Optimizing a Setting?(3.PF)

[Promethean]

How would a setting look if Optimization wasn't something that was exclusive to PCs, but something that was baked into the setting itself?

Just a thought experiment that occurred to me after reading through some old Tippyverse stuff, which is in itself an optimized setting based mostly on core, but what would a setting look like if you included non-core and (liscenced)3rd party or D20 resources?

For example: In a typical tippyverse setting, the the typical teleportal-hub city would still have a majority 1st-5th level population. A single necromancer with the cheaper fell-drain variant of the Locate City bomb would turn anywhere from 50%-99% of that population into wights in just a few rounds and turn the inside into an undead apocalypse, which could make compact cities less viable. How would the setting instead change to prevent this?

Edit: From extensive discussion, let's say wish and epic spellcasting nerfed as needed. They're OP yeah, but other things are more interesting to talk about. The normal/non-word-twisty effects of wish like copying spellls of lower level and making price uncapped magic items is still fair game though.

Edit 2: Okay, let's just say infinite loops, arbitrary increase in stat builds, and Pun-Pun likes are also banned. The answer to any setting with these included will always be "whatever Pun-Pun wants". That's not the answer we want here.

Clerification: the idea isn't that everyone wakes up one day with complete knowledge of the game mechanics and how to optimize them or that everyone in this setting is optimized.

The central idea of this post is that various societies in said world were able to figure out the "mechanics" by trial and error, that they'd gravitate toward improving magic/technology to improve their race/group's standard of living, and make efforts to standardize class education and builds to increase their power by reducing the number of "NPC classes". Not everyone would necessarily be optimized for the same reason that not everyone is a soldier, a farmer, or a computer engineer.

Basically trying to build a setting where optimization organically grew out of the circumstances as a form of technology.

[Jervis]

How would a setting look if Optimization wasn't something that was exclusive to PCs, but something that was baked into the setting itself?

Just a thought experiment that occurred to me after reading through some old Tippyverse stuff, which is in itself an optimized setting based mostly on core, but what would a setting look like if you included non-core and (liscenced)3rd party or D20 resources?

For example: In a typical tippyverse setting, the the typical teleportal-hub city would still have a majority 1st-5th level population. A single necromancer with the cheaper fell-drain variant of the Locate City bomb would turn anywhere from 50%-99% of that population into wights in just a few rounds and turn the inside into an undead apocalypse, which could make compact cities less viable. How would the setting instead change to prevent this?

I actually played with this for my custom 3.5 dnd setting(I make a setting for every system I play unless it has a baked in setting I like). In that setting Illumians are basically in universe power gamers. Their understanding of magic is purely mechanical and have a reputation of doing nonsensical stuff that somehow leads them to being more powerful than average. Things like early entry to PrCs is something they do in universe like cheating on proficiency exams to join organizations on a technicality “clearly this detect magic I just cast modified by earth spell and my magical word halo is a 4th level spell, are you blind! I fail to see what me standing in a box of dirt while I cast spells changes that.”

[Promethean]

cheating on proficiency exams to join organizations on a technicality “clearly this detect magic I just cast modified by earth spell and my magical word halo is a 4th level spell, are you blind! I fail to see what me standing in a box of dirt while I cast spells changes that.”

...I Love This.:smallbiggrin:

On the other hand, Wouldn't dragons be bigger powergamers? They'd have all the time in the world to figure out magic's "Mechanics" and they have, by far, the most broken content in their supplimentary material. Heck, Great Wyrms are able to take epic feats like Epic Magic just for being in their age category per the rules in one of the supplements.

[Batcathat]

...I Love This.:smallbiggrin:

On the other hand, Wouldn't dragons be bigger powergamers? They'd have all the time in the world to figure out magic's "Mechanics" and they have, by far, the most broken content in their supplimentary material. Heck, Great Wyrms are able to take epic feats like Epic Magic just for being in their age category per the rules in one of the supplements.

For flavor, they should embody all the worst traits of a nerdy know-it-all. Adventurers everywhere live in fear of hearing a thunderous "Well, actually...", followed by a two-hour lecture until the party begs to be burned alive.

[Jervis]

For flavor, they should embody all the worst traits of a nerdy know-it-all. Adventurers everywhere live in fear of hearing a thunderous "Well, actually...", followed by a two-hour lecture until the party begs to be burned alive.

My favorite take on a dragon quirk. Now I want to make a species of Lawful Chaotic Grey Dragon that worship pun pun and obsess over obscure and Byzantine rules all day, along with how those rules can be abused and stretched to absurdity.

[Promethean]

...species of Lawful Chaotic Grey Dragon that worship pun pun...

...Lawful Chaotic Grey Dragon...

...Lawful Chaotic...

...What?:smalleek:

[Jervis]

...What?:smalleek:

The follow the letter of the law and use it to cause as much chaos as positive. Stuff like putting on a grass skirt and hula dancing in the middle of the road. “Not illegal, not illegal, show where there’s a law against it.” And of course using magic for absurd things like setting up boon trap perpetual motion machines that give everyone in a 100 mile radius bad gas.

[Batcathat]

...What?:smalleek:

They do worship someone famous for breaking the game. Presumably the almighty Pun-Pun broke the alignment table for their benefit.

[Quertus]

Pun-pun would be the Creator deity, and the world would look however they wanted it to look.

Anything else would be suboptimal.

[AvatarVecna]

It honestly kinda depends on who reached a particular level of capability first in history. Like...let's say that "system knowledge" is a function of your Int score, and it's just in-universe knowledge of mechanics that you accrue over a lifetime, and that's how the world has always been. Realistically, at some point somebody genocided everybody else: at some point, some older smarter dragons did the math, realized that humanoids breed faster, age faster, and level faster than dragons, and wiped them out to eliminate the competition. Or some human/elf/dwarf/whatever figured it before any great wyrms with Epic Spellcasting existed, power-leveled to 21st level, and took out all the competition with BS epic magic.

This isn't really avoidable. If it's possible for more than one person in the world to get access to Epic Spellcasting, or wish loops, or any other "infinite power" trick, those people are going to be in conflict. If one aims for it and the other doesn't, the one that didn't gets taken out, and now the world is "whatever the only guy with epic spellcasting wants it to be". If both aim for it, it's a matter of who got there first. This is true regardless if it's two people who can possible reach epic spellcasting, or 200, or 200 million. Somebody's with the motive to properly use that power is going to reach it before anybody else does, and that person is going to get to shape the world as they please. The only thing that can stop them from doing that is if somebody else in the world already has Epic Spellcasting or deific power or infinite wishes as a result of the settings.

So basically, the world is whatever the gods decide it is, and the mortals just kinda have to live with it, and they're allowed to abuse the rules if the gods allow them to, or they get smote off the face of the earth two weeks before they would've pulled a wish loop to solve world hunger because the goddess of the harvest didn't feel like having her domain rendered obsolete.

[Promethean]

Realistically, at some point somebody genocided everybody else

Maybe, but this pre-supposes that the first person to reach that level of power was far enough into the evil alignment to thing genociding the competition was a doable idea. Good and lawful aligned people would be predisposed to working with others of their own alignment and Neutral/Balance Aligned people would be pre-disposed to making sure either non-one or more than one person achieved that kind of power to maintain the state of the universe.

Also, I think This is overblowing the power of Epic magic. Yes it's powerful enough to make wish look like a firecracker and yes it can do things that are normally impossible, But the extreme end lore of most D&D settings are full of forces so immutable that they can't be changed and things older than the gods could ever hope to live. Even with Epic Magic, I think the limit on power would be becoming the undisputed most powerful creature in a country sized track of land or the ruler of a self-created plane less powerful than the elemental or outer planes.



So basically, the world is whatever the gods decide it is, and the mortals just kinda have to live with it, and they're allowed to abuse the rules if the gods allow them to, or they get smote off the face of the earth two weeks before they would've pulled a wish loop to solve world hunger because the goddess of the harvest didn't feel like having her domain rendered obsolete.

I hate this interpretation. Mostly because it's So Boring. It leaves no room for change or setting upsetting events "because this is what the gods like", ultimately putting the setting in an eternal status quo.

