Preventing a Tippyverse

[mehs]

Changing the game as little as possible, what would be the main ways to make it that a dnd world actually resembles the description of what the world is like (forgotten realms/ middle ages but with magic and monsters)?

Changing automatic reset magic traps, lowering effectiveness of teleportation circle, and similar seem prime candidates. Preventing scroll of gate to summon a solar and spam wish, etc.

[noob]

Remove magic items and remove spells lasting longer than a day or that is instantaneous but have a lasting effect or that allows to use other spells(ex: summon monster, create lantern archon and so on it also includes wish, miracle, shapechange(all those allows to use other spells) and polymorph any object(can replicate a specific few lower level transmutation spells))
The removed spells must also be removed from monsters.

[mehs]

That is a pretty drastic change dude.

[AvatarVecna]

Changing the game as little as possible, what would be the main ways to make it that a dnd world actually resembles the middle ages but with magic and monsters?

Changing automatic reset magic traps, lowering effectiveness of teleportation circle, and similar seem prime candidates. Preventing scroll of gate to summon a solar and spam wish, etc.

You basically need a system rework or a DM. Tippyverse is an extreme example, but frankly based on how demographics are determined in D&D, there's just too much magic available for things to not change from medieval to something else rather quickly. The default setting of Forgotten Realms is basically post-apolcalypse, where society used to be this high-fantasy epic world where enormous mythals gave elves superpowers and literal gods literally walked the earth as they pleased, and then things went pear-shaped and now we're picking through the ruins for ancient magic items lost to time.

But things don't remain post-apoc forever. Sooner or later we're gonna find those weapon factories and hidden emergency nuke silos and power plants and food reserves that were lost to time, and we can start pushing society forward once again. Progress is inevitable, and magic allows that process to occur quicker than normal, so long as there's no interference. And because of the scale and power magic can achieve, that interference more or less has to be divine in origin to keep things on the medieval rails. That's where the gods come in, via the DM.

Edit: I'll also clarify that this isn't me saying a Tippyverse scenario (post-acarcity, superpowerful humanity, etc) is inevitable, except maybe in a long-term sense. But even if you're not abusing exploits like wish loops or scrolls of gate or resetting beneficial traps, there's still plenty of ways in which magic can uplift society out of the dark ages, because "making life easier" is kinda what most utility magic is for. If you're going to keep thing medieval in the (relatively) short term, if you don't want a Tippyverse springing up in a reasonable time frame, a good deal of utility magic and powerful magic needs to be more reined in. Gate, Wish, and Shapechange basically just have to go entirely, for example: access to all monsters and/or all magic is just...it's gonna be too difficult to balance, you can't just ban a few monsters that get mentioned a lot on forums and call it a day. The problem is literally systemic.

[noob]

That is a pretty drastic change dude.

You can keep magical items with only the purpose of killing stuff in front of you without risks to break the medieval stasis as long as you do not allow magical items including excessive area of effect(such as scrolls of apocalypse from the sky) because those can cause the most scary cold wars.

[Eldan]

Play E6 and ban most magic items?

[Crake]

The tippyverse comes about as the result of assumptions on the way people will react given magical abilities. Just segregate the magic users and make them a separate class of citizen who rarely, if at all interact with the mundane folk, and bam, you have your typical medieval fantasy setting, just with a magocracy instead of feudalism

[Silly Name]

Play E6 and ban most magic items?

This. You don't even need to ban all that many items, just make anything that requires a CL higher than 6 to be crafted an ancient and rare item, possibly unique or one of a few handful.

[Yuki Akuma]

Make Teleportation Circle unable to last longer than a day and rework how magical traps work so they can't be used for beneficial spells. That way, Tippy's thought experiment doesn't even get off the ground. Because it relies explicitly on those two things.

[Eldan]

The tippyverse comes about as the result of assumptions on the way people will react given magical abilities. Just segregate the magic users and make them a separate class of citizen who rarely, if at all interact with the mundane folk, and bam, you have your typical medieval fantasy setting, just with a magocracy instead of feudalism

I mean, that comes down to how strictly you define Tippyverse. Sure, you may not have the full magitech universe full of resetting wish traps and monster summoning for XP-farming, but a powerful magocracy is still halfway there already. And the OP also wanted something that looks medieval-ish.

[mehs]

Pretty much anything that sticks to the usual premise of a dnd style world, but yeah, medieval ish.

[sreservoir]

This. You don't even need to ban all that many items, just make anything that requires a CL higher than 6 to be crafted an ancient and rare item, possibly unique or one of a few handful.

You don't even need to ban CLs higher than 6, you can mostly get away with tossing anything that requires spells that can't be learned by character level 6. Better that way, probably, since there are whole classes of magic items (rings) have a CL requirement beyond 6th that, frankly, probably wasn't intended to keep them out of low-level players' hands.

Also, I just like the idea that most rings in the world are crafted with the help of basement-dwelling evil dwarves who inexplicably have SLAs with higher CL than their HD to qualify for Forge Ring (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/dwarf.htm#duergar)...

[Eldan]

Also, I just like the idea that most rings in the world are crafted with the help of basement-dwelling evil dwarves who inexplicably have SLAs with higher CL than their HD to qualify for Forge Ring (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/dwarf.htm#duergar)

I mean, that's all of Norse mythology, so I'm all for that.

[AnimeTheCat]

Changing the game as little as possible, what would be the main ways to make it that a dnd world actually resembles the middle ages but with magic and monsters?

Changing automatic reset magic traps, lowering effectiveness of teleportation circle, and similar seem prime candidates. Preventing scroll of gate to summon a solar and spam wish, etc.

You don't really need to change anything, you just need to limit availability in your game. When you do your city building, you pick what the characters are that exist. In a metropolis, you're going to have four wizards between level 13 and 16, four clerics between level 13 and 18, four sorcerers between 13 and 16, and four druids between level 13 and 18, plus whatever that filters out to for lower leveled of those classes. So just pick spells and deities that these spellcasters have that aren't problematic. None of them have Teleportation Circle (Wizards haven't researched it, Sorcerers don't have it ingrained in their blood memory). Druids aren't granted Shapechange by the primal forces of Nature, because it disrupts the cyclical flow of energies in the world. Clerics aren't granted Miracles, or they are severely limited based off of their deities' specific tenets. Come up with your in universe reasons for why certain things are the way they are, and just make the spells that are problematic, in your view, not a part of the history of your world. If no wizard has ever researched Teleportation Circle, then it won't exist. If there was a nation that researched it and used it to alpha strike a neighboring nation, have it written in to your history that the surrounding powers formed a coalition to fight back against that nation to swiftly put it down, and force them in to a pact where that knowledge was destroyed and all who knew it were sealed/beheaded/etc.

If you're the DM, you really control the narrative of the world, so I don't know why this is a particular question. And I don't mean that in a mean or rude way. The obvious answer for how to build a world that resembles the middle ages but with magic and monsters is... to build a world that resembles the middle ages but with magic and monsters.

[Duke of Urrel]

The reason why Tippyverse fails to develop in D&D is the same as the reason why Terry Pratchett's wizards and witches aren't in charge of the Discworld. The men who have magical powers are mostly lazy bums, and the few who have ambition are bitter rivals and willing to stab each other in the back. The women who have magical powers, i.e. witches, being more responsible than the men, are fully occupied protecting the Discworld against invasions by sadistic fairies.

Sure, we can imagine that magic in the world of D&D would be much better put to use to improve everybody's material standard of living, but who could ever persuade the magic users to co-operate with this vision? They're preoccupied using their magic to secure their own personal advantage and to fight other magical beings, including each other.

[Batcathat]

The reason why Tippyverse fails to develop in D&D is the same as the reason why Terry Pratchett's wizards and witches aren't in charge of the Discworld. The men who have magical powers are mostly lazy bums, and the few who have ambition are bitter rivals and willing to stab each other in the back. The women who have magical powers, i.e. witches, being more responsible than the men, are fully occupied protecting the Discworld against invasions by sadistic fairies.

Sure, we can imagine that magic in the world of D&D would be much better put to use to improve everybody's material standard of living, but who could ever persuade the magic users to co-operate with this vision? They're preoccupied using their magic to secure their own personal advantage and to fight other magical beings, including each other.

One problem with this reasoning is that high level D&D wizards are more like a Discworld sourcerer than a Discworld wizard, in that one of them is quite enough to change the world all by themselves and an argument between them can get pretty nuclear.

[noob]

The reason why Tippyverse fails to develop in D&D is the same as the reason why Terry Pratchett's wizards and witches aren't in charge of the Discworld. The men who have magical powers are mostly lazy bums, and the few who have ambition are bitter rivals and willing to stab each other in the back. The women who have magical powers, i.e. witches, being more responsible than the men, are fully occupied protecting the Discworld against invasions by sadistic fairies.

Sure, we can imagine that magic in the world of D&D would be much better put to use to improve everybody's material standard of living, but who could ever persuade the magic users to co-operate with this vision? They're preoccupied using their magic to secure their own personal advantage and to fight other magical beings, including each other.
In terry pratchet it is explained that 1: use of magic for simple tasks is generally more complicated than doing the task by hand and that 2: excess of use of magic does make a hole in reality that allows magic eating creatures to escape.

[Duke of Urrel]

One problem with this reasoning is that high level D&D wizards are more like a Discworld sourcerer than a Discworld wizard, in that one of them is quite enough to change the world all by themselves and an argument between them can get pretty nuclear.

Precisely. If the most powerful magic users tend to get drunk on power and "go nuclear," they're not going to get around to creating the Tippyverse, are they?


In terry pratchet it is explained that 1: use of magic for simple tasks is generally more complicated than doing the task by hand and that 2: excess of use of magic does make a hole in reality that allows magic eating creatures to escape.

This is true of the world of D&D, too.

One (1): Magic is complicated, which is why only a tiny minority of people who qualify (that is, only a tiny minority of people who have requisite mental ability scores of 10 or higher) ever develop the ability to create magic.

And, two (2): Magic often tears holes in the Prime Material Plane through which dangerous creatures enter. In the world of D&D, this magic includes Summoning and Calling spells, not to mention Necromancy spells that draw negative energy from the Negative Energy Plane to create beings that hate all living things. So, again, reckless people who use magic create big and nasty messes, so that consequently, responsible people who use magic are perpetually occupied with cleaning up after the reckless ones. So ... nobody has time to create the Tippyverse.

Post-Script: My main point is this. The main reason why a medieval society doesn't create the Tippyverse isn't technological; it's political. Magic users don't co-operate with each other, and no non-magic-users are powerful enough to make them co-operate with each other. So the Tippyverse never happens. – D. of U.

[Batcathat]

Precisely. If the most powerful magic users tend to get drunk on power and "go nuclear," they're not going to get around to creating the Tippyverse, are they?

They can go nuclear, they don't necessarily do. Just look at the real world – most countries with nukes don't use them. That said, I do think the risk is higher with D&D mages, since it comes down to individuals and thus probably takes less to set things off.

But just as it only takes a single mage to ruin countries, it only takes a single one to make some enormous changes to society as well (for good or bad).

While the Tippyverse is going too far for my taste, I prefer it if magic actually affects society. Otherwise it feels less like an organic part of the world and more just sort of pasted on.

[Eldan]

I mean, ripping holes into reality with two much magic is maybe a thing that can happen, but there's no rules for it. It's at best part of a Setting and more likely, DM fiat. There's other games where this is an explicite part of the rules, like the various Warhammer RPGs. But in D&D? Doesn't say this happens. You can use this as a reason for your own Campaign Setting, or play Dark Sun or something, but you can't argue that it always happens.

[Gnaeus]

The gods, at least a working majority of the active ones, decided that they like a society that resembles a medieval one but with magic and monsters. People or societies that deviate excessively are corrected or punished. Every printing press or resetting food trap comes with a free meteor, volcano or tsunami.

If you want to maximize pc agency and/or uniqueness you adjust the rules or enforcement. For example: the god of war likes medieval battles. He doesnt care if you have a gun or odd magic tricks for your personal use, but whenever things begin to invalidate castles or cavalry charges on a bigger scale they get squashed. Or the PCs have until X date to eliminate improper societal innovations in the city before the sea gods do it the destructive way.

[noob]

The gods, at least a working majority of the active ones, decided that they like a society that resembles a medieval one but with magic and monsters. People or societies that deviate excessively are corrected or punished. Every printing press or resetting food trap comes with a free meteor, volcano or tsunami.

So if I luck out and get the volcano option I can then later use that to make volcano powered things in my backyard?

[Gnaeus]

So if I luck out and get the volcano option I can then later use that to make volcano powered things in my backyard?

If you are truly suicidal and don’t care about your neighbors, sure.

[noob]

If you are truly suicidal and don’t care about your neighbors, sure.

Or if I am an happy small smiling fire elemental or something.
ex: fire elemental sees someone is going to invent the press: they invite that individual to their home and go for a walk 10 kilometers away.
afterwards they come back and see a volcano or a tornado or a tsunami or a meteor or something.
It could also be used to ruin kingdoms: throw in printing press inventors in an opponent kingdom and sabotage it thanks to the cataclysm that follows.

[Gnaeus]

Or if I am an happy small smiling fire elemental or something.
ex: fire elemental sees someone is going to invent the press: they invite that individual to their home and go for a walk 10 kilometers away.
afterwards they come back and see a volcano or a tornado or a tsunami or a meteor or something.


I guess that depends on how stupid you want your gods to be to not send epic level inevitables or scorch you with lightning or turn you into a tree or otherwise punish you for playing with their rules.

If you are looking at a myth in which a too skilled healer gets zapped for interfering with the Death god I think “we need more lightning rods” probably shouldn’t be the takeaway.


It could also be used to ruin kingdoms: throw in printing press inventors in an opponent kingdom and sabotage it thanks to the cataclysm that follows.

That sounds like a plot with multiple hooks for PCs. Sabotage kingdom. Prevent sabotage kingdom. Rescue somebody/thing. Appease gods.

[noob]

I guess that depends on how stupid you want your gods to be to not send epic level inevitables or scorch you with lightning or turn you into a tree or otherwise punish you for playing with their rules.

If you are looking at a myth in which a too skilled healer gets zapped for interfering with the Death god I think “we need more lightning rods” probably shouldn’t be the takeaway.


In that scenario the fire elemental was entirely non responsible for the invention so the gods have no reason at all to do anything to the fire elemental.

[gijoemike]

In the majority of published settings the high powered magic centric universe existed and an Apocalypse happened crashing civilization into a dark medieval age where technology and magic is lost and weakened.

Forgotten Realms - Time of Troubles, Spell Plagues, deities dying.
Greyhawk - Betrayal of council of 8. Murder of several arch mages. Establishment of evil slave kingdoms.
DragonLance - the Cataclysm. The absurd restrictions placed by the deities to prevent that mess from happening again.



Wizards eventually take over. Political disagreements only hold them off for so long. It is too easy for a lvl 12+ wizard to take over a kingdom. It doesn't require much besides a few displays of power and a few properly placed charms. It is an arms race. Powerful magic is the only thing that protects against powerful magic. Pretty much wizards are protecting their kingdoms from other wizards. They act as advisors to the king if they really need that political figure anymore instead of just ruling themselves.

That is until one day the all fire off their nukes and contingency plans and wreck the world. Then the mundane rebuild again.

[Gnaeus]

In that scenario the fire elemental was entirely non responsible for the invention so the gods have no reason at all to do anything to the fire elemental.

Other than to offer to house the blasphemer and his evil deeds to try to manipulate the gods into a reaction. All while foolishly hoping that the reaction will be one you like (here: meteor, volcano) rather than one you don’t (Flood, 30 year winter, rampaging monster, inventor gets turned into monster in your house.)

