes out at 8700), and there are 750 players in the Majors at any given time (25-man roster times 30 teams) then the percentage of players who aren't in the Majors is easy to work out. Conventional wisdom says that about 10% of players signed ever play in the Bigs, which I think would place those players in the 90th percentile of professional baseball players, at least. I don't think it's unreasonable to place them well into the 99th percentile as far as capability goes.

Zarrgon
2020-06-17, 02:08 PM
Most of the text for D&D (both for the settings and and for its implicit setting), and many other game settings, make it quite clear that wizardry is an intellectually challenging pursuit that is not just unsuited for the average intellect, but quite potentially dangerous.

Well, maybe there is fluff that sort of implies it....but you'd be hard pressed to find much in a game book.

In fact, just about all "settings and implicit settings" do have weak wizards that are a lot more common then the archmage wizards.

And very few "settings and implicit settings" have "dangerous" magic, in fact again it's the exact opposite where magic is super safe and easy.




There are roughly 6500 minor league baseball players each season. Even if we ignore how many of them are from other countries and pretend they're all Americans, that's about 0.002% of the US population playing minor league baseball each season. So if anything, 99th percentile is being conservative.


Well comparing athletes to wizards might not be the best as athletes are not intelligence based.

Maybe compare wizards to scientists.

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-17, 03:03 PM
That assumes that everyone who is capable of playing in the minor leagues wants to. For example, a lot of athletes playing in other sports would be capable of playing minor league baseball if they shifted their training regimens to that, and lots of people who are capable of minor league baseball have chosen to be software developers, or lawyers, or cashiers. Ultimately speaking, how much someone wants to be involved in these occupations is one of the primary drivers of whether they do.

For example, the average salary of a minor league baseball player is $1,100 per month, which is only $7.25 per hour if you're training full-time for games - and then clubhouse fees are taken out. You literally make more money working at McDonalds. I don't think the primary barrier to participation in the minor leagues is your physical ability to play baseball.

And it calls into question how you're defining capability. If I were capable of playing in the minor leagues, provided that I was willing to spend 2-3 hours a day training to be in the minor leagues, but since I am not currently spending 2-3 hours a day exercising I would not currently be able to play in the minor leagues - are you excluding me from the list? If most people could learn wizardry, but they don't have time because the hours required to be a farmer preclude the hours involved to be a wizard, would you say that those people can't learn to be wizards, or merely that they don't?

I'd say most of that is swamped by the fact that it's 0.002%.

If we guesstimate that there are 10 times as many who capable, but either don't want to or are playing another sport... that's still 0.02%.

If we guesstimate 100 times as many, that's 0.2%

Still safely in the 99th percentile figure I originally gave, and actually some of the reasons I didn't go further than 99th percentile.

My original point still stands, comparing wizards to elite athletes, not ditch-diggers and random clerks.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-17, 05:09 PM
Where are you getting that from? At least in the OGL stat block no skills are listed. (EDIT: Ah, okay, outsider rules. Still not sure where the diplomacy is coming from though). How would cross-class skill rules and max ranks interact with that? And even when maxed out, any intelligence skills will still only be at a +0 pretty sure. Charisma and Wisdom skills would be +2?

For monsters, any skills found in their stat block are treated as class skills, so yes, cross-"class" Int-based skills are +0 and Wis-/Cha-based skills are +2. But that's not a huge deal, because many tasks you'd use lantern archons for either don't require any skill checks (so long as you can give them the appropriate destination, they don't need to navigate or look anything up, they can just bamf there) or require low-DC skill checks (so long as they have a +0 in a Knowledge skill they can take 10 for "common knowledge," enough to be a tour guide or intepreter or the like).


In addition, that spell says "You sacrifice a small part of your own life force to create a new lantern archon". That doesn't sound like the sort of spell you can spam if we're taking spell descriptions with any in-universe weight. Of course, we could also go with a Tippyverse setup, but that's a far more comprehensive interpretation of the setting beyond just having mageocracies and such.

As mindstalk noted, the spell only costs 1d2 Con drain. Any non-evil 7th-level cleric with at least 10 Con can safely create 8 lantern archons per day, following every fourth casting of create lantern archon with a casting of restoration to heal the Con drain, so unless you need dozens of disposable archons per day you don't even need dedicated lantern archon generators, any mid-level priest (or archon with cleric casting) can fill in in a pinch.