I've also seen this line of thinking used by a Lot of hardcore "You can only have the Correct type of fun" railroady DMs. The type that inspired me to become a DM so that I didn't have to play games with them anymore.

[Maat Mons]

Assuming people don't get to pick their race and starting ability scores, I think a few things would happen.

Any human aware of the existence of Elans would petition to become one. Any humanoid or monstrous humanoid aware of the existence of Necropolitans and not morally opposed to undeath would petition to become one.

In Pathfinder, several classes offer eternal life as a capstone ability. My favorite is Arcanist, though you have to be a human, take the Blood Arcanist archetype, and pick Imperious as your Bloodline. I know picking your bloodline sounds weird, but seriously, what are the odds you don't have at least one ancient noble as a ancestor? Genghis Khans descendants make up 10% of the people living in the land that was once his empire, and he's just one, relatively recent ruler.

Anyone with a level-20 immortality capstone would develop a "live forever or die trying" mentality, and would take risks to try to level up fast enough to cheat death.

Anyone with at least one decent mental ability score would seek training as a spellcaster. You could actually make a career as a caster work with only an 11 as a starting attribute. You wouldn't be able to cast 2nd level spells until you hit 4th level and got a point to put in your casting stat, but once you've got 2nd-level spells, most spellcasting classes give you the spell you need to craft a +X item to boost your casting stat. Saving up to buy the crafting materials could be a pain, but if you've taken Craft Wonderous Item to go this route, surely someone will commission you to build something eventually.

Someone would found The Church of the Almighty Dollar. All the clergy would take the Commerce domain and the Domain Focus ACF for +20 on checks to earn a living.

[AvatarVecna]

Maybe, but this pre-supposes that the first person to reach that level of power was far enough into the evil alignment to thing genociding the competition was a doable idea.

You're right, "genocide" is debatable. "Suppression" is not. It all comes down to means and motive - which is to say, "can they get Epic Spellcasting" and "do they want to". Regardless of who you are, there will be somebody you are aware of that you do not want to have Epic Spellcasting, and that person is probably just as capable as you of acquiring it. Them gaining it would be a disaster, from your point of view, so you can't allow that. That requires either preventing them from knowing Epic Spellcasting is an option (very difficult, given the thread's basic premise), or preventing from acquiring Epic Spellcasting at all (which will generally require restricting their personal freedoms in some manner, possibly via murder).

If it's only that one person you're ideologically concerned about having that power, you could probably solve everything by killing them or locking them up. The problem is that there's probably more than 1 person you can't afford to have this power. There's probably more than 10. More than 100, than 1000, than 1 million, then 1 billion. A third of humanity, statistically speaking, will probably try to gain ultimate power for their own gain. At least, a third of the portion of humanity that realizes epic spellcasting is the gateway to ultimate power. How high is the bar for that realization? Oh yeah and this isn't accounting for how non-human races have different proportions of good-to-evil members, and they'll all have about as easy a time reaching epic as a human. This isn't counting the literally infinite hordes of the abyss.

There's an infinite number of evil beings who will suddenly understand how to level up to epic, and mitigate their way to ultimate power. You can't kill infinite people before a finite span of time passes. It's debatable if infinite people would have time to kill infinite people in a finite time - depends how big those infinites are relative to each other.

The only way to make sure an Evil person isn't the first to get ultimate power, is to make sure it's a Good person. The only way to do that is to be a Good person and accomplish it first. And it's not enough to be the first person up that ladder, you have to pull that ladder up behind you before anyone else can climb it too.

This is the issue at hand. If a demon is the first person to achieve Epic Spellcasting, NI mitigation will allow them to destroy the universe with a few rounds of quickened epic spells that were all developed at DC 0. Or it'll let them conquer the universe, or remake the universe, or whatever it is they decide to do.

If the first person to get Epic Spellcasting is LG, they've got to lock things down ASAP to prevent that from happening, likely by developing similarly-stupid-powerful spells that are capable of suppressing the knowledge, or suppressing XP gain, or suppressing the desire to murder other creatures at all. This is because pulling up the ladder is an integral step: if you reach the top first but don't do anything to prevent others from getting up there too, then they will get up there, and now instead of one new god pulling the strings of reality, there's two. Or three. Or a million.


Good and lawful aligned people would be predisposed to working with others of their own alignment and Neutral/Balance Aligned people would be pre-disposed to making sure either non-one or more than one person achieved that kind of power to maintain the state of the universe.

Alignment is a small facet of what makes people want to work with others or not. There is nothing preventing evil creatures, even creatures like demons, from working together to achieve exactly the same things LG characters could achieve. TBF, I think Lawful beings are slightly more inclined towards cooperation in a way that would allow them to coordinate reaching epic level more easily. But to the same degree, Good characters are slightly more inclined towards the "who even deserves power like this" question. To that end, I don't think the first person to get epic spellcasting would be an angel or a demon, but a devil. While the demons have a free-for-all murderfest, and the angels are having an election to see who everybody agrees deserves this power the most, Asmodeus has already organized a fight-club pyramid designed for getting the person closest to Epic Spellcasting the rest of the way. Devils too weak to grant the max XP are fighting each other to level up and thus provide more XP to the champion, while the champion is grinding through pit fiends or whatever.


Also, I think This is overblowing the power of Epic magic. Yes it's powerful enough to make wish look like a firecracker and yes it can do things that are normally impossible, But the extreme end lore of most D&D settings are full of forces so immutable that they can't be changed and things older than the gods could ever hope to live. Even with Epic Magic, I think the limit on power would be becoming the undisputed most powerful creature in a country sized track of land or the ruler of a self-created plane less powerful than the elemental or outer planes.
I hate this interpretation. Mostly because it's So Boring. It leaves no room for change or setting upsetting events "because this is what the gods like", ultimately putting the setting in an eternal status quo.

I've also seen this line of thinking used by a Lot of hardcore "You can only have the Correct type of fun" railroady DMs. The type that inspired me to become a DM so that I didn't have to play games with them anymore.

I don't disagree with either of these quotes individually, but they aren't compatible. The first one is "epic spellcasting isnt the end all be all because there's creatures in the lore more powerful than epic spellcasting", and the second one is "creatures more powerful than epic spellcasting being the ones who shape the world is a boring answer".

Either epic spellcasting can be smacked down by gods, or archfiends, or cthulhu, or whoever...or it can't. If epic magic can be smacked down, then those beings that outweigh epic spellcasting will shape the world to be the way they want instead of the mortals who have achieved epic magic. If epic magic can't be smacked down, then those wielding epic magic will be the ones shaping the world instead. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "epic magic isn't powerful enough to override gods, but also the gods won't do anything if epic magic threatens to replace the need for gods".

And if there's not some higher power putting a cap on what can be accomplished with epic magic, then the first person to achieve epic magic will have the choice of recreating the multiverse in their image. And if they decide not to, but they don't prevent others from achieving epic magic, the second person will have that choice. And then the third, and then the fourth, and then the fifth, and so on. At some point, somebody will take over the universe, because nobody who came before them stopped them from doing so.

[AvatarVecna]

The question gets more interesting if the really high TO stuff is off the table. Epic spellcasting and wish loops get into some ridiculous nonsense extremely quickly, and end up leading to "reality is whatever I make it" levels of stupid. And that's a boring answer for "what would society look like with charop knowledge/high magic available".

[Promethean]

You're right, "genocide" is debatable. "Suppression" is not. It all comes down to means and motive - which is to say, "can they get Epic Spellcasting" and "do they want to". Regardless of who you are, there will be somebody you are aware of that you do not want to have Epic Spellcasting, and that person is probably just as capable as you of acquiring it. Them gaining it would be a disaster, from your point of view, so you can't allow that. That requires either preventing them from knowing Epic Spellcasting is an option (very difficult, given the thread's basic premise), or preventing from acquiring Epic Spellcasting at all (which will generally require restricting their personal freedoms in some manner, possibly via murder).

If it's only that one person you're ideologically concerned about having that power, you could probably solve everything by killing them or locking them up. The problem is that there's probably more than 1 person you can't afford to have this power. There's probably more than 10. More than 100, than 1000, than 1 million, then 1 billion. A third of humanity, statistically speaking, will probably try to gain ultimate power for their own gain. At least, a third of the portion of humanity that realizes epic spellcasting is the gateway to ultimate power. How high is the bar for that realization? Oh yeah and this isn't accounting for how non-human races have different proportions of good-to-evil members, and they'll all have about as easy a time reaching epic as a human. This isn't counting the literally infinite hordes of the abyss.