[noob]

Other than to offer to house the blasphemer and his evil deeds to try to manipulate the gods into a reaction. All while foolishly hoping that the reaction will be one you like (here: meteor, volcano) rather than one you don’t (Flood, 30 year winter, rampaging monster, inventor gets turned into monster in your house.)

If you regroup enough people all the reactions can be desirable: get one water elemental, a cold elemental, and an adventurer and all the results you mentioned are desirable.

[Gnaeus]

If you regroup enough people all the reactions can be desirable: get one water elemental, a cold elemental, and an adventurer and all the results you mentioned are desirable.

So the fire elemental gets frozen, the other elementals get flamestruck, and the pc playing sillybuggers with all powerful omniscient superbeings gets his own special personalized eternal torture to discourage anyone for the next thousand years for following his example. This is how you lose D&D.

[Kalkra]

You really don't need that much to break medieval stasis. A CL 1 at-will item of Unseen Servant can have 60 servants at a time. A CL 1 permanent Prestidigitation item can probably replace even more people. Any 1st-level Commoner with the Night Haunt feat can cast both of those once per day. Any 3rd-level spellcaster living alone in a tower can make either item in a day or two, depending on exactly how he does it. And those are just spells which directly make people obsolete. Something like Endure Elements will indirectly render a lot of jobs invalid, and of course beyond 1st-level spells you get Create Food and Water, which just breaks the whole thing. You don't need phenomenal cosmic power to bring about a post-scarcity utopia. You just need some 3rd-level spellcasters, and maybe a 5th-level cleric or two.

With regards to the argument that spellcasters would be too lazy to do such things, I point first to people living in remote places where ordinary servants aren't available. Those people are gonna want to automate, and their machines will last longer than they will. Some adventurer will eventually raid their tower, either after their death or shorty before it, and they'll probably sell any magic item that doesn't have immediate combat value, and some rich person will buy it, and that person's rich friends will want one too. Or, the adventurers will keep it, and all of their adventurer friends will want one too. Regardless, these things will get made. Sure, that may seem like an unlikely scenario, but it only needs to happen once, and the world is a big place, and has been around for a very long time. And that's only one possible way it could happen. There are plenty, and none of them needs to be very likely on its own.

Also, any LG Cleric will kinda be morally obligated to do all of that stuff for people. Anybody who takes a Vow of Poverty will have spend all of his wealth bettering the living conditions of the poor anyway. And their LG deities would surely approve. I mean, you can't say the gods want people to be trapped in medieval stasis when many of them aren't complete sadists. Even aside from Clerics, and LG spellcaster should be doing that stuff. Also, Druids and the like would be motivated to give people alternatives to deforestation and other ecologically damaging practices.

[noob]

So the fire elemental gets frozen, the other elementals get flamestruck, and the pc playing sillybuggers with all powerful omniscient superbeings gets his own special personalized eternal torture to discourage anyone for the next thousand years for following his example. This is how you lose D&D.
The postulate of gods being omniscient contradicts directly the postulate of them being dnd gods.
You are not even talking about the same system as me nor of gods of any current official dnd setting.

[sreservoir]

Unseen Servant does have the really annoying limitation of being Close range and explicitly winking out if it leaves that range, which limits it to ... about the area of a small house? Prestidigitation has an even smaller range of 10 ft.

The hard part of solving all the world's problems with low-level spells isn't necessarily having enough spells, the logistics is killer.

[AvatarVecna]

The postulate of gods being omniscient contradicts directly the postulate of them being dnd gods.
You are not even talking about the same system as me nor of gods of any current official dnd setting.

Gods have explicit universal temporal senses when it comes to things relating to their domain. A deity of farming can sense the cotton gins invention coming and decide what to do about it if anything. In the case of a cotton gin, probably nothing - it makes farming more efficient, but it doesn't replace farming. Spells like Create Food And Water or Fabricate used on an industrial scale do replace farming, and so a smite might be thrown their way.

Edit: Like I ain't saying dnd deities are omniscient or omnipotent, but they're still pretty knowledgeable and powerful.

[Gnaeus]

And their LG deities would surely approve. I mean, you can't say the gods want people to be trapped in medieval stasis when many of them aren't complete sadists. Even aside from Clerics, and LG spellcaster should be doing that stuff. Also, Druids and the like would be motivated to give people alternatives to deforestation and other ecologically damaging practices.

Sure you can.
1. Good gods support evil stuff regularly. Garl Glittergold is canonically pro Kobold genocide.
2. The all wise gods could have a reason why this is the best plan. Like if they determined that whenever societies advanced much beyond this point they always wind up having to do a hard planar reset with everything above the mantle.
3. Outside pressure could be applied. “The overdeity says do it this way” is going to convince most gods/every god the DM wants to convince.
4. It doesn’t have to be all gods, if it is a working majority of the most powerful/active ones. The god of commerce could absolutely be telling his clerics “Look, I like what you guys are trying to do. But I don’t have the power to stop Mr. Luddite over there from having the earth swallow your kingdom and bury it under magma at the bottom of the ocean. And there is no commerce when everyone is dead. So just don’t, and make sure no one else does either.”.


The postulate of gods being omniscient contradicts directly the postulate of them being dnd gods.
You are not even talking about the same system as me nor of gods of any current official dnd setting.

They are exactly as omniscient as the setting calls for them to be. Most of them are eternals with vastly superhuman stats. The difference between “it is omniscient” and “it is vastly knowledgeable and vastly smarter than PCs in ways you couldn’t even understand at achievable levels of intelligence, with epic level servants doing epic level divinations to stop exactly what you are trying to do” is only semantic. If the DM wants the gods to be able to stop tech advance, they can, with minimal changes to setting and no changes to rules.

[Kalkra]

Sure you can.
1. Good gods support evil stuff regularly. Garl Glittergold is canonically pro Kobold genocide.
2. The all wise gods could have a reason why this is the best plan. Like if they determined that whenever societies advanced much beyond this point they always wind up having to do a hard planar reset with everything above the mantle.
3. Outside pressure could be applied. “The overdeity says do it this way” is going to convince most gods/every god the DM wants to convince.
4. It doesn’t have to be all gods, if it is a working majority of the most powerful/active ones. The god of commerce could absolutely be telling his clerics “Look, I like what you guys are trying to do. But I don’t have the power to stop Mr. Luddite over there from having the earth swallow your kingdom and bury it under magma at the bottom of the ocean. And there is no commerce when everyone is dead. So just don’t, and make sure no one else does either.”.

I don't find any of those arguments to be compelling, but I won't specifically address any of them because they're all basically a spin-off of the argument that it must make sense because that's the way it is. If the default were Tippyverse instead of faux medieval you wouldn't be saying that it doesn't make sense because the gods should have prevented it. You're essentially arguing that logic can't be applied to deities, and therefore you can have them do whatever the heck you want, which is an argument without bounding principles, and and therefore is just the DM saying "Because I said so." The OP seemed to want a bit more than that.

[Gnaeus]

I don't find any of those arguments to be compelling, but I won't specifically address any of them because they're all basically a spin-off of the argument that it must make sense because that's the way it is. If the default were Tippyverse instead of faux medieval you wouldn't be saying that it doesn't make sense because the gods should have prevented it. You're essentially arguing that logic can't be applied to deities, and therefore you can have them do whatever the heck you want, which is an argument without bounding principles, and and therefore is just the DM saying "Because I said so." The OP seemed to want a bit more than that.

One of the basic premises of the tippyverse is that the Gods for whatever reason choose not to interfere. And everything the gods do or don’t do is entirely because the DM said so. Sure logic can be applied to deities. But the person who determines the Deity’s motivations, powers and constraints is the DM. And the person who builds the setting is also the DM. If the person who built the setting wants that to be the setting, the easiest way is for the most powerful NPCs (the gods or godlike beings) to want that to be the setting. If it being gods offends you, the name doesn’t matter. “The council of Elder Wyrm dragons with sorcerer levels determined that the world should be at this tech level and they enforce it with X epic, supergenius, infinite time and resource methods” is the same. So is “there are a dozen epic level inevitables who are monitoring the time stream for crimes against tech level, and when you build a resetting food trap they go back in time and kill your mom”.

OP asked for the simplest way to stop tech advance. That isn’t rewriting rules or banning spells. The simplest way is if everyone capable of advancing tech is either opposed to advancing it or scared of things that are opposed to advancing it. In this case, that means able to enforce it consistently against the strongest human casters, so gods or godlike beings.

[Batcathat]

OP asked for the simplest way to stop tech advance. That isn’t rewriting rules or banning spells. The simplest way is if everyone capable of advancing tech is either opposed to advancing it or scared of things that are opposed to advancing it. In this case, that means able to enforce it consistently against the strongest human casters, so gods or godlike beings.

It may be the simplest, but since it's also quite literally a deus ex machina, I can imagine a lot of players (including myself) not finding it a very satisfying explanation. Yes, "the gods did it" can answer almost any question in a lot of fantasy settings but if that starts being the answer to too many of them, it gets a little worn out, I think.

[Elves]

Assume the game rules are an incomplete model of how magic actually works.

[Gnaeus]

It may be the simplest, but since it's also quite literally a deus ex machina, I can imagine a lot of players (including myself) not finding it a very satisfying explanation. Yes, "the gods did it" can answer almost any question in a lot of fantasy settings but if that starts being the answer to too many of them, it gets a little worn out, I think.

I guess. But the world is also literally the result of those same gods, and whether every other thing PCs do from orc murder to raising the dead to the practice of magic itself is good, bad or neutral is literally also the result of the decision of the DM through those same gods. I know we have threads about “why is necromancy evil”, and for some people this isn’t enough. But “because the gods say so” generally works for most groups I’ve been in.

And again, if it is the god part that offends “because I set up an NPC(s) that enforce it with power that is godlike compared to anyone who can challenge it” is the same stuff with different name.

Personally, I’m much less offended by “Dragons eat any kingdom that advances beyond loosely medieval” than I am by “here is a list of items and spells I banned or rewrote to allow cavalry or castles or scarcity to exist”.

And if you and your players think “fight the gods, start a Renaissance” is a cool storyline, amazingly, the tech gatekeepers are exactly powerful enough to bbeg in that story, because the DM makes them.

[Batcathat]

I guess. But the world is also literally the result of those same gods, and whether every other thing PCs do from orc murder to raising the dead to the practice of magic itself is good, bad or neutral is literally also the result of the decision of the DM through those same gods. I know we have threads about “why is necromancy evil”, and for some people this isn’t enough. But “because the gods say so” generally works for most groups I’ve been in.

I don't like the idea of objective morality either, I suppose it might be related.


And again, if it is the god part that offends “because I set up an NPC(s) that enforce it with power that is godlike compared to anyone who can challenge it” is the same stuff with different name.

Exactly, it's the same thing with a the same issues.


Personally, I’m much less offended by “Dragons eat any kingdom that advances beyond loosely medieval” than I am by “here is a list of items and spells I banned or rewrote to allow cavalry or castles or scarcity to exist”.

To me, it depends on a couple of things. If all the GM wants to do is to keep the setting a certain way and pick "the gods did it" as a lazy hand wave, I'd prefer to just be told that.

However, if "the gods want to keep the world a certain way" was actually an integrated, consistent and well-though-out part of the setting I wouldn't mind it much, at least no more than other setting gimmicks. I dislike fantasy settings that are basically medieval-ish pseudo-Europe with some magic thrown in without actually changing the world in any meaningful way and the GM adding "the gods did it, so that's how it is" and nothing more wouldn't improve that.

So yeah, I suppose I wouldn't mind the idea, as long as it was well done and its consequences actually explored.

[Gnaeus]

To me, it depends on a couple of things. If all the GM wants to do is to keep the setting a certain way and pick "the gods did it" as a lazy hand wave, I'd prefer to just be told that.

However, if "the gods want to keep the world a certain way" was actually an integrated, consistent and well-though-out part of the setting I wouldn't mind it much, at least no more than other setting gimmicks. I dislike fantasy settings that are basically medieval-ish pseudo-Europe with some magic thrown in without actually changing the world in any meaningful way and the GM adding "the gods did it, so that's how it is" and nothing more wouldn't improve that.

So yeah, I suppose I wouldn't mind the idea, as long as it was well done and its consequences actually explored.

Also just because there is a reason doesn’t mean the PCs know.
Player: so why aren’t there teleport circles everywhere and resetting traps
DM good question. Make a DC 50 knowledge planes/religion then a DC 50 knowledge engineering. No? Guess you don’t know.

No one in the game I’m running has asked me this question. I haven’t asked the question in my last game or the game I’m about to start. Was everyone who tried murdered before birth? Killed by secret anti tech priests? Maybe. My characters don’t know/care. I would in general be happy with “because DM/gods said” on either side of the screen until and unless “why” became important to a pc or the plot. At which point as DM I’d make something up.

[Kalkra]

Also just because there is a reason doesn’t mean the PCs know.
Player: so why aren’t there teleport circles everywhere and resetting traps
DM good question. Make a DC 50 knowledge planes/religion then a DC 50 knowledge engineering. No? Guess you don’t know.

I'm pretty sure a 1st-level Artificer could manage that.

More to the point, to clarify my earlier position, I don't think that you need a good reason for the gods to cause medieval stasis, because I don't really feel the need for a reason at all. I'm completely fine with a DM saying "Because I said so." There's no way a world that a few people made up and then a bunch of other people added to is going to make sense, and I feel like tying yourself into knots trying to make it make sense is both silly and an exercise in futility. You start in a medieval society. Maybe you can make a food trap, and nobody else does because your DM said so, maybe you can't make a trap because your DM said so. Either way it's just part of the social contract between the players and the DM and to me that's good enough on its own.

[Gnaeus]

I'm pretty sure a 1st-level Artificer could manage that..

Im pretty sure most PCs can’t. So if faced with a pc who can and does credibly ask what the mysteries of the universe are I suppose I would then need to define said mysteries to my own satisfaction and whether there are consequences for asking the question. Insanity? Does he attract the Illuminati just by knowing? Visions from outside reality? Does he find himself at a temple with a week of lost time and a bunch of NPCs who agree he begged to have his memory wiped? Assassins from the future? Or does the 50 give partial knowledge and a quest hook? “You know it has something to do with the word “tenet””. He breaks the third wall and suddenly realizes he is a character in a game and spends the rest of the campaign taking flack from Pinkie Pie and Deadpool.

This, honestly, is where I call the game and ponder plot for a week.

[tyckspoon]

Leaving the medieval stasis happens when something permits 1 person running a machine (/using a magical item/commanding an automatic labor force) to do what used to take 10 manual laborers. That means you no longer need the majority of your people doing basic farming and making the items required for basic survival, which permits more exploration and development of specialized areas of study, which eventually means somebody figures out another nifty machine which reduces the manpower for another previously labor-intensive sort of job..

The default D&D world is honestly primed for this as is - the question is usually 'why doesn't magic spark this transformation', but it could just as easily be somebody inventing a practical steam engine or figuring out all the nifty things you can do with electricity or pneumatic pressure or whatever. Travel and communication is generally shown as easy enough that a revolutionary technology can spread over the world quite easily.

That said, if you want to make sure it's not magic that causes the transformation, I think you need one or both of two major things: Permanent magic effects.. aren't, and magic just isn't useful for all that much. Consider what happens if absolutely everything has charges similar to a wand. That magic food generator may be good for 10,000 uses before it stops working forever and you have to create a new one. The adventuring party using it to supplement their supplies when they have to travel through the desert is never going to use up all of it; for them, it's functionally permanent. A city trying to use it as its main food supply is going to burn through it in a week. It might serve as an emergency supply to get through the worst of a famine or a siege, but it's not going to replace regular agriculture as their main food source. Magic can still be around and will still be useful on a personal scale, but trying to industrialize it to the point of transforming society with it won't work (especially if you pair with modifying the tricks for getting something for nothing - no super discount crafting, no free Wishes, etc.)