---

Regarding the wizard stats discussion, keep in mind that high stats actually aren't all that rare.

The minimum starting Int needed to be able to eventually cast 9th-level spells without Int-boosting items in 3e is 15 (+4 from levels gets you to Int 19 just in time), and getting at least 15 Int happens 9.26% of the time on a straight 3d6 roll or 23.15% of the time on 4d6-drop-lowest, so between ~1/10 and ~1/4 of the population is capable not just of "being a wizard at all" but of reaching the heights of wizardry with no outside assistance. Even the much-vaunted 18 Int will show up a comparatively high 0.46% (3d6) or 1.62% (4d6b3) of the time, so between 1/216 and ~1/60 of the populace is thus gifted.

That doesn't mean adventuring or military wizards are necessarily that common, since those percentages don't take into account other stats and someone with a stat array of 3/3/3/15/3/3 isn't going to last long in a fight (or be someone you want to trust with phenomenal cosmic power, obviously), but it does mean that "ZOMG an Int above 10, what a dirty dirty optimizer!" is a ridiculous reaction to someone having good stats for their class, and it also means that a wizard-based magocracy can have a pretty wide base of individuals from which to draw new arcanists if you assume universal magical education.

AdAstra
2020-06-17, 08:46 PM
For monsters, any skills found in their stat block are treated as class skills, so yes, cross-"class" Int-based skills are +0 and Wis-/Cha-based skills are +2. But that's not a huge deal, because many tasks you'd use lantern archons for either don't require any skill checks (so long as you can give them the appropriate destination, they don't need to navigate or look anything up, they can just bamf there) or require low-DC skill checks (so long as they have a +0 in a Knowledge skill they can take 10 for "common knowledge," enough to be a tour guide or intepreter or the like).



As mindstalk noted, the spell only costs 1d2 Con drain. Any non-evil 7th-level cleric with at least 10 Con can safely create 8 lantern archons per day, following every fourth casting of create lantern archon with a casting of restoration to heal the Con drain, so unless you need dozens of disposable archons per day you don't even need dedicated lantern archon generators, any mid-level priest (or archon with cleric casting) can fill in in a pinch.
"Tour guide and interpreter" is very different from an administrator.

Also, if we're allowing infinite archon summoning from splatbooks, that definitely is just going to end up as Tippyverse, Locate City bombs and all. Infinite teleportation and servants with no limit on stamina completely obviate the need to even have citizens in your country, and realistically obviate the need for adventurers as well.

Zarrgon
2020-06-17, 09:23 PM
My original point still stands, comparing wizards to elite athletes, not ditch-diggers and random clerks.

How about wizards to scientists? Does that not seem like a better match? Both are intelligent based.

How about the fact that just about all settings that have at least average levels of magic do, in fact, have lots of weak and average wizards?

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-17, 11:57 PM
"Tour guide and interpreter" is very different from an administrator.

You'll note that I initially said lantern archons would be excellent "messengers, couriers, translators, concierges, and other public-facing roles where being fast and multilingual helps." I never claimed they would make, say, good scribes or calligraphers; first of all, it's kind of hard to use a quill when you lack hands. :smallamused:

For both the archon example and the general case, a lot of people seem to be reading "magocracy" and thinking "clerks and middle managers with wizard levels," but a bureaucracy is much more than just a bunch of paper-pushers. The famed ancient Chinese scholar-bureaucracy, with its Imperial examinations transitioning the government from a hereditary to a meritocratic system, gave roles such as secretaries, messengers in the Ministry of Rites, case reviewers, erudites, prefectural judges, prefects or county magistrates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#Post-examination_appointments) to those who scored lowest on its exams, and the current ISCO list of clerical and service jobs includes such roles as tellers, money collectors, transport clerks, travel attendants, guides, and personal care workers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Classification_of_Occupatio ns#Major_group_4).

Those certainly aren't glamorous jobs, but I'd certainly sleep better at night knowing that physical incarnations of Lawful Goodness who are cognitively incapable of corruption or embezzlement are handling the government's casework and tax collection, wouldn't you? And handing those tasks off to lantern archons lets you give the more traditional bureaucratic jobs to stronger archons who, y'know, have hands and stuff.