There's an infinite number of evil beings who will suddenly understand how to level up to epic, and mitigate their way to ultimate power. You can't kill infinite people before a finite span of time passes. It's debatable if infinite people would have time to kill infinite people in a finite time - depends how big those infinites are relative to each other.

The only way to make sure an Evil person isn't the first to get ultimate power, is to make sure it's a Good person. The only way to do that is to be a Good person and accomplish it first. And it's not enough to be the first person up that ladder, you have to pull that ladder up behind you before anyone else can climb it too.

This is the issue at hand. If a demon is the first person to achieve Epic Spellcasting, NI mitigation will allow them to destroy the universe with a few rounds of quickened epic spells that were all developed at DC 0. Or it'll let them conquer the universe, or remake the universe, or whatever it is they decide to do.

If the first person to get Epic Spellcasting is LG, they've got to lock things down ASAP to prevent that from happening, likely by developing similarly-stupid-powerful spells that are capable of suppressing the knowledge, or suppressing XP gain, or suppressing the desire to murder other creatures at all. This is because pulling up the ladder is an integral step: if you reach the top first but don't do anything to prevent others from getting up there too, then they will get up there, and now instead of one new god pulling the strings of reality, there's two. Or three. Or a million.

There is the issue of How a person locks down the ability to gain epic spellcasting. In order for someone to get it in the first place, they already need to be powerful enough to defy the mandate of The Goddess of Magic herself that prevents higher than 9th level casting, and epic casting is just not as powerful as anything the gods do.



Alignment is a small facet of what makes people want to work with others or not. There is nothing preventing evil creatures, even creatures like demons, from working together to achieve exactly the same things LG characters could achieve. TBF, I think Lawful beings are slightly more inclined towards cooperation in a way that would allow them to coordinate reaching epic level more easily. But to the same degree, Good characters are slightly more inclined towards the "who even deserves power like this" question. To that end, I don't think the first person to get epic spellcasting would be an angel or a demon, but a devil. While the demons have a free-for-all murderfest, and the angels are having an election to see who everybody agrees deserves this power the most, Asmodeus has already organized a fight-club pyramid designed for getting the person closest to Epic Spellcasting the rest of the way. Devils too weak to grant the max XP are fighting each other to level up and thus provide more XP to the champion, while the champion is grinding through pit fiends or whatever.

I'd say along those same line, Asmodeus likely already Has epic spell-casting even in vanilla D&D. His stat spread is contradicted depending on source and the stats get ridiculous in some books. Though, what you just described adds a new layer to the blood war and the 9 hells aggressive "recruitment" strategy.



I don't disagree with either of these quotes individually, but they aren't compatible. The first one is "epic spellcasting isnt the end all be all because there's creatures in the lore more powerful than epic spellcasting", and the second one is "creatures more powerful than epic spellcasting being the ones who shape the world is a boring answer".

Either epic spellcasting can be smacked down by gods, or archfiends, or cthulhu, or whoever...or it can't. If epic magic can be smacked down, then those beings that outweigh epic spellcasting will shape the world to be the way they want instead of the mortals who have achieved epic magic. If epic magic can't be smacked down, then those wielding epic magic will be the ones shaping the world instead. You can't have it both ways. You can't say "epic magic isn't powerful enough to override gods, but also the gods won't do anything if epic magic threatens to replace the need for gods".

And if there's not some higher power putting a cap on what can be accomplished with epic magic, then the first person to achieve epic magic will have the choice of recreating the multiverse in their image. And if they decide not to, but they don't prevent others from achieving epic magic, the second person will have that choice. And then the third, and then the fourth, and then the fifth, and so on. At some point, somebody will take over the universe, because nobody who came before them stopped them from doing so.

I'm not saying they can't. I'm saying that having gods interfere with the daily lives of mortals based on their whims is bad.

Yes, Tir could smack a Epic Caster into next week with one use of his at-will Alter-Reality salient ability, but there really shouldn't be a time he Would outside of that spellcaster directly picking a fight with him or doing something on the planetary apocolypse levels of monumentally stupid. I'm disagreeing with the Idea of a deity punting a puny mortal across reality because they "wish looped to solve world hunger" as it's not not something I classify as warranting that.

[AvatarVecna]

There is the issue of How a person locks down the ability to gain epic spellcasting. In order for someone to get it in the first place, they already need to be powerful enough to defy the mandate of The Goddess of Magic herself that prevents higher than 9th level casting, and epic casting is just not as powerful as anything the gods do.

I think epic spellcasting should be off the table for discussions like this. I only explored those possibilities because you mentioned great wyrm dragons having it. If dragons have it, and Noone else, then either dragons reshape reality, or they do so only as far as deities/cthulhu/lady of pain/whatever allow them to. If dragons can get it, humans probably can too. And whoever got it needs to do a better job of locking it down.

If nobody locks it down properly, then we're getting into a discussion of dueling reality benders, and the answer to "what does it look like" is unanswerable unless we use the cop-out "deities shut down all the nonsense" answer. Which is boring.


I'd say along those same line, Asmodeus likely already Has epic spell-casting even in vanilla D&D. His stat spread is contradicted depending on source and the stats get ridiculous in some books. Though, what you just described adds a new layer to the blood war and the 9 hells aggressive "recruitment" strategy.

Yeah he probably does. It's arguable that Asmodeus has ascended to Divine Rank in some form as well. Idk what his stats are like, I just feel like this is the kinda scheme he would set up if he suddenly realized what epic magic is capable of.


I'm not saying they can't. I'm saying that having gods interfere with the daily lives of mortals based on their whims is bad.

Yes, Tir could smack a Epic Caster into next week with one use of his at-will Alter-Reality salient ability, but there really shouldn't be a time he Would outside of that spellcaster directly picking a fight with him or doing something on the planetary apocolypse levels of monumentally stupid. I'm disagreeing with the Idea of a deity punting a puny mortal across reality because they "wish looped to solve world hunger" as it's not not something I classify as warranting that.

The issue is that there's a lot of weird niche deities and if their niche is threatened too much, it threatens their worship, which threatens their existence. To a god of the harvest, who is only a god because billions of people need a good crop this year to survive much less thrive, "picking a fight with him" and "making it so people don't need crops" are functionally pretty similar. If you're solving world hunger by making it easier to farm, that's great! If you're solving world hunger by giving everyone a Ring Of Sustenance, you're threatening their portfolio and Divine Rank.

I'm not even sure this is strictly headcanon: I'm about 70% certain there's a few points in the lore where drow should've been wiped out due to a combination of too many enemies and not enough friends, only for Lolth to Deus Ex Machina because drow genocide threatens her Deity status.

It's just...easier to answer a question of "what does a higher-op world look like" if we're leaving out the high-TO nonsense that would almost inevitably require a deity to intervene out if seof-preservation. And that means the world can only look so different even though epic magic is flying around. Which is still kind of a boring answer.

It's easier to answer about what a PO world would look like. High TO just has too many variables to really predict what the final result actually looks like.

[Promethean]

I think epic spellcasting should be off the table for discussions like this. I only explored those possibilities because you mentioned great wyrm dragons having it. If dragons have it, and Noone else, then either dragons reshape reality, or they do so only as far as deities/cthulhu/lady of pain/whatever allow them to. If dragons can get it, humans probably can too. And whoever got it needs to do a better job of locking it down.

If nobody locks it down properly, then we're getting into a discussion of dueling reality benders, and the answer to "what does it look like" is unanswerable unless we use the cop-out "deities shut down all the nonsense" answer. Which is boring.

I think we have fundamentally 2 completely different views on how powerful Epic spellcasters are. My thinking is more in line with the example epic spells that are shown in the faerun and dark sun settings, things like sorcerer becoming a athus dragon lord or a lich copying their soul in up to 20 phylacteries. Things that are super powerful and beyond normal magic, but still don't alter the fundamental laws of reality. If a caster wanted to block out the sun for example, I wouldn't allow an epic spell to do more than create a larger permanent object-thing that casts a shadow the size of up to a country, Not extinguish the actual sun or remove all light from the planet.