The other big restriction I can think of is that you just can't use magic to achieve those kinds of effects. This would require significantly rewriting the available spells and effects, but perhaps magic cannot make usable food. Maybe you can only turn spoiled food back into good food, or preserve the food against spoilage to start with. This is still an amazing improvement, especially if you still permit automatic/permanent magical effects.. but you still need farmers to provide the goods to start with. Maybe all your Wizards and Sorcerers are actually Warmages, and nobody actually knows how to do very much other than throwing energy at monsters. Maybe all Transmutations are inherently temporary and trying to Fabricate mass amounts of consumer goods is doomed to fail when it all turns back into base materials a month later.

[Batcathat]

Also just because there is a reason doesn’t mean the PCs know.
Player: so why aren’t there teleport circles everywhere and resetting traps
DM good question. Make a DC 50 knowledge planes/religion then a DC 50 knowledge engineering. No? Guess you don’t know.

Yes, that line of reasoning might justify the PCs not knowing (though I have to imagine most worlds would have scientists and philosophers who've looked into the question of why the world works as it does) but my main concern was with the actual players. As a player (or book reader or movie watcher or whatever) I can accept all sorts of unrealistic and fantastical things, but I do prefer it if the imaginary worlds make internal sense. So a world with incredibly powerful magic slapping the laws of physics silly is fine but a world where all that magic fail to really impact society in a meaningful way is less fine and such a world justified by "the gods want it like this. Don't think about it" isn't much better.


I would in general be happy with “because DM/gods said” on either side of the screen until and unless “why” became important to a pc or the plot. At which point as DM I’d make something up.

Fair enough, but not everyone would.

[Quertus]

Im pretty sure most PCs can’t. So if faced with a pc who can and does credibly ask what the mysteries of the universe are I suppose I would then need to define said mysteries to my own satisfaction and whether there are consequences for asking the question. Insanity? Does he attract the Illuminati just by knowing? Visions from outside reality? Does he find himself at a temple with a week of lost time and a bunch of NPCs who agree he begged to have his memory wiped? Assassins from the future? Or does the 50 give partial knowledge and a quest hook? “You know it has something to do with the word “tenet””. He breaks the third wall and suddenly realizes he is a character in a game and spends the rest of the campaign taking flack from Pinkie Pie and Deadpool.

This, honestly, is where I call the game and ponder plot for a week.

Although I find your specific answers rather unsatisfying, it sounds like at least, unlike most people I've mentioned it to IRL, you'd understand why Quertus, my signature academia mage for whom this account is named, tries very hard *not* to uncover the truth behind certain secrets of reality. Because, he figures, if there *is* some hand guiding things beyond the abilities of the gods to accomplish, he does *not* want to attract its attention.

[JNAProductions]

Question to the OP-is this a hypothetical exercise, or something that has relevance to a game?

If the former, you're gonna need a lot of changes, some small, many big, in order to make significant advancement not possible, or at least not feasible.

If the latter... Just talk to your players, explain that you'd rather run a medievalish-fantasy setting than a post-scarcity magitech world, and if need be, work with them to figure out how to make that happen.

[Warlawk]

To me, it depends on a couple of things. If all the GM wants to do is to keep the setting a certain way and pick "the gods did it" as a lazy hand wave, I'd prefer to just be told that.

However, if "the gods want to keep the world a certain way" was actually an integrated, consistent and well-though-out part of the setting I wouldn't mind it much, at least no more than other setting gimmicks. I dislike fantasy settings that are basically medieval-ish pseudo-Europe with some magic thrown in without actually changing the world in any meaningful way and the GM adding "the gods did it, so that's how it is" and nothing more wouldn't improve that.

So yeah, I suppose I wouldn't mind the idea, as long as it was well done and its consequences actually explored.

Now, I'm just working on the fly here so there's likely to be a number of things that could be better developed.

Ascension to godhood is usually seen as requiring certain specific things. Commonly these include both worship/adoration of the masses and immense magical power. Someone who raises the quality of life tippyverse style is going to have the adoration of the masses and be in a position for potential exponential growth of magical power. The gods (or even just the overdeity) attained their positions through exactly this process. They are the sole survivor of a plane/crystal sphere/whatever that followed that train of thought and ended up going full nuclear. Each god is the living receptacle of an entire world/plane and all the magical power therein. They have witnessed the effects of magic run rampant firsthand.

Depending on the nature of the god they are unwilling to allow the world to implode in such a fashion either out of goodness or simple self preservation. Stopping those progressions at the early stages is much easier than waiting until after the exponential growth has begun. As such even the goodly deities tend to be a bit draconian in their execution of enforcing the limits of magitechnological growth. Since the deities are not omniscient they have entered into a compact where each polices their portfolio to prevent this from happening. While they have their conflicts and even outright wars they do all act in concert to prevent this type of growth from beginning.

This can then be used in the campaign if such an event happens where the gods crush an invention/inventor and the PCs question why. Let them get a glimpse behind the curtain. Perhaps they can be employed by someone who is a direct agent of one of the goodly deities to prevent such an advancement before it comes to the point of needing to drop a flaming meteor on a city. Let them see what's going on and understand the internal consistency that is happening out of sight of most mortals.

That's just my initial thought process on considering this topic.

[Kazyan]

Our modern idea of technological progress is very new, in the grand scheme of things, and people didn't always find useful ways to apply new ideas--the Ancient Greeks had a steam engine and never used it for anything more than a novelty. Given the number of nature spirits and gods, plus how undead can raze everything to the ground every other Tuesday, you can give a sociological reason for stasis instead of a material one: basically, very few people have the idea for advancement, it even more rarely catches on, and even when it does, it gets nuked by a Spirit of the Land/Druids/Obad-Hai's avatar/various fey courts that declared that you've disturbed the natural order by ceasing to be owlbear food.

[Doug Lampert]

Our modern idea of technological progress is very new, in the grand scheme of things, and people didn't always find useful ways to apply new ideas--the Ancient Greeks had a steam engine and never used it for anything more than a novelty.

The Romans had a steam toy that used steam expansion to rotate.

The first two generations of actual, practical, usable steam engines used the condensation/compression cycle for the power stroke.

Because using the expansion stroke, with VASTLY better metal working than the Romans had available, as anything more than a toy, consistently resulted in a steam explosion and a ruined mechanism and dead would be inventor.

Had the Romans (or Greeks) tried to do anything with their steam engine the result would certainly have been a steam explosion and dead would be inventor. They were nowhere close to good enough at building pressure containment to make an expansion based engine work.

We KNOW EXACTLY why the Romans and Greeks didn't build a practical steam engine, and it has NOTHING to do with a reluctance to apply new ideas. The Greeks had organized R&D efforts to try to come up with practical tech. They didn't get steam because they were nowhere close to ready.

[Maat Mons]

I thought the way the Tippy-verse thought experiment concluded was with a few high-magic megacities and vast swaths of low-magic lands.

So anyone showing substantial magical potential is invited, along with their friends and family, to live a life of leisure on a utopian demiplane built and run by mages. Heck, why even wait to make the offer to the individual they want to recruit? As soon as a promising child is located, invite the parents to move their whole family out of their mud-hovel and into luxury they've never dreamt of. The "price" is that the child will be educated in the use of magic and given a high-paying job when they come of age.

The few who decline these offers wind up being the only mages the folk of the prime material ever see. And out of those ones, any who have altruistic intentions build their own mini-utopias. Then they find people flock to their wonderful, problem-free cities faster than they can build the magic items needed to maintain everyone's quality of life. So they place limits on immigration, and start trying to recruit like-minded magic-users to help them. Eventually, they realize that it's more efficient to create a paradisiacal demiplane to move their people to than it is to try to contend with the weather, monsters, and invading armies of the material plane. And suddenly, they're now running a utopian demiplane just like the ones they declined to join earlier in their lives.

So the material plane isn't a techno-magical paradise because it's more efficient to build techno-magical paradises on demiplanes you create with Genesis. And people still live on the material plane because they keep reproducing faster than the techno-magical paradise demiplanes can build out capacity.

So the entire medieval D&D world we see is just a giant slum that exists in the shadow of a better world that's being built as we speak. Maybe, someday, everyone will get to live in that better world. But right now, some people draw the short straw.

[noob]

I thought the way the Tippy-verse thought experiment concluded was with a few high-magic megacities and vast swaths of low-magic lands.

So anyone showing substantial magical potential is invited, along with their friends and family, to live a life of leisure on a utopian demiplane built and run by mages. Heck, why even wait to make the offer to the individual they want to recruit? As soon as a promising child is located, invite the parents to move their whole family out of their mud-hovel and into luxury they've never dreamt of. The "price" is that the child will be educated in the use of magic and given a high-paying job when they come of age.

The few who decline these offers wind up being the only mages the folk of the prime material ever see. And out of those ones, any who have altruistic intentions build their own mini-utopias. Then they find people flock to their wonderful, problem-free cities faster than they can build the magic items needed to maintain everyone's quality of life. So they place limits on immigration, and start trying to recruit like-minded magic-users to help them. Eventually, they realize that it's more efficient to create a paradisiacal demiplane to move their people to than it is to try to contend with the weather, monsters, and invading armies of the material plane. And suddenly, they're now running a utopian demiplane just like the ones they declined to join earlier in their lives.

So the material plane isn't a techno-magical paradise because it's more efficient to build techno-magical paradises on demiplanes you create with Genesis. And people still live on the material plane because they keep reproducing faster than the techno-magical paradise demiplanes can build out capacity.

So the entire medieval D&D world we see is just a giant slum that exists in the shadow of a better world that's being built as we speak. Maybe, someday, everyone will get to live in that better world. But right now, some people draw the short straw.

everyone will get to live in the better world once the demiplane is wide enough and that the shenanigans for doing simulacrums are optimised but that could take centuries for people to discover the existence of mirror mephits or to have a demiplane wide enough for it to grow fast enough to start accepting widely people from the material plane.

[Particle_Man]

I would say ban "loops" (including indirect loops, like using wishes to summon beings that grant wishes that let you summon beings that grant wishes . . .) and "recursion", both magical and mechanical.

Also ban "auto repeaters" like traps that reset themselves, magic items that replenish themselves, etc. Remember the above, so you also ban "loops" (even indirect ones) that reset these traps/items anyhow.

Another option, more drastic, is that "Creation" magic doesn't actually create . . . it steals from elsewhere. So a hamlet might suddenly be struck with famine because some cleric created a huge magical feast.

[Khatoblepas]

So the entire medieval D&D world we see is just a giant slum that exists in the shadow of a better world that's being built as we speak. Maybe, someday, everyone will get to live in that better world. But right now, some people draw the short straw.

I'd be inclined to go with this interpretation - that the Tippyverse already exists. But I'd be more cynical about it, because it's run by wizards.

Yes, the Tippyverse has already happened. There are demiplanes of gigantic utopian city states, where the people within live lives of luxury and leisure. But in order to keep absolute control, they must keep up the masquerade that the Tippyverse isn't possible. To do this:


They have trained anti-magic mages, dedicated to destroying any attempt at a new Tippyverse. Is a wizard getting too close to resetting traps? Then they must engineer a distraction, a wightocalypse, or simply kidnap that mage and Modify his Memory. This also means that humanitarian efforts, like auto-resetting traps of Create Food and Water or mass intercity teleportation circles, are stamped out. Upholding the masquerade is more important to the wizards than easing suffering.
Anyone found to be breaking the masquerade is stripped of their spellcasting and shunted to the PMP. Perhaps by being mind controlled, forced to cast Mordenkainen's Disjunction at an artifact (wizards have NI of these in their spell component pouches) until their spellcasting is gone, and then Modify Memory/Mindraped and plane shifted away. Those high level commoners you see on the Material? Might be ex-wizards who tried to break the masquerade.
Adventurers who gain power quickly are both an asset and a liability. If you can bring them over to the Tippyverse, you can have more wizard manpower. However, they are likely to be do-gooders who will try and break the masquerade if you're not careful. Guide them carefully and make sure to control them with wealth and magical items, both of absolutely no cost to you due to resetting Wish traps. Where do these suspiciously tailored magical items come from? Why, they're heirlooms from a different time. You're loathed to give them up. Once the adventurers reach epic levels, they're often too busy with cosmic stuff to think about the level 1 commoners they left behind.
Perpetuating the idea that the world is cruel and dangerous and deadly will make people who find out about the utopia of the Tippyverse even more desperate to be there. Create monsters, stoke wars, stir unrest, do everything you can to make the outside hostile and the inside a paradise. You're high level wizards, you can do anything. And what will the gods do to stop you? Nothing. They want people desperate too, so they can have their souls after they die. And if the Good gods try to do anything, that gives the Evil Gods carte blanche to retaliate in kind.


Power is power. And if this power is the ability to have a comfortable bed with a singing elysian thrush for every citizen who bows before you, then so be it. Let the rest of the universe sleep on straw hiding from monsters, as long as you have your demiplane where you can have your power, that's all that matters.

There's no reason why a Tippyverse couldn't exist in a D&D world, it's just that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and they'll do their best to stop you from having the same power as them.

Same reason Pun-pun can exist and simultaneously stop Pun-pun from existing.

Edit: Of course, the goal for the PCs would be to defeat the Tippyverse and break the stasis, and bring magic to everyone.

[RandomPeasant]

The easiest way to avoid a Tippyverse is to simply declare that the campaign is happening before people figured the Tippyverse out. If you wanted an alt-history game set before gunpowder, you would just set it before gunpowder was invented, not create some special reason gunpowder was impossible. That doesn't work if your players want a Tippyverse, but if your players want a Tippyverse, you should talk with them instead of trying to "prevent" it by rules or setting assumptions.

[Efrate]

But that does not really work. If you are in utopia, you do not need to stop it. If you discover how to do it on prime, you make your own not join someone elses. The ways are known IN utopia, so its just a matter of being your own godking in your own plane. Much easier than uprooting an established likely higher level one.

Given that the keys to near infinite power are in your hands, the established powers will likely have no issue with you copying them on your own turf and maybe one day being an equal demiplane state trading partner. There is no competition for resources since you make your own out of nothing, so no reason to deny you freedom to make your own. To better harbor a future ally or to stop disruption they would very well help you.

And in the case of fully mind raped populaces, if someone wants that, fine, their subjects would never have these questions.

[Calthropstu]

One word. War.

High level casters do not like to share power. When something comes along that threatens them, they tend to eliminate it. Even good aligned casters willing to form an alliance will often find themselves at odds with each other. So, as they increase their power base, they have to constantly wonder who their actions might piss off.

And when one finally wins and eliminates all other casters of high level? Along comes a new generation bestowed with the power of the gods to take him down. The Tippyverse never forms because simply diverting your attention to creating such a place leaves openings in your defenses long enpugh to allow someone to take you out of the picture.

I wouldn't be surprised if any caster reaching 13th level begins getting attacked "just in case."

[Lapak]

Assume the game rules are an incomplete model of how magic actually works.

This is the simplest explanation, to be honest. But the first answer:


Remove magic items and remove spells lasting longer than a day or that is instantaneous but have a lasting effect or that allows to use other spells(ex: summon monster, create lantern archon and so on it also includes wish, miracle, shapechange(all those allows to use other spells) and polymorph any object(can replicate a specific few lower level transmutation spells))
The removed spells must also be removed from monsters.
Also has in it the root of my answer. Which is: assume that anything that works for 'free'... doesn't. I've mentioned before that my personal ruling on this in 'typical' 3.x environments is that all permanent or infinity-repeating magic doesn't get something from nothing, but rather does a low-level draw on the vital energy of everything around it. (Vital energy you might recognize as the XP that goes into making most items.) Empires like the Forgotten Realms' Netheril are entirely possible, but quickly collapse. The effect isn't too noticeable on an individual level when we're talking about a couple magic swords in an adventuring party, but a Teleport Gate operating full-time and an army of golems draws so much that crops fail, children are born sickly and eventually not at all, the local plants and animals begin to die off, etc. In Magic Empires running on Negative Energy (your standard Evil Lichocracy) that Negative Energy gets tapped instead, causing centuries-old demiliches to find their souls suddenly evaporating, skeleton armies simply falling apart, and so on.