Also, if we're allowing infinite archon summoning from splatbooks, that definitely is just going to end up as Tippyverse, Locate City bombs and all. Infinite teleportation and servants with no limit on stamina completely obviate the need to even have citizens in your country, and realistically obviate the need for adventurers as well.

I'm sure you realize that there's a massive gap between "a level 3 and a level 4 spell that are both known to literally every single non-Evil cleric of 7th level or higher, the former of which can be cast spontaneously and can be used more sparingly by a 5th-level-or-higher-cleric if they rest a few days between castings" and "infinite traps of infinite everything with 17th+ level casters flinging wishes and teleportation circles around."

The Tippyverse is something requiring a bunch of factors to arise, including but not limited to a cooperative and/or RAW-obeying DM, non-interventionist gods, and a critical mass of 17th-level wizards. An archonocracy is something that any government in Eberron could just wake up tomorrow and decided it wanted to implement and it would be well within both their mechanical and thematic capabilities to do so.

AdAstra
2020-06-18, 12:32 AM
You'll note that I initially said lantern archons would be excellent "messengers, couriers, translators, concierges, and other public-facing roles where being fast and multilingual helps." I never claimed they would make, say, good scribes or calligraphers; first of all, it's kind of hard to use a quill when you lack hands. :smallamused:

For both the archon example and the general case, a lot of people seem to be reading "magocracy" and thinking "clerks and middle managers with wizard levels," but a bureaucracy is much more than just a bunch of paper-pushers. The famed ancient Chinese scholar-bureaucracy, with its Imperial examinations transitioning the government from a hereditary to a meritocratic system, gave roles such as secretaries, messengers in the Ministry of Rites, case reviewers, erudites, prefectural judges, prefects or county magistrates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination#Post-examination_appointments) to those who scored lowest on its exams, and the current ISCO list of clerical and service jobs includes such roles as tellers, money collectors, transport clerks, travel attendants, guides, and personal care workers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Classification_of_Occupatio ns#Major_group_4).

Those certainly aren't glamorous jobs, but I'd certainly sleep better at night knowing that physical incarnations of Lawful Goodness who are cognitively incapable of corruption or embezzlement are handling the government's casework and tax collection, wouldn't you? And handing those tasks off to lantern archons lets you give the more traditional bureaucratic jobs to stronger archons who, y'know, have hands and stuff.



I'm sure you realize that there's a massive gap between "a level 3 and a level 4 spell that are both known to literally every single non-Evil cleric of 7th level or higher, the former of which can be cast spontaneously and can be used more sparingly by a 5th-level-or-higher-cleric if they rest a few days between castings" and "infinite traps of infinite everything with 17th+ level casters flinging wishes and teleportation circles around."

The Tippyverse is something requiring a bunch of factors to arise, including but not limited to a cooperative and/or RAW-obeying DM, non-interventionist gods, and a critical mass of 17th-level wizards. An archonocracy is something that any government in Eberron could just wake up tomorrow and decided it wanted to implement and it would be well within both their mechanical and thematic capabilities to do so.
In the Imperial Chinese Bureaucracy example, yeah it was the lowest scoring individuals, among those who passed the rigorous standards (because you could still fail), after going through the years of education and study that were required before you even took the test. Does that sound like an Int 6 task?


The problem is that the archonocracy directly leads to a Tippyverse situation without intervention, assuming the archons stick around or others show up to replace them. Infinite teleports coupled with cargo allows for infinite energy (through waterwheels or other contraptions), infinite transportation capacity of objects that are less than 50 pounds per package, rapid communication across any distance, even warfare (archon teleports near hazardous material, then teleports it on top of whatever it wants to kill).

Max_Killjoy
2020-06-18, 06:44 AM
How about wizards to scientists? Does that not seem like a better match? Both are intelligent based.

How about the fact that just about all settings that have at least average levels of magic do, in fact, have lots of weak and average wizards?

"Lots". OK. Just how common do you think wizards are compared to farmers, laborers, clerks, merchants, etc, or other character classes, in these settings?