Yeah he probably does. It's arguable that Asmodeus has ascended to Divine Rank in some form as well. Idk what his stats are like, I just feel like this is the kinda scheme he would set up if he suddenly realized what epic magic is capable of.

I think he already does and all of his archdevils might have it on some level, but I don't think he could grant it to every pit fiend in his army for example.

I think the ultimate cap on this is the fact that, after a certain level, lower level creatures stop giving you XP. These means higher strength creatures need to work harder to find creatures that can level them, ultimately putting a soft cap on the number of stupidly high level powers. Sigil canonically supports epic level characters of every class and feat distribution because it's the center of the multiverse and links to every crystal sphere ever, but any one infinte plane sized area is only going to have a handful. Dragons being the only ones that can cheat this system by essentially leveling up via age category, but they still have to Survive that long.



The issue is that there's a lot of weird niche deities and if their niche is threatened too much, it threatens their worship, which threatens their existence. To a god of the harvest, who is only a god because billions of people need a good crop this year to survive much less thrive, "picking a fight with him" and "making it so people don't need crops" are functionally pretty similar. If you're solving world hunger by making it easier to farm, that's great! If you're solving world hunger by giving everyone a Ring Of Sustenance, you're threatening their portfolio and Divine Rank.

I'm not even sure this is strictly headcanon: I'm about 70% certain there's a few points in the lore where drow should've been wiped out due to a combination of too many enemies and not enough friends, only for Lolth to Deus Ex Machina because drow genocide threatens her Deity status.

It's just...easier to answer a question of "what does a higher-op world look like" if we're leaving out the high-TO nonsense that would almost inevitably require a deity to intervene out if seof-preservation. And that means the world can only look so different even though epic magic is flying around. Which is still kind of a boring answer.

It's easier to answer about what a PO world would look like. High TO just has too many variables to really predict what the final result actually looks like.

Thing is, deities in most D&D settings Can't act directly in the mortal world even if they wanted to. In faerun they're bound by the laws of Ao that prevents direct interference outside of specific situations, in Eberon they can't interact directly at all, in Dark Sun they straight up don't exist because the primordial won and kicked them out, etc. Something has to be Really major in order for a god to intervein directly, and I think that rule of thumb should be followed even outside of settings where their hands are tied. Otherwise, why aren't Deities solving every campaign issue by willing it away? Why do Acerak or Asmodeus or even the Demon lords exist if the deities are able to come in and will everything away willy nilly?

On the other hand, deities aren't stuck to a single multiverse. Deities exist in not only exist and have worshippers multiple parallel prime material planes, but also have worshippers in other Crystal spheres with their own sub-varient of prime material plane. So loosing a single planet might be to insignificant for all but the lowest demigods to even notice.

[Mechalich]

The optimized setting depends on two major things: initial start state, and rate of ability acquisition.

One important caveat is that non-spontaneous arcane magic usually requires literacy, which is not part of most initial starting conditions (which usually presume some sort of vague post-creation stone age scenario). That means the Arcanist and Wizard probably aren't available from day one (also some lower-tier classes like Alchemist and Gunslinger). That means your Tier I classes are Cleric, Druid, Shaman, and Witch. Significantly, the Witch spell list does not include the Planar Binding series of spells, which removes one of the easier paths to true ultimately optimized power. This leaves the door open for Sorcerers to step up, especially for various species that happen to have sorcerer levels from the start. An aranea, for example, shows up as a 5HD monsters with 5 levels of Sorcerer, which is a pretty sizeable head start (there's probably something with a better ratio out there, buried in the bestiaries).

Then it's a matter of who levels up to true ultimate power - which basically means 9th level spells - first. Not that we can put a floor to this exercise, ands it's dragons. Some, but not all, dragons hit 19th level sorcerer casting upon becoming great wyrms (the Chromatics actually have it the worst, with only Reds hitting this milestone, while all Metallics do and most Primals, Imperials, Outers, and Esoterics do). Consequently, if no one else unlocks 9th level spell casting first, the dragons hit the benchmark at 1200 years after creation and begin reshaping the world to their whims.

Any species with a bonus to either Wisdom (for Clerics, Druids, and Shamans) or Intelligence (for Witches) has a clear advantage over all the others. Beyond that there's enough randomness in the system that it could well be anyone, though with regard to the divine side of things the nature of D&D experience gain means that it's likely to be the worshipper of a rather aggressive deity who hits level 17 first.

[Promethean]

Sigh... This thread is becoming more about speculation on who can reach 9th/epic spellcasting first.

What about things like circle magic, elven high magic, schools specifically dedicated to raising students according to a specifically optimized build some wizard or dragon figured out, the economy of magic items when people figure out cost reducers at scale, how would XP/life energy farming change the setting after people become more aware that it exists, etc?

[AvatarVecna]

I think we have fundamentally 2 completely different views on how powerful Epic spellcasters are. My thinking is more in line with the example epic spells that are shown in the faerun and dark sun settings, things like sorcerer becoming a athus dragon lord or a lich copying their soul in up to 20 phylacteries. Things that are super powerful and beyond normal magic, but still don't alter the fundamental laws of reality. If a caster wanted to block out the sun for example, I wouldn't allow an epic spell to do more than create a larger permanent object-thing that casts a shadow the size of up to a country, Not extinguish the actual sun or remove all light from the planet.

Epic spellcasters can only do what their spells allow them to. Epic Spellcasting (the feat and subsystem) is infinite and limitless, and becomes available at lvl 21. I absolutely agree with you: most people who use Epic Spellcasting aren't doing all that much with it in-universe. But...


How would a setting look if Optimization wasn't something that was exclusive to PCs, but something that was baked into the setting itself?

...the thread premise is "what if everybody could optimize?". Assuming that existing Epic Spells are representative of the capabilities of Epic Magic is ignoring the fundamental premise of the thread. Epic Spells can do literally anything as long as you cheat hard enough, and the basic thread premise (at least, as I initially understood it) was that "how to cheat the rules of reality" became more commonly understood in-universe.

[Jervis]

Sigh... This thread is becoming more about speculation on who can reach 9th/epic spellcasting first.

What about things like circle magic, elven high magic, schools specifically dedicated to raising students according to a specifically optimized build some wizard or dragon figured out, the economy of magic items when people figure out cost reducers at scale, how would XP/life energy farming change the setting after people become more aware that it exists, etc?

For one thing I see Succubus run spas being a method people use to drain off levels temporarily for crafting or permanently drain RHD to make gaining caster levels easier. Probably with a boon trap of the typical negative level healing spells available at a extra cost

[Promethean]

For one thing I see Succubus run spas being a method people use to drain off levels temporarily for crafting or permanently drain RHD to make gaining caster levels easier. Probably with a boon trap of the typical negative level healing spells available at a extra cost

Huh, never thought of that.

I forget, but do Succubi gain anything when they bestow a negative level in 3.PF besides putting the target under Suggestion? Does it accelerate their evolution into a lilitu?

[AvatarVecna]

Sigh... This thread is becoming more about speculation on who can reach 9th/epic spellcasting first.

Creature's capable of granting wishes to themselves, especially Su Wishes. Alternatively, people with really good Knowledge (Religion) checks for abusing the Sacrifice rules.


What about things like circle magic

Higher caster level, Empower Spell, Maximize Spell, Heighten Spell. That's increases to variables. That's all just Big Numbers via magic. It's cool. "Slightly more creatures summoned", "slightly higher DCs", and "slightly thicker walls of salt" is all interesting stuff. But it's not wish. It's not Epic Seeds. It's not Divine Rank.


elven high magic

There's a PrC for elven high magic. It's essentially just limited epic spellcasting, that's only available to epic elf mages. It's slightly cheaper than normal for certain seeds, but it's not "cheaper" enough to make Epic Magic viable without mitigation cheese. And if you're using mitigation cheese anyway, you don't even need the PrC.


schools specifically dedicated to raising students according to a specifically optimized build some wizard or dragon figured out, the economy of magic items when people figure out cost reducers at scale, how would XP/life energy farming change the setting after people become more aware that it exists, etc?