The collapse function isn't understood in-setting but is well enough known in the world that trying to construct a civilization that runs on magic has fallen out of fashion. And technology hasn't advanced too far because as progress starts to kick off people start to assume it's all so much mythology and go full magitech, which leads to a collapse cycle, which means things get kicked back to the status quo but with a new set of ruins and dungeons full of (effectively radioactive, but who knew) stuff for adventurers to loot.

[Particle_Man]

Maybe the lich-queen of the Githyanki is trying to prevent the Tippyverse.

Maybe the ancient Mindflayer empire WAS the Tippyverse, and got overthrown.

[Maat Mons]

If you're going to make magic consume an unseen ambient energy, I wouldn't tie it into life force. Instead, I'd tie it into null magic and wild magic zones. Basically, wild magic zones have too much ambient magic energy, and null magic zones have too little. Excessive use of magic in an area can downgrade the total amount of ambient energy available there, and make future magic in that location difficult. The energy naturally builds back up over time, if it's not being drained too heavily, but there's a maximum sustainable amount of magic use.

This would mean that any responsible government would require licensure for the construction of magic items. Depending on jurisdiction, magic items may be divided into categories to determine how difficult it is to get permission to build them. The categorization would depend on the rate at which the items consume magical energy, and how useful and necessary they are deemed to be. Naturally, items that ensure the safety of the realm would be given priority. And if the PCs spend part of their time slaying dangerous monsters, all their adventuring gear falls into that category. Meanwhile "luxury" items, such as anything that exists merely to ease the toils of the common folk, would be given much lower priority.

And that, friends, is why magic items are expensive. It doesn't cost much money to make them. All the money goes to paperwork and fees, which the government imposes for the sake of ensuring magic item use doesn't get out of hand and risk damaging the natural magical energy flow for future generations.

It's also why not every Tom, ****, and Harry is a magic user. The government imposes strict limits on how many individuals are permitted to receive that sort of training. Imagine if every peasant were throwing magic at each little gangrenous limb or starving child. There wouldn't be enough ambient energy left to fuel the important spells.

[Saintheart]

I dunno, personally I think the biggest structural difference between D&D and medieval reality isn't the presence of magic, it's that virtually everyone speaks a common language, Common, and that there's massively more literate people in a thorp or hamlet than there were in a fifty mile radius of a similarly-sized medieval settlement.

[Quertus]

I dunno, personally I think the biggest structural difference between D&D and medieval reality isn't the presence of magic, it's that virtually everyone speaks a common language, Common, and that there's massively more literate people in a thorp or hamlet than there were in a fifty mile radius of a similarly-sized medieval settlement.

Boy oh boy, has 2nd edition got you covered!

Everyone is illiterate by default, and you have to spend one of your precious few proficiencies (think "feats", but also covers skills, and it's only an optional rule to boot) to become literate. The results of creating an illiterate Wizard are undefined.

And everyone speaking Common? Well, it's pretty obvious that humanoid "races" are just goblinized versions of different IRL cultures / nations / etc - so *of course* all "humans" (and any other relatable races) speak the same language, and you're supposed to kill everyone who looks different and speaks a different language. War propaganda looks on with envy at the ability to demonize other cultures as "monsters".

Anything else D&D can do for you to capture that medieval feel?

[zlefin]

One detail about world-building I like to help address the issue is to change create food and water from conjuration (creation) to conjuration (calling).

You know all those festivals and ceremonies where food is sacrificed or given as tribute to the gods? In DnD world that food is actually taken by the gods; and the gods and their agents will then hand it out as needed through their clerics, which is why it's a cleric spell.

So magic doesn't create food, it merely distributes it; it still needs to be grown. And it has nice world-building to explain offerings to the gods.

Your gods agents will let you know if you're overusing the spell; as there are limits to what they have, it just doesn't come up much in practice for adventurers (though gods will still prefer you not use it needlessly). Getting a population through a famine is trickier though.

[GloatingSwine]

Changing the game as little as possible, what would be the main ways to make it that a dnd world actually resembles the middle ages but with magic and monsters?

Invoke Hodgson's Law and just don't think about it too hard.

You simply can't reconcile the magic, monsters, and extreme abilities of beings within D&D as a ruleset (let alone any given setting) with an otherwise grounded semblance of the middle ages.

That's why the makers of the game sensibly didn't. They just ignored all the disconnects and ploughed ahead with a kitchen sink swords and sorcery setting.

[Lapak]

Boy oh boy, has 2nd edition got you covered!

Everyone is illiterate by default, and you have to spend one of your precious few proficiencies (think "feats", but also covers skills, and it's only an optional rule to boot) to become literate. The results of creating an illiterate Wizard are undefined.Not completely! Written arcane magic is handled separately from everything else, such that you need Read Magic to understand it regardless of how well or poorly educated you are; you explicitly retain the ability to understand what you've read without re-casting it. It's entirely possible to have a 2e Wizard who can't read normal text but can pull out the spell to interpret whatever magic words they find if you're using the Nonweapon Proficiency rules. :smalltongue:

EDIT: Now that I think about it, I kind of enjoy the idea of a Wizard who disdained learning to read the regular way and uses Read Magic for magic stuff and Comprehend Languages whenever they need to read something 'mundane.' Only ordinary, uninteresting people learn to read non-magically.

[mehs]

If you're going to make magic consume an unseen ambient energy, I wouldn't tie it into life force. Instead, I'd tie it into null magic and wild magic zones. Basically, wild magic zones have too much ambient magic energy, and null magic zones have too little. Excessive use of magic in an area can downgrade the total amount of ambient energy available there, and make future magic in that location difficult. The energy naturally builds back up over time, if it's not being drained too heavily, but there's a maximum sustainable amount of magic use.

This would mean that any responsible government would require licensure for the construction of magic items. Depending on jurisdiction, magic items may be divided into categories to determine how difficult it is to get permission to build them. The categorization would depend on the rate at which the items consume magical energy, and how useful and necessary they are deemed to be. Naturally, items that ensure the safety of the realm would be given priority. And if the PCs spend part of their time slaying dangerous monsters, all their adventuring gear falls into that category. Meanwhile "luxury" items, such as anything that exists merely to ease the toils of the common folk, would be given much lower priority.

And that, friends, is why magic items are expensive. It doesn't cost much money to make them. All the money goes to paperwork and fees, which the government imposes for the sake of ensuring magic item use doesn't get out of hand and risk damaging the natural magical energy flow for future generations.

It's also why not every Tom, ****, and Harry is a magic user. The government imposes strict limits on how many individuals are permitted to receive that sort of training. Imagine if every peasant were throwing magic at each little gangrenous limb or starving child. There wouldn't be enough ambient energy left to fuel the important spells.

That or set the limit to be somewhere around the geb/nex war in the pathfinder main setting. Two (relatively) highly magical nations duking it out. That limit is set low enough to curtail the megacities of a tippyverse or otherwise "magic is the solution to everything", but high enough that it won't reasonably appear elsewhere.

Though auto reset magical traps really, really need a rework.

[False God]

Don't, it's depressing as all get out.

(sigh)

If you insist, then D&D needs disease, poverty, oppression and rarity.
It's not that a cleric can't go out and heal the sick, it's that they're not going to, and the ones that do are not powerful enough to make enough of an impact. As soon as they heal someone, another is sick, as soon as they save a life, someone else dies.
People need adventurers (mercenaries) to solve problems but they don't have money or supplies. Those that do have money and supplies often have "problems" that involve "solving" the peasantry.
Magic is power, therefore it is rare. It's not that anyone can't practice and learn a level 1 spell or something, but that there are people in power with a vested interest in ensuring their own power, so they cannot allow "free practice" of magic.
(Rarity also applies to mundane resources of course)

This is assuming you've already included "conflict", between people, kingdoms, ideologies and species (more than just generic orcs vs humans).

Keep in mind, you don't need to include real life examples of racism and sexism. You just need people to not get along for reasons that make sense within the context of your setting.

I built the "it looks like the middle ages, but with some fantastical elements". It sits on a shelf because it's hard, and depressing.

IMO: Have fun with the fact that D&D is a "shallow" fantasy game. Don't dive too deep.

[noob]

Don't, it's depressing as all get out.

(sigh)

If you insist, then D&D needs disease, poverty, oppression and rarity.
It's not that a cleric can't go out and heal the sick, it's that they're not going to, and the ones that do are not powerful enough to make enough of an impact. As soon as they heal someone, another is sick, as soon as they save a life, someone else dies.
People need adventurers (mercenaries) to solve problems but they don't have money or supplies. Those that do have money and supplies often have "problems" that involve "solving" the peasantry.
Magic is power, therefore it is rare. It's not that anyone can't practice and learn a level 1 spell or something, but that there are people in power with a vested interest in ensuring their own power, so they cannot allow "free practice" of magic.
(Rarity also applies to mundane resources of course)

This is assuming you've already included "conflict", between people, kingdoms, ideologies and species (more than just generic orcs vs humans).

Keep in mind, you don't need to include real life examples of racism and sexism. You just need people to not get along for reasons that make sense within the context of your setting.

I built the "it looks like the middle ages, but with some fantastical elements". It sits on a shelf because it's hard, and depressing.

IMO: Have fun with the fact that D&D is a "shallow" fantasy game. Don't dive too deep.
Paladins will heal the sick if they meet them because their cure disease ability does not use the same resources as its other abilities.
I guess commoners ends up loving paladins a lot and that when a paladin arrives in a town or village a bunch of sick commoners comes asking "can you cure diseases?".
But while a paladin can make a local spot of light and happiness there is not many of them so it have an overall low influence.

[ShurikVch]

Greyhawk - Betrayal of council of 8. Murder of several arch mages. Establishment of evil slave kingdoms.
Also, the Twin Cataclysms (https://greyhawkonline.com/greyhawkwiki/Baklunish-Suloise_Wars#The_Twin_Cataclysms).

Still, Greyhawk 2000 is a thing...

[Morphic tide]

The things you need to address are XP farming and infinite spell sources. The former is fairly easily done by adding more fleshed-out training rules to cap the rates or using milestone leveling instead, and the latter is exceedingly rarely of use. The resetting magic traps only matter in very weird cases of spamming summons or the PCs operating a defensive position, the vast majority of the time they're interchangeable with a Glyph of Warding.

Without XP farms and the spell sources, Teleportation Circle can actually be used to help with the Medivalesque setting backdrop, as it's a 9th-level spell. Anyone able to make one is definitionally a Grand Wizard, the very sort of person who's supposed to be making the rare wonders, and a Teleporation Circle is one of the best options for this because it enables the liege-lord system to operate as intended, making it so that the mid-level monsters have something remotely in their way for the vast majority of the landmass because the Kingdom has a way to bring a military response in a sensible amount of time to stop the various Spawn-makers from turning into unstoppable hordes.

Using such a thing purely for trade is nonsensical if the world in fact remains hazardous. You still get much shortened routes, but in a D&D world the natural primary use is defending territory from all the monsters. And the costs associated with upkeep on the magic return the wealth-concentration reason behind feudal systems, because high-level equipment gets insanely expensive and is required just to keep the wilderness at bay in the long run.

[RandomPeasant]

IMO: Have fun with the fact that D&D is a "shallow" fantasy game. Don't dive too deep.

It's not even that it's a "shallow" game, it's that it's a game that's not deep in the specific way OP wants it to be deep. There's plenty of deep world-building you can do in D&D, it just doesn't generate "medieval Europe, but there are dragons and witches and demons for real". If you want that, you can either A) mind caulk D&D or B) play something else that does do that. But D&D isn't bad just because it doesn't do the exact thing you want.

[Arael666]

I don't really think you have to change anything, per se, just the way you interpret it. By that I mean you go for RAI, not RAW.

Auto reseting traps? They are used for damage dealing spells. No wishes. No create food and water. No beneficial spells
Gate? Your summoned creatures can't summon more creatures.
Plannar Biding? You actually need to strike a deal (pay for it).
Polymorph Any object? You can't cast it in succsession and have the latest change made permanent
Wishes? You can't have them for free. no. not even then. you either pay with gold or with xp.
Wish? no wishing for CL infinite items; no wishing for infinite wealth

[noob]

I don't really think you have to change anything, per se, just the way you interpret it. By that I mean you go for RAI, not RAW.

Auto reseting traps? They are used for damage dealing spells. No wishes. No create food and water. No beneficial spells

Plannar Biding? You actually need to strike a deal (pay for it).
Polymorph Any object? You can't cast it in succsession and have the latest change made permanent
Wishes? You can't have them for free. no. not even then. you either pay with gold or with xp.
Wish? no wishing for CL infinite items; no wishing for infinite wealth


Gate? Your summoned creatures can't summon more creatures. that is not a possible interpretation of the rules: the creature is here for real: it would be like saying "teleport? you can not cast teleport if you are already teleported".
You can however prevent that by saying that the creatures the gate spell picks have already spent all their spell slots and conjuring abilities (which prevents gate chains) but if you give a scroll of summon monster to a gated monster it can use it and there is no rai way to prevent that.


Wishes? You can't have them for free. no. not even then. you either pay with gold or with xp. that is not rai either that is a houserule: solars do get to make their own wishes for free and it is not ambiguous in any way.


Wish? no wishing for CL infinite items; no wishing for infinite wealth because infinity can be considered to not be a value but it does not prevents wishing for 99^999999999^99999999^99999999^999999999 cl wish items that can wish for magical items of a value up to 999^999999^99999^999999^99999 gold: it is 100% RAI you need an houserule to prevent that again.

RAI does means "rules as interpreted in the way that makes the game the easiest to manage and least broken" not "rules modified to not be broken" RAI modifies no rules and there is rules that are non ambiguously usable to make arbitrary power wishes for free and RAI can not change that because there is no ambiguity.
There is only a bunch of of things that are utterly broken in a non ambiguous way including supernatural abilities not having any cost unless specified otherwise(an actual rule says that non ambiguously) to sarrukhs and a bunch of metamagic abuses (like persisting easily a spell with divine metamagic for making a stone wall every 5 rounds for a whole day) so if you are combining rule interpretation with house rules/bans you need to only make like 12 houserules or bans at the maximum.

RAI is fundamentally a very complicated thing because it involves reading all the rules and trying to make the interpretations that are the least broken so RAI is probably the highest effort and complexity action to do and it is way simpler to just make the ban list I made that fits in like 4 lines.

[RandomPeasant]

I have to say as a player, if my DM pulled that kind of "I'm not actually changing anything, it's just RAI" line, I would be very tempted to spitefully undermine whatever it was they were trying to achieve. If you are changing the rules, change the rules. This has the added benefit that, instead of getting rules that say "whatever I can contort the rules into meaning without losing the rest of the table" you can get rules that say things that are good and functional for the game you are running.

[sreservoir]

RAI is fundamentally a very complicated thing because it involves reading all the rules and trying to make the interpretations that are the least broken so RAI is probably the highest effort and complexity action to do and it is way simpler to just make the ban list I made that fits in like 4 lines.

RAI is nothing quite so conceptually complex; it usually means "Rules as Intended", as, you know, the number of letters in the acronym implies, and in that context the difficult is just that it's all about divining intent while living in a world where other people's qualia are inaccessible. Sometimes we get official statements, sometimes we can read meaning into explicit deletions in errata, sometimes we have examples to generalize from, but a lot of the time we have nothing to go on.