(Never mind that most people who fail to cut it in science don't blow themselves up or summon a demon who eats them in the process of failing...)

Nifft
2020-06-18, 10:06 AM
(Never mind that most people who fail to cut it in science don't blow themselves up or summon a demon who eats them in the process of failing...)

If adjunct teaching positions were actually life-devouring demons, I suspect those people would not be worse off...

Friv
2020-06-18, 11:15 AM
How about wizards to scientists? Does that not seem like a better match? Both are intelligent based.

How about the fact that just about all settings that have at least average levels of magic do, in fact, have lots of weak and average wizards?

Flipping over to support Max, you should probably not look at modern numbers of experts when you're trying to figure these things out, because D&D, as a rule, doesn't have a modern agricultural base. Clerical magic, provided that it is relatively common (and that's the other half of this can of worms, of course) can help deal with disease and injuries and probably provide a better life expectancy, but clerical spells aren't really designed for industrial farming. The number of experts that a nation can support is thus fairly low compared to current societies, and wizards are experts. They need food from somewhere until they're fairly high level, and even then, they probably don't want to spend spell slots exclusively on feeding themselves.

mindstalk
2020-06-18, 11:30 AM
OTOH if you can get to 50% workforce in agriculture via weather or pest control magic, you'll still have a largely agrarian society and yet half as many non farmers as you can ever have.

Even at 75% that's still 1/4 as many experts as modern, which is still a lot, though a lot lower expert/farmer ratio.

And a lot of people moved from farming to retail or other basic services, rather than high experts.

Zarrgon
2020-06-18, 05:52 PM
"Lots". OK. Just how common do you think wizards are compared to farmers, laborers, clerks, merchants, etc, or other character classes, in these settings?

Well, I'll admit I'm a bit confused about what "settings" everyone is talking about. Settings vary a lot. And the really good settings are massive in scope and scale that they cover way to much ground literately to be talked about as just one whole setting.

Spelljammer, Planescape, The Forgotten Realms, Ebberon, Mystrara all have a TON of wizards.

Any pre industrial low magic "generic" setting will have a ton more farmers and other such "sustenance" jobs then any other class. Merchants need a whole trade infrastructure(and a concept of worth and money) to even exist...and something to trade.

And local places do trump the "setting". In the Forgotten Realms Vangerdahast of Cormyr founds War Wizards in 1306, and by 1358 there are "over" 3,000 of them kingdom wide. Something like 200 to 500 per city. But this is artificial, of course, as Vangy did recruit and train wizards who then recruited and trained more and more. And THAT is only the War Wizards. Plus 5-20 public wizards per town and city(no dumb 3E rules here), and 5-20 not public. Plus each noble family having 5-20 wizards, plus 'house' wizards. And, that only covers humans and half elves. So, maybe a little under 5,000 wizards. For a single kingdom.



(Never mind that most people who fail to cut it in science don't blow themselves up or summon a demon who eats them in the process of failing...)

So what is your reference for this? Is there a game your thinking of where a player has to roll some dice or "blow up" when they cast a spell. I know your not thinking about any D&D past 3E as all that magic is safe.

Quertus
2020-06-18, 06:24 PM
Ehhhh...

It's unlikely that anybody with 11 int would become a wizard.


It's not as unlikely as you might think.


To me it sounded more like people with 11 INT don't become wizards for the same reason people with the equivalent of 11 INT in the real world don't become theoretical mathematicians.


Yea, but that is a bit apples and oranges though.

Wizard is much more generic then "theoretical mathematicians". A "theoretical mathematician" is a bit more like saying "Archmage".

Oh about "wizard" for "scientist" or "engineer" or "computer programmer". You might find a couple million people with 11 Int in such jobs.

You know some programmers are making quantum virus artificial intelligence networks.....and some make internet click bait with a little flashing box that says "click here".

I certainly had a fair number of "Int 11” classmates in my Computer Science classes - and numerous below-average intelligence people in university in general (really, if "there's a 1-in-6 chance of getting a '6' on a normal die (a d6 for us)" is an incomprehensible, "stuff of the gods" "how can you know that" concept? You may be making it through college on your back.).

Heck, now I want to run an 11-Int grey elf in 3e who had to go to human Wizard school, and still only made it through on her back.