I have thoughts on these subjects, but at least for this post, I'm more pointing out that they only really matter if you're not allowed to just...use Wish or epic magic or divine rank to make everybody a god-wizard instead of sending them to god-wizard school.

[Promethean]

Creature's capable of granting wishes to themselves, especially Su Wishes. Alternatively, people with really good Knowledge (Religion) checks for abusing the Sacrifice rules.

I think this is kind of missing the point.

Okay, from now on Epic spellcasting is nerfed. Wish is nerfed. Can we talk about something else now?



Higher caster level, Empower Spell, Maximize Spell, Heighten Spell. That's increases to variables. That's all just Big Numbers via magic. It's cool. "Slightly more creatures summoned", "slightly higher DCs", and "slightly thicker walls of salt" is all interesting stuff. But it's not wish. It's not Epic Seeds. It's not Divine Rank.

It's more interesting though, and wizard schools set up to create a conveyer belt of acolytes to power Circle magic is interesting for thought experiments. It also has interesting synergies with incantatrix



There's a PrC for elven high magic. It's essentially just limited epic spellcasting, that's only available to epic elf mages. It's slightly cheaper than normal for certain seeds, but it's not "cheaper" enough to make Epic Magic viable without mitigation cheese. And if you're using mitigation cheese anyway, you don't even need the PrC.

Depends on the supplement you're using. "The Quintessential Elf" has a version of elven high magic that uses a system of metamagic feats. In that version the user can sacrifice consitution to alter the duration and or area of a spell by orders of magnitude, allowing a caster to do things like curse a noble house for nine generations or bless a castles court-house to only allow ever the truth to be spoken as long as it stands(by modifying curse and zone of truth respectively)



I have thoughts on these subjects, but at least for this post, I'm more pointing out that they only really matter if you're not allowed to just...use Wish or epic magic or divine rank to make everybody a god-wizard instead of sending them to god-wizard school.

As I said in my other post, Gods shouldn't be able to will up or away things mortals do whenever they want(even if they are powerful enough to)even in a normal campaign setting. It'd defeat the point of having players to begin with when the question becomes "why didn't the god of X just will the final boss to stop existing? It'd be easier than picking his nose!"

As for epic/wish, lets just say they're nerfed as needed and move on.

[sreservoir]

You can take this surprisingly far with a settingwide E6/E8-style cap, although even then there's a lot of stuff you kind of just have to slap down because, well, maybe you don't want a shadow/wightpocalypse setting. The rules make a pretty poor substitute for physics.


On the other hand, Wouldn't dragons be bigger powergamers? They'd have all the time in the world to figure out magic's "Mechanics" and they have, by far, the most broken content in their supplimentary material. Heck, Great Wyrms are able to take epic feats like Epic Magic just for being in their age category per the rules in one of the supplements.

I mean conversely, they might not have to. Dragons are, well, already dragons, and in a setting that can be powergamed like this they're more or less assured that in a few hundred years they'll be a bigger, stronger, more magical dragon, so long as they survive to wait it out that long. Not a tremendously tall order when you're already a dragon. They don't have to optimize tremendously hard unless that's just their hobby.

[Jervis]

I have thoughts on these subjects, but at least for this post, I'm more pointing out that they only really matter if you're not allowed to just...use Wish or epic magic or divine rank to make everybody a god-wizard instead of sending them to god-wizard school.

yeah but thats like answering any optimization thread with "Be kobold and buy a candle of invocation to summon Pazuzu." It's boring. We already know that magic is broken past 20, even before that with Wish abuse. Reiterating it doesn't add to the discussion.

[Mechalich]

You can take this surprisingly far with a settingwide E6/E8-style cap, although even then there's a lot of stuff you kind of just have to slap down because, well, maybe you don't want a shadow/wightpocalypse setting. The rules make a pretty poor substitute for physics.

The undead apocalypse is actually fairly likely even outside E6, if you assume everyone starts at level 1 max, and that there are any Shadow/Wights or other spawn spewing undead out there, they the only break on the apocalypse is sufficiently strong monsters intervening to stop the process.

Which leads into another consideration. Even if you don't operate on the assumption of highly-optimized nearly unbeatable Tier I casters (which even without Wish abuse and Epic Spellcasting they are still stupidly powerful) it's important to decide what the most powerful thing in the setting is on Day One, and what that being or small group of beings wants. Pathfinder has some stupidly powerful monsters that are native to the Prime Material - a Thriae Queen is a CR 18 monster capable of reshaping the world into a giant hive of bee people - a Rune Giant is a CR 17 bruiser with high-powered mind control abilities. In the absence of humanoids with a significant quantity of class levels they are just as much a threat as dragons to take control.

[Promethean]

...In the absence of humanoids with a significant quantity of class levels they are just as much a threat as dragons to take control.

Brings up the question of how Humanoids survive long enough to be largely dominant species in a D&PF setting taken to its logical conclusion. Especially when things like giants and titans are able to form their own complex societies with magic and magitech On Top of their natural advantages.

[AvatarVecna]

Brings up the question of how Humanoids survive long enough to be largely dominant species in a D&PF setting taken to its logical conclusion. Especially when things like giants and titans are able to form their own complex societies with magic and magitech On Top of their natural advantages.

The advantage of Humanoids is (generally) that they can start grinding levels earlier than other species, and can go faster. A human could be a bonafide commoner at age 15, and it takes just 1000 XP for them to gain a level in whatever they want. If they aimed for Wizard instead, they're 30 at the oldest by the time they get that first HD, and it still takes 1000 XP for them to gain a level. Meanwhile, a white dragon wyrmling has finally hatched from its egg, and is already ECL 5. They need 6000 XP to level up, and while it's slightly easier for a dragon than a human fighter, it's not so much easier that it makes up for needing 6 times as much XP to level. If a human and white dragon wyrmling raced to gain their next class level, the human is getting their first. Granted, depending on how long it takes dragon eggs to hatch, this might matter less than the minimum 15 years the human spent becoming an adult...but that's something that can be solved with planar traits accelerating childhood. If any species becomes ready to level 1 real-world round after they were conceived, the advantage goes to whoever can level faster...which will usually be humanoids.

Of course, that's also only the case if they're starting that race at the same time. From a certain perspective, if the knowledge is baked into the setting from the start instead of "one day everybody realized how XP works", then whichever race emerged from the primordial ooze first is the one that's in charge. While the rest were figuring out how to have thoughts, dragons were dragons, and that means dragons rule the roost forever unless they decide to give somebody else a chance. Or maybe it's demons who came first. Idk the lore too well. You get my point though.


schools specifically dedicated to raising students according to a specifically optimized build some wizard or dragon figured out, the economy of magic items when people figure out cost reducers at scale, how would XP/life energy farming change the setting after people become more aware that it exists, etc?

Alright, so aiming for a bit lower optimization where society doesn't immediately ceasing to exist and actually figures out how to use stuff:

1) At birth, a series of scrolls were used on you. These are 5 scrolls with 6 Wishes each. They are used specifically to grant you +5 inherent to each attribute. This requires either a high level sorcerer/wizard, a high level cleric of the magic or envy domain, or any character who can hit a DC 37 Use Magic Device check. Long story short, that means "basically anybody", since item availability is arbitrarily high for non-epic items (and maybe even for epic items).

2) Let's assume everybody in the world rolls 3d6 in order for attributes at birth. In order to achieve 9th lvl spells on time, you need to start with at least a 15 in the casting stat (including roll, race, and inherent). Because of the build I've got in mind, society is going to prioritize beguilers/wizards/warmages/clerics/artificers in that order. There is a 5/8 chance a given person will roll a 10+ on their a given score. Thus, the percentages will break down like this:
Wizard/Beguiler: 2560 per 4096
Warmage: 960 per 4096
Cleric: 360 per 4096
Artificer: 27 per 4096

3) Wizards, Beguilers, and Warmages will all head into the Rainbow Servant PrC, followed by the Shadowcraft Mage PrC. Beguilers and Warmages have spontaneous access to all their spells, and wizards can scribe any spell on their list into a spellbook, or make items using them. RS/ScM Wizards can get pretty spontaneous if they build right, and Warmages have a harder time getting access to ScM natively, hence why they're lower on the totem pole than wizards. Functionally speaking, all three will end up playing almost identical, though. Wizard is mostly here for easy access to stuff on the Wizard list that isn't on the Beguiler or Warmage lists, especially higher-level spells that are harder to get via Eclectic Learning. Only some beguilers and warmages will have weird niche 8th lvl wizard spells as 9th lvl beguiler/warmage spells, but every wizard will end up having every weird niche 8th lvl wizard spell in their spellbook.