When we do have something to go on, sometimes the inferred intention is shockingly useless, sometimes it's completely bonkers, and sometimes it reveals that whoever is making the official statement doesn't understand how the game works; sometimes the head doesn't know what the dog is doing. Most of the time, it's just some banal interpretation optimized for neither obvious correctness nor balance, but makes just enough sense that agreeing on the version that you can pull up a citation for is the most boring way to keep everyone on the same page.

None of that has anything to do with whether the interpretation makes the game easier to manage or not broken. Lots of RAI around what information player are supposed to have and not have actively makes the game more tedious to manage!

[JoeNapalm]

Wouldn't it simpler to just...not play D&D?

There's a plethora of systems available. Just pick the system that fits the flavor you're after.

WFRP or Zweihander, for example, would give you gritty middle-ages without totally removing magic and monsters.

-Jn-
Ifriti Sophist

[mehs]

This is more about adjusting rule set to make a world that mechanically functions like the setting does in the fluff. Not gritty for gritty sake, but actually sticking to the description of the world.


Also to the guy who said it's totally RAI to make a cl 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 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99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 Item, wtf dude? Rai would keep CL to about 20 as a soft cap, with 30 being soft cap for artifacts and such. You would need epic casting to go above 20 as you are creating an epic level effect.

[noob]

This is more about adjusting rule set to make a world that mechanically functions like the setting does in the fluff. Not gritty for gritty sake, but actually sticking to the description of the world.


Also to the guy who said it's totally RAI to make a cl 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999 Item, wtf dude? Rai would keep CL to about 20 as a soft cap, with 30 being soft cap for artifacts and such. You would need epic casting to go above 20 as you are creating an epic level effect.

I am not sure from where you bring those rules: cl for normal spells keeps scaling of one level per class level in epic progression and epic casting says that you can never put any epic spells in epic magical items and epic magic items are not capped at all in cl and there is many examples of specific epic magical items having a cl higher than 30(if you can make your cl be arbitrarily high then the epic magic item crafting feats allows to craft arbitrarily high cl items) and artefacts nearly always have a CL of 20 or lower or do not have a CL at all(and those without cls do cast spells with cls nearly always at 20 or lower).
Wish have no restrictions at all on what magical item you can make (as long as it is a magical item and that you have enough xp or are not paying the cost) so you can make epic magical items just fine.(epic magical items are just magical items but without the caps you have when you lack the epic magic item crafting feats)

[mehs]

I am not sure from where you bring those rules: cl for normal spells keeps scaling of one level per class level in epic progression and epic casting says that you can never put any epic spells in epic magical items and epic magic items are not capped at all in cl and there is many examples of specific epic magical items having a cl higher than 30(if you can make your cl be arbitrarily high then the epic magic item crafting feats allows to craft arbitrarily high cl items) and artefacts nearly always have a CL of 20 or lower or do not have a CL at all(and those without cls do cast spells with cls nearly always at 20 or lower).
Wish have no restrictions at all on what magical item you can make (as long as it is a magical item and that you have enough xp or are not paying the cost) so you can make epic magical items just fine.(epic magical items are just magical items but without the caps you have when you lack the epic magic item crafting feats)

Dude. Wish was published before the epic rules were published. You are trying to argue that wish (a non epic effect) can create any magical item RAI, when it should be self apparent that it just can't. There are limits or else the gm is obligated to invoke the "malevolent genie" clause.

[JNAProductions]

I don’t think anyone is saying you should actually allow CL 9^999 items.
But as written, it is allowed.

And it’s much better to say “I’m changing the rules, so you can’t make more than CL 20 items with Wish” than to pretend the rules say what they don’t.

[mehs]

You mean a rule other than the bit where it says that wishing for something too powerful will cause a literal but unintended consequence?

Noob is arguing that he can wish up an item that can create universes at will.


He isn't even trying to argue RAW, he is trying to say that rules as intended, you can make an item of create water strong enough to flood the solar system

[RandomPeasant]

If wish was supposed to have a limit on how powerful of magic items you could ask for, it would have a limit on how powerful of magic items you can ask for. There's a cap on how much money in mundane goods you can get (25k GP), there are quite detailed limitations on what kind of spells it can mimic for you. But it can just "Create a magic item".

Now, that's not to say that RAW wish is balanced or reasonable, but if you're changing it, you should acknowledge that you're changing it, not pretend you aren't. Because that will let you make better changes and be less insulting to your players.


You mean a rule other than the bit where it says that wishing for something too powerful will cause a literal but unintended consequence?

You mean nowhere? The text is "You may try to use a wish to produce greater effects than these, but doing so is dangerous.". Any usage of the explicitly enumerated effects is definitionally safe, even if that usage happens to be very powerful.

[Jack_Simth]

How about we add a homebrew drawback to magic use that has essentially 0 effect on PCs?

Suppose, for a moment, that natural things have a "spark" in them from the original act of creation: The stuff of life, latent power that's used for breaking the rules of the world, which is necessary for enchanting things. Some materials have more than others, and it's easier to extract from some materials than others... but magically created or magically manipulated materials don't have this "spark" in them. Let's also assume that a good supply of this "spark" is needed for having kids (it's the stuff of life).

This explains the fixed values of most trade goods:
One gold is worth 10 silver or 100 coppers (or 1/10th of a platinum piece), because that's the ratio of "creation spark" - needed for enchanting items - that can be extracted and because lots of folks do enchanting, they're in demand in those ratios. Suppose the price of gold drops due to an increase in supply. What happens? Well, all the mages start grabbing gold (in preference to silver, copper, or platinum), because it's now a less expensive source of "creation spark" than the other sources in our current comparison list - which means the demand for gold goes up while the demand for copper, silver, and platinum goes down. In very short order, they equalize again in exactly the same ratios they had before.
And there's no particular reason it's only in metals. Cows, pigs, wheat, flour, etc. could all have their own amount of "creation spark" that casters can pull out for enchanting things. When the mundane processing triples the item in value (such as wheat to flour)? Well, that's because the mundane processing makes it easier to extract the "creation spark".

Note that I said "mundane processing". There's a reason I included "magically manipulated" in the first section up above. If you try to use Fabricate to turn wheat into flour, the flour doesn't have the "spark" anymore. You'll need someone to actually grind it if you want to use it better for enchanting. Fabricated flour can still be baked into bread and eaten, and will prevent you from starving to death, but it's not suitable for crafting anymore (this also explains why Spellcraft has that "Identify materials created or shaped by magic" clause: With a bit of practice, you can kind of sense the lack of "spark" in an object). A similar effect happens if you try to have constructs, outsiders, elementals, undead, etc. do the work - they're slowly sucking the "spark" out of the surrounding environment to power themselves (they don't eat - where does that energy come from? "spark"). You need to have regular people doing it.

And the "kids" thing also explains why Magic doesn't see proper widespread use: Any society that tries it dies off. Set up an Everful Larder to feed the city? Works fine... for a time. But that magically created food doesn't have the "spark" folks need to have children. It's OK for a siege, but for regular use? Folks mysteriously stop having children. This is also why rulers don't generally wrap themselves and their families up in defensive magic items and spells: They want heirs, and all those items will be tugging on the "spark" they need to do that.

And, of course, with the "spark" being sucked up by magical things... you can't have too much of it in one place for too long. Start mass producing undead for your army? Well, they soak up "spark", and plants need some to have their "kids" too (yes, they get some from sunlight, the soil, the water, etc... but it's being actively tugged out of them by a large concentration of undead). The surrounding farmland and forest stops being productive. They're a literal blight on the land.

Doesn't much affect PCs - few players want to do a pregnancy arc - and strong NPCs will still have plenty of magic available (it's OK as long as it doesn't get too out of hand), but the run-of-the-mill folks won't be using it. You'll also have areas where magic is distrusted or even hated (there was a disaster however long ago that was blamed on magic - correctly, even, although the details may be distorted). You'll have areas where folks consider it a wondrous and useful tool (details on why magic shouldn't be used too much got lost somewhere along the way, so all this hatred of wizards and witches and things makes no sense at all... that stuff's so incredibly useful...).

... but you don't get a Tippyverse.

Also has in it the root of my answer. Which is: assume that anything that works for 'free'... doesn't. I've mentioned before that my personal ruling on this in 'typical' 3.x environments is that all permanent or infinity-repeating magic doesn't get something from nothing, but rather does a low-level draw on the vital energy of everything around it. (Vital energy you might recognize as the XP that goes into making most items.) Empires like the Forgotten Realms' Netheril are entirely possible, but quickly collapse. The effect isn't too noticeable on an individual level when we're talking about a couple magic swords in an adventuring party, but a Teleport Gate operating full-time and an army of golems draws so much that crops fail, children are born sickly and eventually not at all, the local plants and animals begin to die off, etc. In Magic Empires running on Negative Energy (your standard Evil Lichocracy) that Negative Energy gets tapped instead, causing centuries-old demiliches to find their souls suddenly evaporating, skeleton armies simply falling apart, and so on.

The collapse function isn't understood in-setting but is well enough known in the world that trying to construct a civilization that runs on magic has fallen out of fashion. And technology hasn't advanced too far because as progress starts to kick off people start to assume it's all so much mythology and go full magitech, which leads to a collapse cycle, which means things get kicked back to the status quo but with a new set of ruins and dungeons full of (effectively radioactive, but who knew) stuff for adventurers to loot.

Ninja'd!

[ChudoJogurt]

Say that infinite things aren't infinite - they are assumed to be so in the rules because the average adventurer would never use them up.

Resettable traps aren't infinite - they stop working after 1k or even 100 times, which is well enough for any dungeon-building demilich, but would hardly feed a village.
Teleport action circles are "infinite" because a solitary wizard in his tower would never use it up, but really they mostly dry up after 10k medium-size-equivalent uses, which means no army transfers and definitely no commuting or inter-City mass travel, etc.
All things that rules say are "infinite" are actually just "effectively infinite" for a lone user (which is what the rules are written for), but are actually using up the magic as some sort of finite charge.

That kills most of Tippy stuff.

You would probably still not have standard magic fantasy medieval setting, but it won't be quite as absurd. Throw in that magic is a relatively rare gift, and gods actually check what spells they grant and for what reason, and you'll be pretty close.

[Calthropstu]

Say that infinite things aren't infinite - they are assumed to be so in the rules because the average adventurer would never use them up.

Resettable traps aren't infinite - they stop working after 1k or even 100 times, which is well enough for any dungeon-building demilich, but would hardly feed a village.
Teleport action circles are "infinite" because a solitary wizard in his tower would never use it up, but really they mostly dry up after 10k medium-size-equivalent uses, which means no army transfers and definitely no commuting or inter-City mass travel, etc.
All things that rules say are "infinite" are actually just "effectively infinite" for a lone user (which is what the rules are written for), but are actually using up the magic as some sort of finite charge.

That kills most of Tippy stuff.

You would probably still not have standard magic fantasy medieval setting, but it won't be quite as absurd. Throw in that magic is a relatively rare gift, and gods actually check what spells they grant and for what reason, and you'll be pretty close.

In my wkorld, all magic item creation involves binding elemental souls in order to act as a item-magic bonding agent. When a tippyverse starts forming, it involves 10s of thousands elemental souls.

That kind of movement attracts notice.

[noob]

In my wkorld, all magic item creation involves binding elemental souls in order to act as a item-magic bonding agent. When a tippyverse starts forming, it involves 10s of thousands elemental souls.

That kind of movement attracts notice.

In your world as usual the weak (innocent, cute and harmless elementals) are messed over by the powerful (those evil magic item crafters) until they rise up against the oppressor.
Join the defence of the elementals movement and help free elementals now.

[False God]

It's not even that it's a "shallow" game, it's that it's a game that's not deep in the specific way OP wants it to be deep. There's plenty of deep world-building you can do in D&D, it just doesn't generate "medieval Europe, but there are dragons and witches and demons for real". If you want that, you can either A) mind caulk D&D or B) play something else that does do that. But D&D isn't bad just because it doesn't do the exact thing you want.

Not sure how you went from me calling it shallow to it being bad. It's a bad fit IMHO for a "realistic but with fantastical elements pseudo-medieval setting", but it's not bad for what it does: being a kitchen sink swords and sorcery setting that IMO, is best when you don't think too hard or dig too deep.

You can build a lot of things out of D&D, even "semi-realistic but with fantastical elements pseudo-medieval setting", I mean, I've done it. You just have to bring a lot of your own elements from outside the system to really fill in the gaps. Regardless of the style of setting you're going for, I've found it just doesn't bring all the pieces to the table to create a really deep and robust setting, especially regarding more "real-world" elements.

After many attempts, I've really just found it's not worth it. The number of players who want to "dive deep" vs. beer-and-pretzels it up are just too few to really justify the amount of work required to create a truly "deep" setting, of any variety really, with D&D.

As you conclude, it's best to find another system that provides those world-building elements, or has already built the deep world for you.

[Morphic tide]

Say that infinite things aren't infinite - they are assumed to be so in the rules because the average adventurer would never use them up.

Resettable traps aren't infinite - they stop working after 1k or even 100 times, which is well enough for any dungeon-building demilich, but would hardly feed a village.
Much the same thought I had, though personally a sufficient premium that makes it require a 15th+ level creator and the funds of a major city should work out decently. Of note, Create Food and Water actually at-will would be 28,800 Medium Humanoid meals in a day, and as a 3rd-level spell the CL*SL formula gives us 15 times the "baseline" usage rate. Goodberry does an average of 5 per casting on a 1st-level spell, but requires a supply of berries, so for a fifteenth the cost you return the need for some agriculture, made much more complicated by the seasonality of berry supplies. And being a Druid spell making a lot of flavor constraints actually rather explicit.


Teleport action circles are "infinite" because a solitary wizard in his tower would never use it up, but really they mostly dry up after 10k medium-size-equivalent uses, which means no army transfers and definitely no commuting or inter-City mass travel, etc.
Actually, Teleportation Circle is a duration-limited spell, not a uses-limited itemization thing. The shenanigans surround what it does when you Permanency it, but as a 9th-level spell this would be supremely rare within the confines of any vaguely functional level demographics. 17th level and higher Wizards are only going to be servicing the very wealthiest capital cities, and those Kingdoms are only shelling it out for utterly vital functions with trade being a tertiary at best concern.

If you keep large tracts of land required for food supplies because the costs of the actually at-will food-makers is impractical for all but a scarce few Uber-cities that've accreted it over centuries, then you can't go Tippyverse because meeting needs is going to require open fields that'll need ranging military forces able to deal with the monsters.

Another thing you might do is go over AD&D magic item creation rules as inspiration for working out more specific magic item supplies, at least as a "heat map" for the major things, and adjust magic items to be relatively frequently and easily recharged with some such materials. Monsters of above CR 5 for the Tippyverse stuff make the bar rather dramatic and cause such megacities to quickly become perfect examples of Lawful Evil as they're powered by the batter-farming of disturbingly-often-sapient creatures too durable for vaguely humane means and quite firmly not capable of being productive members of the Magocracy.

This way, while Tippian mega-cities can be supported by the rules, their requirements invoke complicated modern-style trade networks that are very difficult to defend during the setup phases, and internalizing much of it in "sustainable" fashions quickly turn into varieties of horrors not remotely considered in the vast majority of history. Say what you will about the treatment of IRL livestock, they are not capable of articulating complaints and do not require multiple applications of high-energy weaponry to electrocute, burn, freeze, or dissolve them rather slowly because of the economics surrounding the killing methods making it ruinously more expensive to take them out in one vaguely painless go.

For a fun bit, you can have Create Food and Water require fauna (for extra only-amoral-bastards-will-do-it, make it Unicorn parts), so you end up in a prerequisite trap where to keep the items running you have to use creatures that take more food than using them produces causing you to end up needing conventional agriculture regardless to feed your livestock. That are sapient creatures bred and raised for the sole purpose of being killed agonizingly to run a magical city. Indeed, with XP farming gutted by some manner of challenge requirement or training rule and a purging of Thought Bottle and similar exploits, prolonged agony would end up almost specifically required for a supply of Liquid Pain to handle the XP costs...