But, back in 2e? I had plenty of 11-int Wizards. Was it suboptimal? Sure. But that didn't make it any less fun. :smallcool:

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-19, 02:21 AM
In the Imperial Chinese Bureaucracy example, yeah it was the lowest scoring individuals, among those who passed the rigorous standards (because you could still fail), after going through the years of education and study that were required before you even took the test. Does that sound like an Int 6 task?

I assume you've heard the old joke:

"What do you call the person who graduates with the lowest possible passing grade in med school?"

"'Doctor.'"

The point of that example was not to impugn Imperial bureaucrats by implying they had Int 6, but to point out that there are lots of different jobs that require a lot less skill than your generic administrator and that are within a lantern archon's capabilities. The reason said bureaucrats needed to take exams to be someone who could relay messages or count money is not that they needed any kind of intensive training (anyone who can read and count can do both jobs) was to prove competence for the jobs and alignment with (and loyalty to) Imperial Chinese culture as an alternative to just hiring a bunch of nobles of dubious education and training.

Thing is, archons spring into existence (whether via spell or from the planes) fully-formed with knowledge, skills, and an unshakeable devotion to the ideals of Lawful Goodness. You don't need to spend 6 years--or even 6 seconds--teaching a lantern archon how to count money and how not to embezzle, they just do that. That's why the example is archons and not eladrin or devils, because the latter two are just as smart and competent but nowhere near as reliable.


The problem is that the archonocracy directly leads to a Tippyverse situation without intervention, assuming the archons stick around or others show up to replace them. Infinite teleports coupled with cargo allows for infinite energy (through waterwheels or other contraptions), infinite transportation capacity of objects that are less than 50 pounds per package, rapid communication across any distance, even warfare (archon teleports near hazardous material, then teleports it on top of whatever it wants to kill).

Remember, only lantern archons are infinite disposable minions, and they only last for 1 hour unless you pay them as per planar ally to stick around. The "archonocracy" we're talking about is still a mageocracy outsourcing some bureaucracy to conjured minions (or a theocracy in the case of Thrane, but still), and making fair and equitable bargains with the more powerful archons to do so, this isn't a "Celestia is empty and all the archons are here" scenario with chain-gated throne archons and such.


But, back in 2e? I had plenty of 11-int Wizards. Was it suboptimal? Sure. But that didn't make it any less fun. :smallcool:

11 Int in 2e isn't nearly as suboptimal as it is in 3e, of course. 2 bonus languages, up to 7 spells per spell level known, and just under a 50/50 shot to learn any given spell is nothing to sneeze at; a max spell level of 5th is a pain, certainly, but for that to matter requires making it past name level and that's hardly guaranteed. It's basically equivalent to a 3e wizard with a 15 Int, which is a perfectly respectable starting score.

Vahnavoi
2020-06-19, 03:41 AM
A dystopian setting where a cabal of fighters uniformly murders level 1 wizards does nothing to explain why an ordinary D&D setting isn't a mageocracy.

Barbarian tribes and subsets of fighters hating wizards and magic is a common trope in D&D. IIRC, 2nd Edition AD&D gave barbarians extra experience for destroying magical things, such as spellbooks, and since this was supposed to reflect in-setting practices, these attitudes persistes to 3rd edition and beyond. So the scenario described is already a local truth in some setting (IIRC, Forgotten Realms, but I may be wrong) , explaining why some societies are not magogracies, even if some are.

---


People don't behave that way. They generally don't turn on their neighbors for resources, and when they do they sure as hell aren't drawing lines over profession. Moreover, even if you accept total self-interest, it's not even a smart strategy. Groups beat individuals. The Fighters would be better off recruiting some Wizards, just as they're better off forming into groups of Fighters.

People have fought each other for resources since the dawn of time, they have persecuted and even murdered each other based on profession up to this day. It's even more true in D&D than real life, due to the way Alignment and XP gain rules work. "Groups beat individuals" is text-book example of a Lawful attitude, and Lawful Evil in particular is defined as holding their in-group as superior and deserving to rule over or even destroy out-groups. By contrast, Lawful Good will act much the same way if their outgroup is actually evil, while Chaotic Evil, thinking might-makes-right, has no qualms of destroying anyone if they feel they will personally benefit... and they will benefit, by getting XP and loot, so what if their group suffers?