4) Cleric casting is better than Druid casting, and Druids would have objection to the XP farms we'll be setting up, so we're going with clerics. Clerics can be dedicated to a cause so we don't need to involve deities if we don't want to...such as if we feel the domain access would be too limited. Honestly, we're mostly going cleric before artificer because native spell access is really good, and also because anybody can be a good artificer and you don't need many artificers to absolutely break things wide open. Additionally, Rainbow Servants won't be getting their cleric magic until lvl 15/16, which is a bit harder to grind up to than lower levels. Having low-level cleric magic available en masse is why cleric ranks higher than artificer, even though more artificers would also be freakin' sweet.

A) Artificer's ability to make magic items is based on their effective caster level (which is either artificer level, or artificer level +2, depending on context), and on their UMD bonus. It's DC 40 to craft a CL 20 scroll, and that's about as high as it gets pre-epic I think? You need to hit the DC once per "item craft prereq" you lack, and you get once chance per day (+1 final attempt at the end) to successfully emulate that prereq and craft the item. So if you have three prereqs, you need to succeed on three checks. And that doesn't matter, because getting enough bonus is child's play. Cha 3, race -2, inherent +5, cloak +6 gives Cha 12. Ranks +4, Cha +1, masterwork tools +2, magic item +30...that's +37 right there, and you haven't even spent a single feat. So you can successfully make anything you're allowed to try and craft.

B) Artificer's can mimic any build's casting ability to craft spell items. This includes classes that get spells at lower spell levels, or lower minimum caster levels. For example, an Expert 5/Ur-Priest X could cast lvl X spells from the cleric list, so the minimum CL for 9th lvl cleric spells is 9. You can do something similar with the Divine Crusader PrC (which gets a single domain), so all Domain spells have a minimum CL equal to spell level too. Ranger and Paladin spells are gained at much higher levels, but their CL is equal to half their class level, so they get (for example) 4th lvl spells at CL 7. A bard 1/Wizard 9/Sublime Chord X build where the SC CL is based on Bard CL is a super-weird build: you can have lvl 4/5 spells cast at CL 2, lvl 6 spells cast at CL 4, lvl 7 at CL 6, lvl 8 at CL 8, and lvl 9 and CL 10. And that can be any spell from the bard/sorcerer/wizard lists. The only major list I haven't yet found a way to broadly cheat like that is the Druid list. But druid list is a lil eh anyway so.

B.1) This is RAW, btw: (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/creatingMagicItems.htm#otherConsiderations)


Since different classes get access to certain spells at different levels, the prices for two characters to make the same item might actually be different. An item is only worth two times what the caster of lowest possible level can make it for. Calculate the market price based on the lowest possible level caster, no matter who makes the item.

If you are using these guidelines, then you are supposed to calculate market price based on the lowest CL anybody could craft the item at. Yes, this means that basically all the scroll costs in the DMG are retroactively incorrect because an Ur-Priest could shoot their casting in the foot in exchange for the ability to craft cheaper scrolls. Seethe.

C) When determining what spells an artificer can build into items, they treat their caster level as their artificer level +2. The item's capabilities will be as if CL equaled AL, but the price and access are based on AL+2. So for example, Wish is a 9th lvl spell on the Sorcerer/Wizard list and in the Envy domain. That means it has minimum CL 9 to craft. That means an Artificer 7 could craft items of Wish. We're not doing broken nonsense with Wish, just the inherent bonus stuff and some non-looped "replicating lower level spells". It's just an example to demonstrate how Artificers access spells for crafting purposes.

...

Item crafting has four major aspects: market price, crafting GP, crafting XP, and crafting time. Have a handbook on reducing them. (http://minmaxforum.com/index.php?topic=1000.0)

D) As far as charop is concerned, the price guidelines are law unless overruled. Additionally, community consensus is that the three curses (requiring skill, race, and alignment respectively) are reductions applied directly to the market price, and also they're additive reductions rather than multiplicative reductions like every other reduction, specifically because they're applied directly to market price. This means that whatever the guideline market price is for an item that could be used by anybody, there is a separate guideline indicating that the same item that can (basically) only be used by you will be 30% as expensive. And because this is an actual reduction in market price, it changes what kind of items can be purchased pre-epic: an item that can only be used by you and costs 200k would cost 666k if anybody could use it. This makes lots of things more available.

E) Crafting GP is 50% of the market price. This can be reduced. If multiple reductions are applied, they are applied multiplicatively, because gold pieces (and broadly, currency) are a real-world measurement. Thus, they multiply like distance instead of damage - so "x0.75" and "x0.75" makes "x0.5625", not "x0.5". Additionally, while this isn't stated anyway, I generally assume that Crafting GP rounds up to the nearest copper piece, if such rounding is necessary.

F) Crafting Time works exactly the way Crafting GP does, except it's 0.1% of the market price measured in days. Time is still a real-world measurement, and (I'm pretty certain) it still rounds up to the next nearest day.

G) Crafting XP is 4% of the market price. However, XP is not a real-world measurement, and thus it should multiply additively. This barely makes a difference, because there's not that many XP reducers anyway, and also we're using XP farms and succubus spas to cheese XP soooooooooo hard.

H) Artificers have an epic progression in Player's Guide to Eberron. It's about what you'd expect: slightly bigger Craft Reserve, epic crafting feats as bonus feat options, basic stuff.

TL;DR Artificer 7 can craft basically any spell that isn't only Wizard 9 or Druid 6+.

XP Farms. One XP farm method involves minimum risk. This generally means only fighting the weakest possible enemy that could give you XP, and doing so with enough magic item support to trivialize whatever danger they might otherwise pose. The other farm involves as few farms as possible that just churn out enemies like nobody's business, and one farm will supply your XP needs for long swaths of levels, going from "the toughest fight you can get XP from" to "the weakest fight you can get XP from" as you fight them more and more.

CR 1/10 creatures give 30 XP to anybody of ECL 1-6. Reaching level 7 by only killing CR 1/10 creatures would require exactly 700 kills. There are two CR 1/10 creatures to my knowledge: bats and toads, both in core. Neither one has a natural attack at all, so they can't damage you under normal circumstances. I'd advise you to go with Toads: they have worse AC, worse initiative, and no fly speed. Additionally, while bats breed slowly (1-2 pups per year), female toads lay 4-8 thousand eggs at a time (albeit 1/year), and toads in captivity can live for decades. A toad breeding farm would be a fine source of XP for a city's burgeoning mages. Additionally, since you're already breeding them, aim for physical capability: it won't grant them attacks, but you could argue it alters them into the elite array, which resets their CR to 1 without getting templates involved. This means a given toad gives 10 times as much XP while still being incapable of actually fighting or resisting you. If you do this, then toads can also give you XP to level up to 9th instead of just 7th, and the number increases from 700 toads per person to 767.

If you're not breeding toads for elite array, Shriekers are a core monster of CR 1 with no speed and no attacks. I have no idea how fast they breed or how long they live, so YMMV farming this creature. To level up further while remaining same, walk the CR up: ECL 9 can get XP from CR 2, ECL 10 from CR 3, and so on. I don't really have good monster picks for these levels because most of them can actually fight, so which is the easiest fight is a more difficult decision. but Lvl 9 with stupid amounts of items vs CR 3 should be like shooting fish in a barrel regardless. Overall, it would take you ~1247 fights to reach lvl 21, and another ~800 to reach lvl 40 (which is about the point at which most builds should have access to the higher-end epic stuff they wanted, like Forge Epic Ring or Multispell 4 or whatever floats your boat.

Screw safe, we can't afford to have 40 different farms just to get people to epic. Let's see what we can do to minimize that:

CR 10 farm will level you from 1st to 18th (that is, let you reach 18th lvl).