[noob]

Much the same thought I had, though personally a sufficient premium that makes it require a 15th+ level creator and the funds of a major city should work out decently. Of note, Create Food and Water actually at-will would be 28,800 Medium Humanoid meals in a day, and as a 3rd-level spell the CL*SL formula gives us 15 times the "baseline" usage rate. Goodberry does an average of 5 per casting on a 1st-level spell, but requires a supply of berries, so for a fifteenth the cost you return the need for some agriculture, made much more complicated by the seasonality of berry supplies. And being a Druid spell making a lot of flavor constraints actually rather explicit.


Actually, Teleportation Circle is a duration-limited spell, not a uses-limited itemization thing. The shenanigans surround what it does when you Permanency it, but as a 9th-level spell this would be supremely rare within the confines of any vaguely functional level demographics. 17th level and higher Wizards are only going to be servicing the very wealthiest capital cities, and those Kingdoms are only shelling it out for utterly vital functions with trade being a tertiary at best concern.

If you keep large tracts of land required for food supplies because the costs of the actually at-will food-makers is impractical for all but a scarce few Uber-cities that've accreted it over centuries, then you can't go Tippyverse because meeting needs is going to require open fields that'll need ranging military forces able to deal with the monsters.

Another thing you might do is go over AD&D magic item creation rules as inspiration for working out more specific magic item supplies, at least as a "heat map" for the major things, and adjust magic items to be relatively frequently and easily recharged with some such materials. Monsters of above CR 5 for the Tippyverse stuff make the bar rather dramatic and cause such megacities to quickly become perfect examples of Lawful Evil as they're powered by the batter-farming of disturbingly-often-sapient creatures too durable for vaguely humane means and quite firmly not capable of being productive members of the Magocracy.

This way, while Tippian mega-cities can be supported by the rules, their requirements invoke complicated modern-style trade networks that are very difficult to defend during the setup phases, and internalizing much of it in "sustainable" fashions quickly turn into varieties of horrors not remotely considered in the vast majority of history. Say what you will about the treatment of IRL livestock, they are not capable of articulating complaints and do not require multiple applications of high-energy weaponry to electrocute, burn, freeze, or dissolve them rather slowly because of the economics surrounding the killing methods making it ruinously more expensive to take them out in one vaguely painless go.

For a fun bit, you can have Create Food and Water require fauna (for extra only-amoral-bastards-will-do-it, make it Unicorn parts), so you end up in a prerequisite trap where to keep the items running you have to use creatures that take more food than using them produces causing you to end up needing conventional agriculture regardless to feed your livestock. That are sapient creatures bred and raised for the sole purpose of being killed agonizingly to run a magical city. Indeed, with XP farming gutted by some manner of challenge requirement or training rule and a purging of Thought Bottle and similar exploits, prolonged agony would end up almost specifically required for a supply of Liquid Pain to handle the XP costs...

There is a good aligned variant of the spell that extracts liquid pain that allows to fuel magic item crafting with happiness.

[sreservoir]

There is a good aligned variant of the spell that extracts liquid pain that allows to fuel magic item crafting with happiness.

Both liquid pain and distilled joy are spells with a 1 day casting time, and provide 3 and 2 XP equivalent, respectively, which is a ludicrously inefficient use of time unless you do the thing where you fill in the gaping holes in the magic device trap rules with gratuitously broken readings. At the base rate 40 XP/day spent creating magic items, it takes 20x longer to collect ambrosia to use it to craft items. Unless you live in a setting where basically nobody sells magic items anywhere near their "market price", ever, it's a tremendously bad deal.

[Maat Mons]

It may be worth noting that, even if no one needed to eat, there would still be need for agriculture. Not every crop is a food crop.

Also, even if a society can magically conjure enough food for its population, they might still want to grow food for export. You can't export magically-conjured food, after all. It spontaneously rots 24 hours after being created.



Even if you eliminate magic food creation, that still leaves extraordinary methods of producing food from nothing. Like good old nightmare-milk! Nightmares are non-native outsiders, so they don't need food or water. But they're, lore-wise, just corrupted unicorns. So, like unicorns, they surely still have foals and produce milk. Delicious, corrupted milk! That the foals have no need to drink. More for us!

Or, if you're a filthy pervert, there are any number of humanoid-shaped outsiders that very clearly have the necessary body parts for milk production. Succubi can even explicitly bear children, which is what typically triggers lactation.

And, of course, there's the classic move of keeping a bunch of incapacitated chain devils around. Thier limbs regrow in 2d6x10 minutes, so you should be able to harvest over 150 limb-worths of meat per day from each kyton. And, since they're non-native outsiders, they don't need any food themselves. Surely, nothing could possibly go wrong with the large-scale exploitation of infernals.

I wonder how often achaierai, arrowhawks, and behemoth eagles lay eggs? I wonder if you can eat slaad eggs without the slaad eggs, in turn, eating you.

[Calthropstu]

In your world as usual the weak (innocent, cute and harmless elementals) are messed over by the powerful (those evil magic item crafters) until they rise up against the oppressor.
Join the defence of the elementals movement and help free elementals now.

That was literally the campaign.

First thing the Elementals did was block off access to the elemental planes. Magic items could no longer be made. It started with the party returning from an adventure. Magic item prices were soaring. Then elementals appeared en masse attacking the city they were in.

Probably the best game I ever wrote.

[RandomPeasant]

Both liquid pain and distilled joy are spells with a 1 day casting time, and provide 3 and 2 XP equivalent, respectively, which is a ludicrously inefficient use of time unless you do the thing where you fill in the gaping holes in the magic device trap rules with gratuitously broken readings.

The magic traps thing isn't necessary, it just makes it cheaper. You can do the same thing with regular magic items, it's just stupidly more expensive (which in turn doesn't really matter, as there are any number of ways of getting infinite money if you want it).

[Bayar]

Even if you eliminate magic food creation, that still leaves extraordinary methods of producing food from nothing. Like good old nightmare-milk! Nightmares are non-native outsiders, so they don't need food or water. But they're, lore-wise, just corrupted unicorns. So, like unicorns, they surely still have foals and produce milk. Delicious, corrupted milk! That the foals have no need to drink. More for us!


Would the foals still be considered outsiders ? They are conceived and born on the material plane.

[Yogibear41]

Use the gods. If a PC can do it, I'm pretty sure a god with the same class levels and 30 more hit dice can do it better.

[RandomPeasant]

Use the gods. If a PC can do it, I'm pretty sure a god with the same class levels and 30 more hit dice can do it better.

Using the gods to solve world-building problems tends to rapidly run into questions that tend to undermine the whole campaign. If Pelor or Nerul or whoever is going to stop you from turning the setting into the Tippyverse, why aren't they stopping the BBEG? If Pelor is Good, why is he opposed to a scheme that would eliminate hunger, poverty, and disease? You very quickly get into questions of Theodicy, and while that's somewhat intellectually interesting, it's kind of a lot to stick into your game as a background setting justification.

[Gnaeus]

Using the gods to solve world-building problems tends to rapidly run into questions that tend to undermine the whole campaign. If Pelor or Nerul or whoever is going to stop you from turning the setting into the Tippyverse, why aren't they stopping the BBEG? If Pelor is Good, why is he opposed to a scheme that would eliminate hunger, poverty, and disease? You very quickly get into questions of Theodicy, and while that's somewhat intellectually interesting, it's kind of a lot to stick into your game as a background setting justification.

False statement is false. As you know from upthread.
1. The overdeity said so. Because he likes medieval world. End of discussion, 0 campaign undermining. AO doesn’t care about BBEG.
2. Because the super intelligent multi plane deities have concluded it leads to apocalypses that create more problems than it solves.
3. Because the “gods” preventing tippyverse aren’t gods, they are godlike NPCs like dragons or inevitables who don’t care about the BBEG as long as humans can’t become not food or challenge the timeline or whatever they care about. Dragon doesn’t care about BBEG. For minimum world disruption, anyone who begins a tippyverse loop is written out of the timeline by killing their mom before they were born with no explanation or witnesses. If it’s a PC, they roll a new character and it is explained that no one in the universe remembers their old PC. If they want they can have a fight scene between themselves as an infant and an Epic CR inevitable.
4. Related to 2. The middle earth Cold War scenario. Pelor likes the idea of ending scarcity, but enough gods are willing to go to war about it that he isn’t going to allow the destruction of a continent to fight about it.

Any of those flat stop the problem with 0 Theodicy and 0 campaign change. This is flat out the easiest way to stop Tippyverse, requiring 0 rules changes and likely 0 effects observable by a typical PC.

There is at least one real world religion that had exactly this scenario with medical technology. If you want to discuss why gods worshiped by some people on this board did exactly what we are talking about, we will just wind up in threadlock. But you can take my word for it or look it up.

[mattie_p]

I would like to point out that while this discussion is going on in this thread, other threads are debating
Getting access to Polymorph as a Cleric
Base price for buying/selling simulacrums
The Whale Wrestler, an AMF Grappler

To name just a few highlights. Clearly the solution to preventing a tippyverse should be self evident.

Don't allow messageboards or forums to spawn.

[RandomPeasant]

The overdeity said so. Because he likes medieval world. End of discussion, 0 campaign undermining. AO doesnÂ’t care about BBEG.

That's not "because the gods", that's "DM fiat laundered through an NPC you can't possibly beat", which is worse than just saying "it doesn't happen because it's not the game I'm running".


Because the super intelligent multi plane deities have concluded it leads to apocalypses that create more problems than it solves.

That's not "because the gods", that's "because apocalypse". Which, sure, you can do that, but the hard problem there is figuring out what the apocalypse is and how the Tippyverse causes it, not getting people to avoid causing the apocalypse. It's not like we'd be having this discussion if OP expected people to take him at his world if he said "it'd go badly, don't try it", and just like with 1, laundering that through "the gods" isn't going to help.


Because the “gods” preventing tippyverse aren’t gods, they are godlike NPCs like dragons or inevitables who don’t care about the BBEG as long as humans can’t become not food or challenge the timeline or whatever they care about. Dragon doesn’t care about BBEG. For minimum world disruption, anyone who begins a tippyverse loop is written out of the timeline by killing their mom before they were born with no explanation or witnesses.

So your solution to "the players would like to play a type of campaign I don't want to run" is "tell the players that every single action they will ever take is possible only because it didn't cause an omniscient council of arbitrarily powerful beings to exercise their retroactive veto power"? That sounds like a great way to convince the players that nothing they do in the campaign really matters, mostly because you're explicitly telling them that if they ever achieved anything that meaningfully impacted the setting, they'd get erased.


Related to 2. The middle earth Cold War scenario. Pelor likes the idea of ending scarcity, but enough gods are willing to go to war about it that he isnÂ’t going to allow the destruction of a continent to fight about it.

If the players want to cause the Tippyverse, telling them that to do so will require tipping the divine balance of power isn't going to make them stop trying to cause the Tippyverse, it's going to make them start trying to tip the divine balance of power. If you tell them they can't do that, you get the same problem as solution 3, where you're telling the players that the only impact they can have on the setting is in doing things that the real players don't care about, which is incredibly disempowering.


Any of those flat stop the problem with 0 Theodicy and 0 campaign change. This is flat out the easiest way to stop Tippyverse, requiring 0 rules changes and likely 0 effects observable by a typical PC.

The easiest way to stop the Tippyverse is to say "the campaign is happening before someone figured the Tippyverse out". That's not robust to the players trying to cause the Tippyverse, but if the players are trying to do something that's incompatible with the campaign you want to run, that's an out-of-game problem you shouldn't be trying to solve in-game in the first place.

[Efrate]

On the apocalypse thing, that falls flat IMO because of 2 things.

Firstly as a generally post apocalyptic setting that's just kind of nonsense. Using FR as a base, each edition, and multiple times in the distant past it happens. Every 4000th Tuesday something happens and boom reset. This is not new and if any authority was trying to prevent that they are doing a really poor job. Either they are incompotent and impotent, or there are clear any pretty easy loopholes( all things considered.) And if they do exist, why did they not fix all the ones in the past?

Secondly, there are multiple gods, most of the CE and I am sure others, that actively work towards world ending events. If post scarcity (which most the good gods I feel would support) leads to that, then why are the evils gods not pushing that HARD. And if the good gods support it they would encourage or work with the doomsday cults of whomever. That's pretty huge narrative dissonance.

If you do not want it as a dm, fine. Your table, your world. But just admit that yes it should be like that, but it is not, purely because it breaks an already broken system even more. Do not look too deep for a fair and reasonable reason. They system quickly falls apart if you dig into it deeply, it's better to treat it as a backdrop for all the stuff the players do and not try to make it all line up nice and neat and be coherent and reasonable, because you will just drive yourself mad. My 2 copper.

[Gnaeus]

That's not "because the gods", that's "DM fiat laundered through an NPC you can't possibly beat", which is worse than just saying "it doesn't happen because it's not the game I'm running"

Most of the game conditions occur because of DM fiat through NPCs you can’t possibility beat. The Blood War impacts a lot more games than Tippyverse, and you can’t end it without killing an infinite number of godlike beings.


That's not "because the gods", that's "because apocalypse". Which, sure, you can do that, but the hard problem there is figuring out what the apocalypse is and how the Tippyverse causes it, not getting people to avoid causing the apocalypse. It's not like we'd be having this discussion if OP expected people to take him at his world if he said "it'd go badly, don't try it", and just like with 1, laundering that through "the gods" isn't going to help

Figuring out the apocalypse isn’t the hard part. It isn’t even required. All most characters need to know is the gods oppose it, and when you ask why you get an answer no human mind can comprehend. Because humans aren’t immortal supergenius multidimensional beings. Laundering through the gods doesn’t help, it 100% solves the problem.


So your solution to "the players would like to play a type of campaign I don't want to run" is "tell the players that every single action they will ever take is possible only because it didn't cause an omniscient council of arbitrarily powerful beings to exercise their retroactive veto power"? That sounds like a great way to convince the players that nothing they do in the campaign really matters, mostly because you're explicitly telling them that if they ever achieved anything that meaningfully impacted the setting, they'd get erased

1. Telling players “that’s not the game we’re playing here” is entirely reasonable. If I’m running a historical fiction game set in Ancient Greece and someone decided to invent cannon and automobiles, I can absolutely say “no, that’s not what we’re doing”.

2. This doesn’t tell players that nothing they do matters. Nearly nothing on PC scale gets affected at all. They can create and destroy empires. They can’t do one tiny subset of actions that redefine the setting completely. And again, the level and means of enforcement is entirely in the hands of the DM. If he wants to say you can make an infinite food trap, but not a dozen, or a circle gate between the capitol and his tower but not a Grand Central Station of ring gates for intercontinental trade, the DM draws the line and the DM says what happens when you step over.


If the players want to cause the Tippyverse, telling them that to do so will require tipping the divine balance of power isn't going to make them stop trying to cause the Tippyverse, it's going to make them start trying to tip the divine balance of power. If you tell them they can't do that, you get the same problem as solution 3, where you're telling the players that the only impact they can have on the setting is in doing things that the real players don't care about, which is incredibly disempowering

You can’t completely rewrite the setting isn’t disempowering player agency. If I’m playing 40k it isn’t disempowering that my space marine can’t kill Khorne. I mean, I’m sure he wants to, right? If I’m playing Dresden Files it isn’t disempowering to say that I can’t cast a spell to remake the universe into Harry Potter or vice versa. The DM can absolutely trivially stop players from tipping the divine balance of power, unless it’s a high powered campaign where tipping the divine balance of power is a plot, in which case, good. PCs can only actually tip the balance of power from an arbitrary number of omnipotent beings with McGuffins the DM gives anyway. If Kill a God isn’t set up as a thing PCs can do, it isn’t a thing they will do.