Neither groups nor individuals always act in their own best interest, and furthermore, what they deem to be in their best-interest isn't necessarily identical to what you deem to be in their best interest. A not-so-smart fighter won't think of the option you deem smart, the Evil or Chaotic fighter won't share your ideas of acceptance and co-operation.


It's not happening iteratively, it's happening in parallel. The population of the planet was already in the tens of millions by the rise of Rome, and by the Middle Ages, it was in the hundreds of millions. Maybe the Fighters beat up the Wizards in some places. But they won't do it everywhere, and that means at some point a nation of people without magic collides with a nation of people with it. That one does not go so well for the Fighters.

Every temporal dynamic system is iterative as much as it's parallel. The rest, I already covered. Again: I don't need to provide a reason why a world would never become a magocracy. I only need to provide one for limited time and space. "Maybe fighters beat up the wizards in some place" is a sufficient, reasonable explanation for why a magocracy doesn't exist in that place at the specified time, provided you can derive such a scenario from the rules used.

---


The entire point of the aboleths-and-dragons example is not to say that those two races coming first means that therefore aboleth-and-dragon-only worlds are a natural consequence of the rules, but rather that "Well, aboleths arose earlier so aboleths would kill off or dominate over any creatures that arose later" and "Well, fighters have earlier starting ages so fighters would kill off or dominate over wizards and other later-starting-age classes" are both equally ridiculous statements.

They're equally arbitrary statements. Neither of them are ridiculous statements. My point was that they're not logically equivalent, because one includes a random element and the other does not. "Dragons and aboleths" is not a functional reduction to absurdity of the original statement.


Sure, at the current point in time 1st-level fighters are on average younger than 1st level wizards, but that means basically nothing at a societal level because...

Yes, a rule will do nothing if you decide to ignore it and any of its implications. You are engaging (via this argument) in the exact practice I was criticizing when I first brought up the starting age rules. Furthermore, you're essentially making the same argument Zarrgon made pages ago: that rules for PCs don't matter for the setting, because the GM can ignore the rules. :smalltongue:

In more detail:



...starting ages might have been different in Ye Olden Days (e.g. back before most spells were invented, wizards might have had the same starting age as fighters, or even lower!);
...starting ages are averages, so it's entirely possible to have a tribe containing wizards who rolled 2 on the +2d6 and fighters who rolled 3 on the +1d4 so some of the wizards came first;
...different races have different starting ages, so it's entirely possible to have a tribe where the wizards are humans and the fighters are dwarves so all of the wizards came first;
...sorcerers and fighters have the same starting ages, so it's entirely possible for all the sorcerers to have killed off all the fighters instead;
...smart fighters might realize that if your tribe is N fighters + M wizards and other tribes are [N+M] fighters, you have a tactical, strategic, and logistical advantage against them;
...smarter fighters might realize that having at least one wizard on your side is better than not having at least one wizard on your side in pretty much all cases;
...Good-aligned fighters do not, as a general rule, commit mass wizard-ocide on teenage apprentices (or mass murder of anyone, in fact);
...and so on and so forth.
Trying to extrapolate from a single data point to an entire society is going to give you ridiculous answers, especially when that single data point doesn't actually have the fixed and unambiguous effect that you're implying it has.

In order:


Yes, you can change what results you'd get from the same initial inputs by arbitrarily changing the algorithm you're using to process them. The only way your conclusion follows ("means basically nothing at a societal level") if you change them specifically to support it. That's begging the question and moving the goalposts at the same time.
Yes, this is true. The difference to other arguments, as I already outlined, is that it's a rules simulation you can actually do and see how often it happens.
This is another "yes it could happen, but why?" Provided you assume a random distribution of stats etc., it's possible but vanishingly unlikely.
Yes, that's possible. Again, it's something you can use the rules to simulate and see how often it happens.
This is the same argument NigelWalmsley made; furthermore, it's essentially the same argument as the multiclassing one and the one you make immediately below. Sure, the fighters might... but they might not. Every "might not" is a potential failure point of a magocracy forming. Again, the fighters don't have all the same knowledge you're using to decide what is the best option.
Same as above.
Again, due to the way Alignment and XP rules work, everyone has a motive to mass-murder someone in D&D. There is no general rule of co-operation and acceptance that would prevent fighting between classes.
so on and so forth. :smalltongue:



Trying to extrapolate from a single data point to an entire society is going to give you ridiculous answers, especially when that single data point doesn't actually have the fixed and unambiguous effect that you're implying it has.