CR 25 farm will level you from 18th to 32nd.

CR 39 farm will level you from 32nd to 46th.

And so on as needed. Again, I'm stopping around ECL 40 because it demonstrates the point.

Idk what CR 10 creature can be killed by an ECL 1 character who's been loaned arbitrary amounts of non-epic gear, but I'm certain it could be done. Maybe they've been loaned the gear for stupid-high UMD checks, and a scroll of disintegrate with baked-in metamagic nonsense? Eh.

Regardless of which farming method is used, it should be relatively trivial for somebody to level up in a rather timely fashion. At 1 fight a day, reaching epic would take 3.4 years. If you do 1 fight a day, but only for non-toad enemies, and toads all get squished in their level-batch in a single day, that's 1.3 years instead. Theoretical minimum is 20 days to reach lvl 21, unless you allow somebody to level up without taking a night's rest?

EDIT:

A metropolis has at least 25000 adult citizens, with a child population equal to somewhere between 10% and 40% of the adult population. Average would be 25%. Let's take a metropolis a good deal bigger than Neverwinter (25k) but nowhere near the disaster that is Waterdeep (2mil) and settle at around 100000. That's a nice-sized metropolis and it makes the math easy.

25000 kids of a random age 0 to 14 inclusive (since 15 is adult for humans). That means at any given time, there are ~1666 kids the same age as each other. That means that in any given year we'll have ~1000 people graduating as wizards or beguilers (ranging in age from 17 to 27, depending on how well they did in magic college). Each one will end up murdering either 700 toads (to reach lvl 7) or 117 elite toads (to reach lvl 9). That's ~700000 toads per year, or ~117000 elite toads per year. The former can be accomplished by ~88-175 average female toads (plus however many males it takes to fertile that many eggs), while the latter can be accomplished by a mere 15-30 prize-winning breeder elite toads. Either way, that's probably a very manageable farm for some nature clerics or whoever is in charge of the breeding farms.

[Jervis]

Brings up the question of how Humanoids survive long enough to be largely dominant species in a D&PF setting taken to its logical conclusion. Especially when things like giants and titans are able to form their own complex societies with magic and magitech On Top of their natural advantages.

Why don't players play those races? Why do they always pick humans or some other LA 0 race? The answer is because class levels are better than RHD, and the LA don't help much either. A Level 17 Wizard vs a 17 HD gold dragon is pretty one sided. The higher level you are the harder it is to gain class levels and get better at magic.

[Maat Mons]

As always, the most secure home is a demiplade no more than 6 miles in diameter with a Weirdstone (PGtF 124) in the middle.

For preventing a wightocalypse specifically, Hallow doesn't allow bodies inside to rise as undead. Hallow is instantaneous and the base version has no expensive material components, so given enough time a sufficiently dedicated group of casters could blanket an arbitrarily-large area.

The Mindsight feat allows someone to directly ascertain the numeric value of the mental ability scores of others. I'm imagining a society where official telepaths go around locating all the people who are worth training in magic.

If dragons are optimizing, I think they'd all try to contract the Spellhoarding psychosis. Though they'd need an above-average Intelligence to be eligible.

Edit: Curse you Ninjas!
As for how humanoid would manage to build a civilization in a world where powerful monsters are also trying to build civilizations, I think most powerful monsters don't grow fast enough to outcompete us, not on an individual level, and not in terms of population size. A human takes 15 years to reach maturity. It then takes 1 to 4 years for that human to learn Sorcery, thievery, or poor anger management. After that, at a rate of 4 level-appropriate encounters per day, it takes 2 months to reach level 20. So level 20 by age 20. But what's really scary are kobolds. They reach adulthood at age 6, take 1 to 3 years to get a class level, and then level up at the same rate. Level 20 by age 10.

[Promethean]

Of course, that's also only the case if they're starting that race at the same time. From a certain perspective, if the knowledge is baked into the setting from the start instead of "one day everybody realized how XP works", then whichever race emerged from the primordial ooze first is the one that's in charge. While the rest were figuring out how to have thoughts, dragons were dragons, and that means dragons rule the roost forever unless they decide to give somebody else a chance. Or maybe it's demons who came first. Idk the lore too well. You get my point though.

The winners of that race would most likely be Dragons in my opinion. Their Racial HD are good enough to almost be equal to class levels and they get innate spellcasting up to 9th level spells just for getting old, and all of that is Before you start looking for their broken supplemental material.

Granted, Dragons spend the majority of their days sleeping by the time they're old enough to be walking forces of nature, and the other long-lived races aren't much better. The flavor text of every long lived race in D&D makes them seem almost lethargic compared to humans and orcs, elves being 110 years old before gaining their first level as a prime example. Humans might outpace everyone else simply because creatures like immortal giants view a 2 hour work week as hard labor.


Why don't players play those races? Why do they always pick humans or some other LA 0 race? The answer is because class levels are better than RHD, and the LA don't help much either. A Level 17 Wizard vs a 17 HD gold dragon is pretty one sided. The higher level you are the harder it is to gain class levels and get better at magic.

Yeah for sure, but that wizard has to Survive being level 1. A difficult prospect vs a newborn dragon who could be reasonably expected to kill a level 5 human straight out of the egg(assuming they aren't an unusually powerful class).


As always, the most secure home is a demiplade no more than 6 miles in diameter with a Weirdstone (PGtF 124) in the middle.

For preventing a wightocalypse specifically, Hallow doesn't allow bodies inside to rise as undead. Hallow is instantaneous and the base version has no expensive material components, so given enough time a sufficiently dedicated group of casters could blanket an arbitrarily-large area.

The Mindsight feat allows someone to directly ascertain the numeric value of the mental ability scores of others. I'm imagining a society where official telepaths go around locating all the people who are worth training in magic.

Maybe they send out magical letters like hogwarts?:smalltongue:


If dragons are optimizing, I think they'd all try to contract the Spellhoarding psychosis. Though they'd need an above-average Intelligence to be eligible.

I think Most dragons would qualify by the time they get natural spellcasting. The only one I can think of that wouldn't are white dragons(can't cast spells until adult stage, and even then their Int is only 10. Poor saps are gonna be steam-rolled).

[AvatarVecna]

The winners of that race would most likely be Dragons in my opinion. Their Racial HD are good enough to almost be equal to class levels and they get innate spellcasting up to 9th level spells just for getting old, and all of that is Before you start looking for their broken supplemental material.

Granted, Dragons spend the majority of their days sleeping by the time they're old enough to be walking forces of nature, and the other long-lived races aren't much better. The flavor text of every long lived race in D&D makes them seem almost lethargic compared to humans and orcs, elves being 110 years old before gaining their first level as a prime example. Humans might outpace everyone else simply because creatures like immortal giants view a 2 hour work week as hard labor.

I don't disagree that some dragons get innate spellcasting capabilities, I just don't think that happens quick enough to matter for the race. Red and Gold dragons get their first racial Caster Level when they reach the Young age category - which takes 16 years to reach. Human will reach CL 1 at age 17-27. The issue is that for those red/gold dragons, their CL upgrades from 1 to 3 after another 10 years - meanwhile, the Human could reach CL 3 in as little as two days. So while dragons do get pretty awesome as they get older, it takes a lot of time for that to happen, and this is a race - not necessarily to epic, but if it takes one species 12 weeks, and the other 12 centuries, one of those species is going to have a whole lot more powerful mages running around giving them an advantage in any magic war. Human Wizard 1 vs Baby Gold in a gladiator match, the dragon probably wins handily. But this isn't about who wins in a fight, this is about who gets to epic quickly. Dragons can win that, but not if they wait for their racial magic to kick in:

A Wyrmling Gold Dragon that popped out of the egg two seconds ago has Int 14. That's plenty to start a career in wizardry. If they really wanna wait for that starting 15+, they can put off adventuring until they're 5 years old. At that point, they can start gaining levels...and while gaining that wizard level is slower for a wyrmling than it is for an adult human, the wyrmling started more than a decade earlier. Even white dragons start with Wis 11, so while they couldn't go wizard, they could make a passable Cleric, even without scroll-spamming the babies.