[RandomPeasant]

If you do not want it as a dm, fine. Your table, your world. But just admit that yes it should be like that, but it is not, purely because it breaks an already broken system even more.

The thing is, there's actually a really simple in-world reason that has absolutely no setting-building or player empowerment problems: you just declare that the campaign is happening before anyone created the Tippyverse. It's like tying yourself into knots trying to figure out how to make a real-world setting that doesn't have modern technology. You just set it before that technology was invented. That doesn't solve the problem of the players trying to create the Tippyverse, but that is an out-of-game problem and there is no good in-game solution to out-of-game problems.


Most of the game conditions occur because of DM fiat through NPCs you can’t possibility beat. The Blood War impacts a lot more games than Tippyverse, and you can’t end it without killing an infinite number of godlike beings.

Yes, the starting conditions of the game do. The question is how the game evolves from those conditions. The Blood War can be very hard to solve. But dynamically changing how hard the Blood War is to solve is bad, as is having an arbitrarily powerful force that exists to maintain the Blood War.


Figuring out the apocalypse isn’t the hard part. It isn’t even required. All most characters need to know is the gods oppose it, and when you ask why you get an answer no human mind can comprehend. Because humans aren’t immortal supergenius multidimensional beings. Laundering through the gods doesn’t help, it 100% solves the problem.

If you don't have an explicit apocalypse, this is just solution 3 (or 1, or 2, so really you only have one solution) and it fails for the reasons those solutions fail.


1. Telling players “that’s not the game we’re playing here” is entirely reasonable. If I’m running a historical fiction game set in Ancient Greece and someone decided to invent cannon and automobiles, I can absolutely say “no, that’s not what we’re doing”.

Then it's not "because the gods", it's "because I don't want to", and you've simply chosen to enforce that through the gods, rather than speaking to the players out-of-game and getting on the same page with them about what the game is supposed to be. That's not good DMing.


2. This doesn’t tell players that nothing they do matters. Nearly nothing on PC scale gets affected at all. They can create and destroy empires. They can’t do one tiny subset of actions that redefine the setting completely

It absolutely does tell them that. Once you've created the council of retroactively undoing anything you do, by definition the only actions that can even be meaningfully attempted are the actions the council doesn't care about. You have said "there are real powers in the setting who can surgically intervene down to the level of your existence, you can only do things they don't care about". That's disempowering. That's just what it is. If you don't want to run a Tippyverse game, tell people that. Using your power as DM to arbitrarily stomp all over any attempt to create the Tippyverse in-game isn't going to make your players happy, and the specific ways you have proposed of doing that are horribly disempowering.


The DM can absolutely trivially stop players from tipping the divine balance of power, unless it’s a high powered campaign where tipping the divine balance of power is a plot, in which case, good. PCs can only actually tip the balance of power from an arbitrary number of omnipotent beings with McGuffins the DM gives anyway. If Kill a God isn’t set up as a thing PCs can do, it isn’t a thing they will do.

What kind of campaign do you think it's possible to create the Tippyverse in? We're talking about a setting that includes things like "forbiddance covering entire cities", "teleportation circle as a basic form of infrastructure", and "millions of XP worth of traps and golems" as core parts of its identity. If the players can do that, they can certainly meddle in planar politics to some degree.

[Gnaeus]

That doesn't solve the problem of the players trying to create the Tippyverse, but that is an out-of-game problem and there is no good in-game solution to out-of-game problems

That sentence is true.



Yes, the starting conditions of the game do. The question is how the game evolves from those conditions. The Blood War can be very hard to solve. But dynamically changing how hard the Blood War is to solve is bad, as is having an arbitrarily powerful force that exists to maintain the Blood War

There are arbitrarily powerful forces that maintain the blood war. Literally every arch devil and demon prince, + some gods.



If you don't have an explicit apocalypse, this is just solution 3 (or 1, or 2, so really you only have one solution) and it fails for the reasons those solutions fail

Almost correct. It succeeds for the reasons those solutions succeed.



Then it's not "because the gods", it's "because I don't want to", and you've simply chosen to enforce that through the gods, rather than speaking to the players out-of-game and getting on the same page with them about what the game is supposed to be. That's not good DMing

Building your setting and themes is great DMing. Trying to rewrite the setting you agreed to play in is poor play.



It absolutely does tell them that. Once you've created the council of retroactively undoing anything you do, by definition the only actions that can even be meaningfully attempted are the actions the council doesn't care about. You have said "there are real powers in the setting who can surgically intervene down to the level of your existence, you can only do things they don't care about". That's disempowering. That's just what it is. If you don't want to run a Tippyverse game, tell people that. Using your power as DM to arbitrarily stomp all over any attempt to create the Tippyverse in-game isn't going to make your players happy, and the specific ways you have proposed of doing that are horribly disempowering

That’s part of D&D. There are real powers in the setting you can’t beat and you can only do things they don’t care about. Most of them are way below the godlike level, but still way above any PC. If you want to remake Thay as a democratic Republic Szass Tam will kill you. You can’t stop the epic lich leading an army of liches.



What kind of campaign do you think it's possible to create the Tippyverse in? We're talking about a setting that includes things like "forbiddance covering entire cities", "teleportation circle as a basic form of infrastructure", and "millions of XP worth of traps and golems" as core parts of its identity. If the players can do that, they can certainly meddle in planar politics to some degree.

You are somehow assuming that all those things are in place. They never get set up.

Honestly, it isn’t even the fiat via NPC that IMO is most likely to come up. That would be spawn apocalypses. And no, I don’t think preventing PCs from creating a shadow or wight and annihilating a continent is disempowering either. Or stopping infinite power loops like pun pun. If you try it, you get scorched. If you’re lucky you get a warning first.

It sounds like you are considering a game in which the PCs are driven to create the tippyverse. First, that isn’t exactly what op posited either. It seemed more of a what global conditions would stop this from occurring. If when you are prepping the campaign, you get character goals like “I’m going to create a post scarcity society with traps and ring gates” this entire thread is the wrong solution. Whether done by rules or NPCs, if the DM wants a fantasy game and the players DONT, stopping the Tippyverse has become an OOC problem. If the DM wants to run Tippyverse you let them succeed. If the DM doesn’t want to run Tippyverse you have options like telling players “if you try to rewrite my world you will fail”, or “if you try to rewrite my world you succeed. Here’s the DMG and Monster Manual, I’m making a wizard for your Tippyverse campaign.

[GeoffWatson]

The Tippyverse relies on ignoring some of the rules - particularly that the item/trap creation rules are just guidelines for the DM to start from when deciding costs and requirements. The item pricing rules are not player-facing rules where deviating from them can be considered the DM cheating or betraying the players.

[noob]

The Tippyverse relies on ignoring some of the rules - particularly that the item/trap creation rules are just guidelines for the DM to start from when deciding costs and requirements. The item pricing rules are not player-facing rules where deviating from them can be considered the DM cheating or betraying the players.
That is not true: even without cost reductions you can do all the things needed for the typpyverse (it only takes more resources) there one magic item(already within the list of available magic items) that creates enough rations for like 20 persons a day that costed roughly 2000 gold, permanencied teleportation circles are player manual only and do not rely on magic item crafting, likewise for forbidence, shadesteel golems and their crafting rules are directly within a monster manual, simulacrum is again a player manual spell and so on.

The resetting traps are just a more convenient and resource cheap way to make food but you could rely on simulacrums and more expensive magic items to do that.

[Quertus]

There are arbitrarily powerful forces that maintain the blood war. Literally every arch devil and demon prince, + some gods.

They are *not* "arbitrarily powerful" - they have stats, the PCs can kill them.

[Gnaeus]

They are *not* "arbitrarily powerful" - they have stats, the PCs can kill them.

Some of them have stats. The gods don’t. Most demon lords don’t. Only the published ones, which is at best a few %. But they control hundreds of infinite planes. If Orcus is worried about the party and wants to attack them with 10,000 pit fiends with class levels, supported by 15,000 liches, and 25,000 vampires, he can. It is absolutely reasonable for the immortal god of liches to have every magic item he wants. His lieutenants make artifacts. The DM can literally set the fight with Orcus at any CR greater to or equal to his printed stats, and not be cheesing at all. If the PCs try to kill him with epic spellcasting, gosh, I guess 30 epic level liches have been sitting on a fast time plane casting epic defensive magic for the last 50,000 years Abyss time. There is no power ceiling for an infinite number of immortal demigods and gods ruling infinite planes for arbitrary long time. That’s arbitrary. If the DM wants to make it doable, he can. If he doesnt, a party of epic casters can’t compete at all. There is nothing they can do that an arbitrary number of super genius epic opponents with arbitrary time can’t floorstomp.

[redking]

Tippyverse assumes there is a high degree of cooperation among the powerful spellcasters of the world. Not likely.

[Quertus]

Some of them have stats. The gods don’t.

AFB, but I'm pretty sure I've heard discussions of Thor's strength in 3e. I think that they do.


Most demon lords don’t. Only the published ones, which is at best a few %.

And both of these quotes are missing the point that their powers are bounded. Finite. Not arbitrary. And, if the GM *does* need to stat them out so that the party can interact with them, the published ones serve as a guide for their rough expected power level.


But they control hundreds of infinite planes. If Orcus is worried about the party and wants to attack them with 10,000 pit fiends with class levels, supported by 15,000 liches, and 25,000 vampires, he can. It is absolutely reasonable for the immortal god of liches to have every magic item he wants. His lieutenants make artifacts. The DM can literally set the fight with Orcus at any CR greater to or equal to his printed stats, and not be cheesing at all. If the PCs try to kill him with epic spellcasting, gosh, I guess 30 epic level liches have been sitting on a fast time plane casting epic defensive magic for the last 50,000 years Abyss time. There is no power ceiling for an infinite number of immortal demigods and gods ruling infinite planes for arbitrary long time. That’s arbitrary. If the DM wants to make it doable, he can. If he doesnt, a party of epic casters can’t compete at all. There is nothing they can do that an arbitrary number of super genius epic opponents with arbitrary time can’t floorstomp.

Unless you allow your party to go arbitrary that way, the NPCs shouldn't, either.

Also, they're canonically not clever (read "Determinator") enough to behave the way you've just described - that's poor role-playing of the NPCs.

So, they're canonically not arbitrarily powerful - neither statistically nor tactically. The party *can* (and probably should) overcome this obstacle.

[Silly Name]

One should keep in mind that the Tippyverse is not an inevitability. It requires a specific reading of the rules, actors that behave "as intended" and an overall permissive world where there are no setbacks ever.

Tippyverse isn't "how things should be". It's not the ending point of every campaign world. It's a specific thing that can be nipped in the bud by rule zero'ing away some blatant loopholes, abuses and dubious interpretations of the game rules.

[Batcathat]

One should keep in mind that the Tippyverse is not an inevitability. It requires a specific reading of the rules, actors that behave "as intended" and an overall permissive world where there are no setbacks ever.

Tippyverse isn't "how things should be". It's not the ending point of every campaign world. It's a specific thing that can be nipped in the bud by rule zero'ing away some blatant loopholes, abuses and dubious interpretations of the game rules.

That is true, but changing the world from the OP's desired state of "middle ages but with magic and monsters" requires much less dubious rule-reading and general shenanigans.

[noob]

That is true, but changing the world from the OP's desired state of "middle ages but with magic and monsters" requires much less dubious rule-reading and general shenanigans.

Not actually true: the existence of teleportation at all (especially demons: they are the reason why people fear a monster can appear, kill them then disappear to kill people elsewhere) is what encourages small fortresses with the forbidence spell and the rules are clear about the fact you can make magic items that creates food if you pick one already in the manuals (instead of custom crafting one) and with both of those you end up favouring tightly packed populations without agriculture.
What changes if you apply the rules in the most strict ways is that it takes a lot more time to create that situation.

[zlefin]

All this brings to mind an interesting possibility for a setting:
The good and neutral gods are trying to keep things in medieval stasis so as to avoid the world-destroying calamities that inevitably occur if people advance; while the evil gods are pushing technology/magic and trying to introduce easy food production for all and all the other tippy-verse stuff to create that apocalypse.

but it's not so easy to tell hungry people that creating permanent easy food sources is 'evil'.

[noob]

All this brings to mind an interesting possibility for a setting:
The good and neutral gods are trying to keep things in medieval stasis so as to avoid the world-destroying calamities that inevitably occur if people advance; while the evil gods are pushing technology/magic and trying to introduce easy food production for all and all the other tippy-verse stuff to create that apocalypse.

but it's not so easy to tell hungry people that creating permanent easy food sources is 'evil'.

Without spamming forbiddance or high level casters doing scry and kill tactics all the peasants die to teleporting rampaging demons and varied other teleporting monsters.
It is why many of the greater people get very busy fighting demons(the blood war helps alleviate that in some settings) and that people on the material plane get to be barely checked in many settings.

[Gnaeus]

AFB, but I'm pretty sure I've heard discussions of Thor's strength in 3e. I think that they do

I think they don’t. There is Deities and Demigods, which is 3.0. But it says 2 relevant things. 1. Whether they CAN die or not, or whether they just reform, is entirely up to the DM. 2. Those stats were written to be impossible for a level 20 campaign and the DM may increase their levels to keep them ahead of characters. So the same book that lists their stats says to change them if they don’t fit the DMs desires. It also says that they are wealthy enough to carry any non artifact they desire, and if they don’t it is because they can’t be bothered to carry all that stuff around. Arbitrary.

Also, one of their abilities, Alter Reality, is at will better than Wish, that also lets them duplicate any spell altered by any metamagic feat available to level 20 characters.



And both of these quotes are missing the point that their powers are bounded. Finite. Not arbitrary. And, if the GM *does* need to stat them out so that the party can interact with them, the published ones serve as a guide for their rough expected power level

See above. They are bounded by what the DM wants them to be able to do.



Unless you allow your party to go arbitrary that way, the NPCs shouldn't, either

I disagree with the premise. A god isn’t an orc, a bag of HP meant to be beaten and operating on a level field with PCs. It is an eternal cosmic force that very reasonably has access to tricks PCs don’t. And if you are thinking Tippyverse level, that also means infinite legions of shadesteel golems and simulacra, because just because they won’t let mortals do something doesn’t mean they won’t do it themselves. And they have infinite time and money and an ability that lets them use simulacrum every round with no cost. They can have any non deity creature… as a familiar. If Lolth wants to play fetch the stick with a great wyrm dragon with 20 sorcerer levels, she totes can. But regardless, since they can do things like shut down everyone’s magic but their own on their home plane, if the party isn’t using epic magic cheese they won’t win.



Also, they're canonically not clever (read "Determinator") enough to behave the way you've just described - that's poor role-playing of the NPCs.


They are canonically super geniuses with int and wisdom in the high 20s++ and thousands of years of experience. That’s a level of intelligence where the DM should cheat egregiously and retcon that they did things that they should have done before but the DM didn’t think of it.

Again, Deities and Demigods p19. “Flocks, if not armies of servants, avatars and proxies normally surround deities. Deities possess relics and artifacts about which mortals know nothing. If threats to their existence are real, they’ve had centuries to carefully prepare their defenses. … allied gods stand ready to assist and defend each other…a potential god killer probably faces legions of mortal worshipers first.” To repeat “IF threats to their existence are real” reinforcing the other text elsewhere that states that if the DM wants them to be unkillable, they are.



So, they're canonically not arbitrarily powerful - neither statistically nor tactically. The party *can* (and probably should) overcome this obstacle.

It is clear that if the DM wants to make a campaign where PCs can slay a god, he RAW can. It is equally clear that if the DM wants to make a campaign where gods have nothing to fear from mortals, he can do that also, within both RAW and RAI. Deities and Demigods pp18-19.