It should be obvious by now that I don't expect a fixed and unambiguous effect, I expect a random function will produce multiple different outputs from the same initial input.

Lkctgo
2020-06-20, 06:30 PM
I certainly had a fair number of "Int 11” classmates in my Computer Science classes - and numerous below-average intelligence people in university in general (really, if "there's a 1-in-6 chance of getting a '6' on a normal die (a d6 for us)" is an incomprehensible, "stuff of the gods" "how can you know that" concept? You may be making it through college on your back.).

Heck, now I want to run an 11-Int grey elf in 3e who had to go to human Wizard school, and still only made it through on her back.

But, back in 2e? I had plenty of 11-int Wizards. Was it suboptimal? Sure. But that didn't make it any less fun. :smallcool:

The real question is how you could MinMax on an 11 int.:smalltongue:

Jay R
2020-06-20, 06:47 PM
A. For every wizard, there is an equal and opposite wizard. Wizards don’t rule because other wizards don’t want them to.

B. Return on investment. You can use your magic to summon and control djinns. Or you can use your magic to control peasants. Which one is worth more?

C. The most powerful people aren’t the most powerful entities. Clerics don’t rule kingdoms because that’s not what their gods ask them to do.

D. It’s a thankless, trivial job. The wizards are controlling cosmic, monumental forces. Why would they want to waste their time holding courts, negotiating treaties, managing bureaucrats, and otherwise doing menial work (for a wizard).

E. It doesn’t make the game any more fun.

PairO'Dice Lost
2020-06-21, 08:17 PM
Barbarian tribes and subsets of fighters hating wizards and magic is a common trope in D&D. IIRC, 2nd Edition AD&D gave barbarians extra experience for destroying magical things, such as spellbooks, and since this was supposed to reflect in-setting practices, these attitudes persistes to 3rd edition and beyond. So the scenario described is already a local truth in some setting (IIRC, Forgotten Realms, but I may be wrong) , explaining why some societies are not magogracies, even if some are.

The only time barbarians had a hatred-of-magic theme was in their 1e Unearthed Arcana debut, and even then it was only hatred-of-arcane-magic-from-spellbooks-and-magic-items. By 2e that was gone, and no AD&D settings ever picked up the barbarians-hate-magic thing; in fact, in the Forgotten Realms the most prominent barbarian culture is Rashemen, which is a magocracy (quite appropriate for this thread) wherein the ruling Witches of Rashemen are highly respected.

The only vestige of that trope in later editions is a brief mention in the 3e class writeup that they "distrust" the "book magic" of wizards, and then only because they don't understand it (due to their illiteracy); they get along fine with bards and sorcerers and don't have opinions on magic items.


They're equally arbitrary statements. Neither of them are ridiculous statements. My point was that they're not logically equivalent, because one includes a random element and the other does not. "Dragons and aboleths" is not a functional reduction to absurdity of the original statement.

Indeed it is, because in both cases you're assuming that the thing that comes first is going to stamp out the thing that comes later--whatever that might be, whether fighter before magic-users or aboleths before humans--for no reason whatsoever when doing so is both irrational (because wizards are helpful at a societal level and humans have opposable thumbs) and does not at all entail "and therefore no magocracies/dragonocracies."


Yes, a rule will do nothing if you decide to ignore it and any of its implications. You are engaging (via this argument) in the exact practice I was criticizing when I first brought up the starting age rules. Furthermore, you're essentially making the same argument Zarrgon made pages ago: that rules for PCs don't matter for the setting, because the GM can ignore the rules. :smalltongue:

No, I'm saying that the GM can follow the aging rules to the letter for PCs and NPCs alike and still not extrapolate anything useful about the existence and prevalence of magocracies from those rules, because there's a huge gap between those rules affecting individual characters and "...and therefore society looks like X, Y, and Z." The rule is that the starting age of fighters and wizards is random, and that on average the value for fighters is lower than the value for wizards; your extrapolation is that therefore all fighters start out younger than all wizards (false) or that all societies have most fighters start younger than most wizards (false) and so on, and that this necessarily says anything about how fighters and wizards interact in general (false).