Certainly there are printed campaigns where PCs defeat individual gods. Or at least their avatars. Usually by merits of some kind of plot mcguffin that weakens them them to bring them into range as the campaign climax. But there is a huge difference in kind between that and “PCs can end the Bloodwar by killing all the arch devils and related gods”. Either way it’s a thing that can happen by RAW only if the DM wants for it to be an option. Or anything in between. If the DM wants to dragonlance it and say that you can only kill a god with super involved tricks requiring time travel to many points of history to get the relevant mcguffins in the right circumstances, but that just walking into Takhisis’ house and rolling initiative just gets you auto smote, that’s legit too.

[JoeNapalm]

This is more about adjusting rule set to make a world that mechanically functions like the setting does in the fluff. Not gritty for gritty sake, but actually sticking to the description of the world.



Oh, well...then, why not just stick to the description of the world?

The Tippyverse relies on the belief that in a world of magic, everything would go to the extremes, and that spells, components, and casters are infinite supply.

Just...don't do that.

And before the inevitable "but that wouldn't WORK!" keep in mind that 99.9% of D&D games run since the late '70s haven't had this problem.

Yes, the game is breakable. Best way to fix that? Don't intentionally break it.


-Jn-
Ifriti Sophist

[Yogibear41]

People in power tend to like the status quo, because well the status quo leaves them in power, if you go about trying to make broad sweeping magical reforms the people in power who have been around longer than you, and are probably more powerful than you and have more resources than you, will stop you.

Assuming you somehow circumvent all of the following and now have the most power, most resources, and are in charge, why would you want to change it? Even if you are a super benevolent good aligned guy making the tippy-verse changes gives Evil a chance to catch up.

Also consider the following:

Since we are "preventing a Tippyverse" lets assume that we begin in a non-tippyverse state.

Lets "assume" you figure out the secret to magical resetting traps to duplicate things like create food and water, cure spells, etc. You now have the ability to create infinite resources for a fixed one time cost. That is VERY bad for business. Perhaps the trade merchants who make their living by creating and selling minor scrolls or potions decided to ban together and boycott you(or worse), because well if they don't they will go out of business. So A. you are unable to receive the supplies you need to make your magic traps B. you can get the items but its waaaaaay Harder. or C. maybe the merchants aren't super benevolent so they hire people to kill you and destroy your research.

The Tippyverse doesn't take alot of things into account like that. Human Nature is a big stopping point to preventing it from happening.

[AnonymousPepper]

I apologize if it's been said, but there's a really obvious answer:

Every setting that isn't Dark Sun (or similar) has an intelligent being supervising magic explicitly.

Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance show us very good examples of what this leads to - when a super-mage oversteps their bounds and tries to rewrite the setting too hard, that intelligent, thinking being reacts as an intelligent, thinking being does, and nerfs magic.

The rules in the book do not exist in a vacuum in-universe; they are themselves adjudicated, supervised, and enforced by specific in-universe entities tasked with doing precisely that and keeping everything running.

You really don't need to change things much, assuming there exists a god of magic or similar who can (and historically does) simply say no. RAW is explicitly subject to the whim of deities. Importantly, deities who have the power to not grant you the magic abilities you would need to kill them. Mystra's obligation to grant magic is not a suicide pact, as Karsus' Folly enshrined.

[noob]

I apologize if it's been said, but there's a really obvious answer:

Every setting that isn't Dark Sun (or similar) has an intelligent being supervising magic explicitly.

Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance show us very good examples of what this leads to - when a super-mage oversteps their bounds and tries to rewrite the setting too hard, that intelligent, thinking being reacts as an intelligent, thinking being does, and nerfs magic.

The rules in the book do not exist in a vacuum in-universe; they are themselves adjudicated, supervised, and enforced by specific in-universe entities tasked with doing precisely that and keeping everything running.

You really don't need to change things much, assuming there exists a god of magic or similar who can (and historically does) simply say no. RAW is explicitly subject to the whim of deities. Importantly, deities who have the power to not grant you the magic abilities you would need to kill them. Mystra's obligation to grant magic is not a suicide pact, as Karsus' Folly enshrined.

A quite fun thing is that in FR you can use magic without using the weave (and thus not be blockable by the deity of magic) but most wizards do not know how to do that because tapping directly in the magic of the world is much harder to do safely.
(except for elves but elves are mary sues)

[TalonOfAnathrax]

Also has in it the root of my answer. Which is: assume that anything that works for 'free'... doesn't. I've mentioned before that my personal ruling on this in 'typical' 3.x environments is that all permanent or infinity-repeating magic doesn't get something from nothing, but rather does a low-level draw on the vital energy of everything around it. (Vital energy you might recognize as the XP that goes into making most items.) Empires like the Forgotten Realms' Netheril are entirely possible, but quickly collapse. The effect isn't too noticeable on an individual level when we're talking about a couple magic swords in an adventuring party, but a Teleport Gate operating full-time and an army of golems draws so much that crops fail, children are born sickly and eventually not at all, the local plants and animals begin to die off, etc. In Magic Empires running on Negative Energy (your standard Evil Lichocracy) that Negative Energy gets tapped instead, causing centuries-old demiliches to find their souls suddenly evaporating, skeleton armies simply falling apart, and so on.

The collapse function isn't understood in-setting but is well enough known in the world that trying to construct a civilization that runs on magic has fallen out of fashion. And technology hasn't advanced too far because as progress starts to kick off people start to assume it's all so much mythology and go full magitech, which leads to a collapse cycle, which means things get kicked back to the status quo but with a new set of ruins and dungeons full of (effectively radioactive, but who knew) stuff for adventurers to loot.
That sounds like a cool setting! Unfortunately, I don't think it so much block Tippyverse as non-nomadic Tippyverse. And while I love the idea of mobile utopias fighting high-magic wars for access to "non used-up" places to roam, that's closer to Mortal Engines than exactly medieval stasis :D
And "the collapse function isn't well-understood in-universe" is a bit weird when this is a universe in which you can produce information from nothing through Divination. "Why is my high magic civilization failing" sounds like a problem that would immediately have dozens of smart, powerful spellcasters trying to solve or explain it.

[AnonymousPepper]

A quite fun thing is that in FR you can use magic without using the weave (and thus not be blockable by the deity of magic) but most wizards do not know how to do that because tapping directly in the magic of the world is much harder to do safely.
(except for elves but elves are mary sues)

What are you referring to, actually? The way I know of is Initiate of Mystra, which doesn't actually have fluff text to it that I know of. I'm probably just forgetting bc I just woke up, but still.

[Lapak]

That sounds like a cool setting! Unfortunately, I don't think it so much block Tippyverse as non-nomadic Tippyverse. And while I love the idea of mobile utopias fighting high-magic wars for access to "non used-up" places to roam, that's closer to Mortal Engines than exactly medieval stasis :D
And "the collapse function isn't well-understood in-universe" is a bit weird when this is a universe in which you can produce information from nothing through Divination. "Why is my high magic civilization failing" sounds like a problem that would immediately have dozens of smart, powerful spellcasters trying to solve or explain it.I mean, I can't draw real-life politics into this for examples, but you assume that people at the top of a power pyramid would stop doing what they were doing simply because they knew it was self-destructive rather than assuming that they would figure out a way to continue to benefit somehow, and we have vast evidence that this is not how human nature works no matter how smart the people involved are.

Also, it's not a localized effect you can evade by moving over to the next valley; it's an ongoing drain that affects wherever the magical civilization happens to be at that moment, so building a mobile city (like, say, a flying city a la Netheril) would be adding more magic and making things even worse for no benefit. :D

EDIT: The 'not well understood' ties back to the first point - sure, the elites of each civilization probably understand it to a greater or lesser degree before the final end, but the final collapse tends to bring all those well-informed folks down with it.

[noob]

What are you referring to, actually? The way I know of is Initiate of Mystra, which doesn't actually have fluff text to it that I know of. I'm probably just forgetting bc I just woke up, but still.

For that kind of magic it is rather the reverse of what you were mentioning it is a bunch of fluff text about op magic used by elves that have no associated rules (it exists in FR but the specifics are not written).

[Efrate]

The weave is essentially a GUI for magic users. Lets them interface raw magic easier. If you know the code you can do more by just writing your own lines. Its harder and mystras propoganda says its dangerous, but its infinitely doable. If you do so, the gods of magic have no direct control and cannot necessarily shut you off. You also function in dead magic zones fine andmaybe antimagic fields.

[Emperor Tippy]

The only thing required for a "Tippyverse" is persistent, long range, cheap (on a per use basis), teleportation and an inability to block or prevent teleportation on a large scale (i.e. across the breadth of a nation).

A Warlock 12 can use Imbue Item to create a scroll of Teleportation Circle with a DC 24 UMD check. Rounding up, it costs him 2,000 GP to make and he can sell it for 5,000 GP and this TC will last 120 minutes. In that 120 minutes you could have thousands of people walk through that TC and appear in a city on the other side of the world, each able to carry a Bag of Holding or Portable Hole filled with stuff. Get a Warlock, set up a transport center, and take reservations. Once you have enough people (or every X days or whatever), you cast the TC in a hallway and people walk through and emerge in another hallway in a transportation center on the other side of the world. Offer rental services for using your Portable Holes, you throw the Portable Hole on the wall, let someone fill it up, and then walk through the TC and reverse the process. Charge 10 GP per trip and say 10 GP per rental of the Portable Hole and you only need five hundred people at a time to make the TC scroll pay for itself (and two thousand uses before the Portable Hole becomes profitable).

Even in that case, who exactly is going to travel by anything but TC?

Then you have the Planar Binding line and Archons. A Lantern Archon gets at-Will Greater Teleport for themselves and fifty pounds of goods. In other words, they can pop Portable Holes around the world for free. A party walks into the hole on the wall, the Lantern Archon pops it to the destination, and the hole is unrolled and out walks the party. Who is going to travel by more traditional means when they can do that for a GP per person per trip? And a Sorcerer 10 can easily set up that system (or a Wizard 9), which will give them all the monies.

Permanency lowers the cost per use and ups the volume you can move but even it isn't absolutely required. But once you have a Permanent Teleportation Circle set up, you have effectively joined two separate cities into one large city.

What Teleportation does is remove the need for merchants to travel between cities overland/by water. Traditionally, how towns are created is that a trade route between two primary cities is created and those towns grow up along the route to service the trade and in time become cities of their own. With Teleportation, you remove all of that organic growth. Cities exist where they do because someone has specifically decided that they want a city in that location, probably to exploit some resource in that location.

For example, some wealthy noble(s) send out Adventurers to find them a nice, temperate, mountain valley with fertile soil, a freshwater lake, the appropriate size, good weather, etc. Then, once the location has been found, the nobles pay to put in a Permanent Teleportation circle to/from the capital before moving in the labor parties. A year later the Capital has a new lake district where the nobles keep their homes, and no one cares that it is actually two thousand miles away from the rest of the capital. Any resource worth exploiting beyond the purely local level will justify the cost of a Permanent Teleportation Circle or two being set up, and once they are set up there ceases to be any reason to develop the area around that resource.

The other issue with Teleportation, and especially Teleportation Circle, is that defending against it is essentially impossible pre-epic. The best option is a Weirdstone and that only has a five mile radius while costing absurd amounts of gold. Unless you are using magic to break wealth, the BEST case is that each city has its own Weirdstone and thus locks down Teleportation for five miles from the city center in every direction. The relevance of this militarily is that at any time, any location can find an entire army at most five miles away from their front door. Natural barriers to the movement of a military force cease to have relevance and strategic depth is, likewise, irrelevant. By necessity, all critical infrastructure will be concentrated where it can be protected.

That need makes cities the only safe place around, because anything that can't afford defenses sufficient to stand off an army is dead in moments. A Sorcerer 12 can field an entire army of CR 5, teleporting, Bearded Devils with a months worth of work and simply order them to start purging towns/villages/lesser population centers across an enemy nation. Those forces would teleport in, kill/wreck anything present, and if they run into resistance just teleport onto their next target.

---
The Traps, the absurd magic levels, the high level wizard wars, the shadesteel golems, etc.; all of that is immaterial to the core reality of the "Tippyverse". Prevent economically and logistically exploitable teleportation and you prevent (or at least seriously mitigate) the "Tippyverse". Fail to stop teleportation and it will, eventually, be exploited and thus create a tippyverse out of military and economic necessity if nothing else.

[sreservoir]

The other issue with Teleportation, and especially Teleportation Circle, is that defending against it is essentially impossible pre-epic. The best option is a Weirdstone and that only has a five mile radius while costing absurd amounts of gold. Unless you are using magic to break wealth, the BEST case is that each city has its own Weirdstone and thus locks down Teleportation for five miles from the city center in every direction. The relevance of this militarily is that at any time, any location can find an entire army at most five miles away from their front door. Natural barriers to the movement of a military force cease to have relevance and strategic depth is, likewise, irrelevant. By necessity, all critical infrastructure will be concentrated where it can be protected.

That need makes cities the only safe place around, because anything that can't afford defenses sufficient to stand off an army is dead in moments. A Sorcerer 12 can field an entire army of CR 5, teleporting, Bearded Devils with a months worth of work and simply order them to start purging towns/villages/lesser population centers across an enemy nation. Those forces would teleport in, kill/wreck anything present, and if they run into resistance just teleport onto their next target.

This is, in fact, a huge leap of logic emblematic of char op wizard-think. You don't actually need to mechanically prevent things to dissuade people from doing it at scale. Yes, it's much harder to mount a comprehensive defense against all possible forms of attack than it is to find some particular way to break through those defenses. That does not mean most of us spend our lives in fear that somebody out there might, with no warning, break down our door, rob us blind, and murder us in our sleep.

[Calthropstu]

Boot. Booting from memory. Loading Prime.

Prime:
Cd Astral.
Astral:
Del *.*
Deleting Astral plane. Confirm? Y/N
Y
Astral plane deleted.

Error, planar directory unstable. Returning to Prime.
Prime:

[Mechalich]

Boot. Booting from memory. Loading Prime.

Prime:
Cd Astral.
Astral:
Del *.*
Deleting Astral plane. Confirm? Y/N
Y
Astral plane deleted.

Error, planar directory unstable. Returning to Prime.
Prime:

Doing this - meaning eliminating access to the Astral and Outer Planes - is precisely the method used by Dark Sun for its various restrictions. In the traditional D&D cosmology it has a lot of downstream consequences, and because Dark Sun wasn't officially supported in 3e we don't have any official understanding of how exactly it would work in a 3e context. It also doesn't necessarily prevent the psionic equivalent of a Tippyverse (whatever that would be, I'm not well versed in 3e psionics). Still, it's a starting point.

[Efrate]

Applying real world to dnd almost automatically fails. If you knew there was someone, or some government/army who could instantly with no warning be on your doorstep, do whatever they want and be gone again with no recourse you could do you would be a bit paranoid. If you instead worked at a place with valuables/information and knew this was a thing and there was nothing you could do about it, that business or government should be terrified.

Magic takes everything you know and expects and completely obliterates everything you think you know. It has rules technically but one of those is alter reality at will, so yeah. There is no real cost, no significant resource expenditure, almost no defense but more magic, and it makes the impossible possible. There is not a but what about....no one would...how could you. All those questions are answered with magic can and it will. Period.

In world, any user of magic who is intimately familiar would very much tend towards wizard char op, because that is their main hope of survival and success. Yes my wizard would stack as many immunities as possible and protect themselves and those they care about from as much as possible, the only limitation being resources.

A magic user who knows that he can generate a ton of money from whatever will do so to reinvest in safety. Because those crazy paranoid and psychoticly obsessed live to adventure again. They might be lucky, but luck is harder to control. They obsess over safety, and warning, and everything else because thats what it takes to survive. With intelligence high enough to be incomprehensible to most of us, they are not going to ignore measures they can take to be safe and secure. They are going to find the cheats of NI money, wishes, etc. because that keeps them living and survival instinct is strong.