All of the counterexamples I gave were examples of scenarios in which starting age is used completely RAW but the "young fighters prevent magocracies" thing is false for other reasons: unusual rolls, certain racial makeups, Int rolls for various characters etc. In your rebuttal you argue "X might, but then it might not," and that is in fact the whole purpose of those examples: to show that taking a single rule with random outputs and no direct impact on any other rules and drawing large-scale conclusions from it is ridiculous and arbitrary.


A. For every wizard, there is an equal and opposite wizard. Wizards don’t rule because other wizards don’t want them to.

Ah yes, the Law of Conservation of Wizardry, Newton's Third Law of Setting-Building. Don't forget the other two laws: "A wizard either remains in his wizard tower or continues to adventure at a constant rate, unless acted upon by an outside wizard" and "The level L of a wizard is equal to the current level l of that wizard multiplied by the rate of change of XP r gained by the wizard."

Satinavian
2020-06-22, 01:01 AM
Remember, only lantern archons are infinite disposable minions, and they only last for 1 hour unless you pay them as per planar ally to stick around. The "archonocracy" we're talking about is still a mageocracy outsourcing some bureaucracy to conjured minions (or a theocracy in the case of Thrane, but still), and making fair and equitable bargains with the more powerful archons to do so, this isn't a "Celestia is empty and all the archons are here" scenario with chain-gated throne archons and such.

Is there any reason why a wizard ruler would be able to summon better or more archons than a court wizard ? I don't think so.

Let's just assume that the number of employed archons is the same in every gouvernment type not particularly hostile to that practice and move on.

Jay R
2020-06-22, 08:59 AM
A. For every wizard, there is an equal and opposite wizard. Wizards don’t rule because other wizards don’t want them to.
Ah yes, the Law of Conservation of Wizardry, Newton's Third Law of Setting-Building. Don't forget the other two laws: "A wizard either remains in his wizard tower or continues to adventure at a constant rate, unless acted upon by an outside wizard" and "The level L of a wizard is equal to the current level l of that wizard multiplied by the rate of change of XP r gained by the wizard."

Cute. But it doesn't address the point. Wizards aren't all on the same side. While they are powerful, the wizards who oppose them are just as powerful.

As J. K. Rowling wrote:

The Prime Minister gazed hopelessly at the pair of them for a moment, then the words he had fought to suppress all evening burst from him at last.

“But for heaven’s sake — you’re wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out — well — anything!”

Scrimgeour turned slowly on the spot and exchanged an incredulous look with Fudge, who really did manage a smile this time as he said kindly, “The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.”

mindstalk
2020-06-22, 05:25 PM
If the only thing stopping a wizard from ruling is other wizards, that just ends up with different wizards ruling. "I should be in charge" seems more likely than a commitment to "wizards should not be in charge". And if a king owes his throne to a wizard, what happens the wizard disagrees with the king about something? The wizard has most of the power.

If the wizard Kalel is defending a democracy, things might be different: more of an ideological commitment to not having one-man rule, and more importantly a more diffuse nature of power and legitimacy in the society. Even then, if Kalel is the only thing between them and rule by the evil wizard Zod, Kalel will probably have lots of influence and be able to get away with a lot. Kalel is kidnapping girls to the Tower of Solitude? Well, at least he's leaving most of us alone, unlike Zod...

Jay R
2020-06-22, 10:27 PM
If the only thing stopping a wizard from ruling is other wizards, ...

“If...”

I specifically gave five different reasons. This is only one of them.

The Fury
2020-06-23, 05:40 PM
D. It’s a thankless, trivial job. The wizards are controlling cosmic, monumental forces. Why would they want to waste their time holding courts, negotiating treaties, managing bureaucrats, and otherwise doing menial work (for a wizard).

This is pretty close to my point from earlier. Phrased a little differently.


E. It doesn’t make the game any more fun.

This is probably the best point anyone's made yet.