The biggest thing dragons have going for them is that across the board, they can start adventuring the second they're born. If there was a humanoid who could start adventuring the second they were born, they would be able to accrue levels slightly faster than dragons (since they'd need only 1k while the dragon would need 6k for that first level). And really, they need to not only be ready at birth, and level faster than dragons, they also probably need to breed faster than dragons. The only race I can think of that might fit the bill is...warforged? Except I don't think warforged will ever come to be, at least not before dragons dominate the world and keep the humanoids down (or at least subservient).

Of course, this is all just theory for if the knowledge is imparted to everybody simultaneously one day. If this is just a fact of life, then more likely dragons figured all this stuff out a million years before humans evolved, and they had a dragon super-empire or something, and they're doing a lot of the stuff I talked about up there, just with slightly stronger creatures for the XP farms.

EDIT: I went to check because I vaguely recalled that Thri-Kreen grow up quickly. Adulthood sets in at age 6, gaining a class level is +1d4 races, so bare minimum for Thri-Kreen Wizard 1 is 7 years, way longer than dragons even if they want to no longer be a wyrmling.

Also I didn't mention it before, but according to Draconomicon, from conception to birth is as follows for the core dragons:
Black: 600 days
Blue: 750 days
Brass: 600 days
Bronze: 750 days
Copper: 675 days
Gold: 900 days
Green: 600 days
Red: 825 days
Silver: 825 days
White: 525 days


I can't imagine a humanoid-ish species having a "conception to adult" length shorter than any of these, but that's the number to beat. If you wanna breed casters faster than dragons can, you need "conception to adult" to be shorter than 525-900 days. That's the number to beat.

[Promethean]

I don't disagree that some dragons get innate spellcasting capabilities, I just don't think that happens quick enough to matter for the race. Red and Gold dragons get their first racial Caster Level when they reach the Young age category - which takes 16 years to reach. Human will reach CL 1 at age 17-27. The issue is that for those red/gold dragons, their CL upgrades from 1 to 3 after another 10 years - meanwhile, the Human could reach CL 3 in as little as two days. So while dragons do get pretty awesome as they get older, it takes a lot of time for that to happen, and this is a race - not necessarily to epic, but if it takes one species 12 weeks, and the other 12 centuries, one of those species is going to have a whole lot more powerful mages running around giving them an advantage in any magic war. Human Wizard 1 vs Baby Gold in a gladiator match, the dragon probably wins handily. But this isn't about who wins in a fight, this is about who gets to epic quickly. Dragons can win that, but not if they wait for their racial magic to kick in:

I mean, dragons existed before humanoids did. so...

[AvatarVecna]

I mean, dragons existed before humanoids did. so...


Of course, this is all just theory for if the knowledge is imparted to everybody simultaneously one day. If this is just a fact of life, then more likely dragons figured all this stuff out a million years before humans evolved, and they had a dragon super-empire or something, and they're doing a lot of the stuff I talked about up there, just with slightly stronger creatures for the XP farms.


Of course, that's also only the case if they're starting that race at the same time. From a certain perspective, if the knowledge is baked into the setting from the start instead of "one day everybody realized how XP works", then whichever race emerged from the primordial ooze first is the one that's in charge. While the rest were figuring out how to have thoughts, dragons were dragons, and that means dragons rule the roost forever unless they decide to give somebody else a chance. Or maybe it's demons who came first. Idk the lore too well. You get my point though.

I'm aware. :smalltongue:

EDIT: Really it more matters for if dragons weren't the only thing crawling into existence a million years ago or whatever. If there's also demons, or mind flayers, or something else, that would need to be accounted for. Still, considering most dragons can be casters right out of the egg, even if something else was able to compete back then, I doubt they'd surpass dragons. Dragons might take forever for their innate magic to kick in, but they're adventure-ready stupid quick.

[Promethean]

I'm aware. :smalltongue:

EDIT: Really it more matters for if dragons weren't the only thing crawling into existence a million years ago or whatever. If there's also demons, or mind flayers, or something else, that would need to be accounted for. Still, considering most dragons can be casters right out of the egg, even if something else was able to compete back then, I doubt they'd surpass dragons. Dragons might take forever for their innate magic to kick in, but they're adventure-ready stupid quick.

That's D&D's favorite Apex Predators for ya.

I would think that there are entire primordial empires built on the things discussed here that don't actually move around or change much within mortal timeframes due to how lethargic immortals/longevity-gifted creatures tend to be.

An exception to this might be aboleths. They all contain the accumulated knowledge of their race, an obsessive need to know things they don't already, and have some racial feats that make tippyverse levels of mechanics-exploitation easy for them(abolyth glyph comes to mind). Then there's mind flays with the illithid savant class... And beholder mages...

Actually, aberrations are scary. :smalleek:

[Jervis]

Actually, aberrations are scary. :smalleek:

In other news, the sun rose this morning

Jokes aside they are my second favorite creature type next to constructs

[Promethean]

In other news, the sun rose this morning

Lol :smallbiggrin:


Jokes aside they are my second favorite creature type next to constructs

Aberrations definitely have some of the best flavor text and variety of any creature type. The stuff about how the far realm, their relation to psionics, and their time-travel shenanigans is enough to right an entire sci-fi universe on its own.

On constructs, there was a 3rd party book that went into a lot more detail on them. Like to the level of how Alchemy & Herbology did for... well alchemy and herbology. It split constructs into 3 categories for your basic golems(which it had a few more to add), you more mechanical robotic types(which it went into a lot more detail for creating and let you add new features to), and your vat-grown fleshy types like clones(and it had all new types of these too).

It was called something like "It's Alive!", but I'd recommend giving it a look!

[Mechalich]

I'm aware. :smalltongue:

EDIT: Really it more matters for if dragons weren't the only thing crawling into existence a million years ago or whatever. If there's also demons, or mind flayers, or something else, that would need to be accounted for. Still, considering most dragons can be casters right out of the egg, even if something else was able to compete back then, I doubt they'd surpass dragons. Dragons might take forever for their innate magic to kick in, but they're adventure-ready stupid quick.

The 'official' history of the D&D multiverse is actually the pole position was held by the Mind Flayers. Specifically the at Great Illithid Empire ruled a stupidly large portion of the Prime Material, bigger than any other Empire before of since and capable of constructing megastructures, and significant enough to cause the Blood War to call temporary truce. Gith eventually toppled the empire (so yes, you can thank the Githyanki for the fact that your character isn't a mind slave), and everyone scrambled to take control of the suddenly mostly empire Prime.

In this peculiar post-apocalyptic scenario, where the apocalypse was the collapse of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, humans held the overall advantage because they were the Illithids most popular slave species (the three Gith species being explicitly derived from humans) while everyone else was emerging from various refugia.

[AvatarVecna]

I wanted to know how much of a difference 525 days makes vs 900 for the incubation. However, that experiment grew into absolutely wild numbers, and after about 5 generations and 40 billion dragons per color, I came to the conclusion that I hd probably done my math wrong, and that even if I hadn't the numbers were so big that they'd be basically meaningless. So I adjusted my scenario to be a bit easier to calc, in a way that doesn't really care about the difference in days between one dragon type vs another. Here's the scenario:

A pair of dragons reach age 51 (young adult, breeding age) at the exact same time. They begin having kids like clockwork: every 50 years until they can no longer breed, they lay a clutch of 4 eggs. The eggs take the normal amount of time to hatch, and were conceived such that they will hatch exactly 50 years after the previous clutch hatched. When the kids grow up and reach age 51, they pair off and start breeding as well. When the original female reaches the age of 801 (ancient) and can no longer breed, I will stop counting, and look at how many dragons there are across all generations. I will count up the number in each age category for a given dragon color and put them in the table. I'll also put the total number in that flight, and what CR they would collectively be if the CR guidelines were used brainlessly (so two CR X are the same EL as one CR X+2, and three CR X are the same EL as two CR X+1).

So, the scenario I've just described...4 eggs every 50 years per mating pair? That's not exactly very fast. Dragons can lay a clutch of eggs from 2 to 5, and can do so as often as yearly, not bicentennially. This is an awful lot slower than dragons could mate if they were really trying for total numbers.




Age
Quantity
Age Category


801
2
Ancient


751
4
Very Old


701
12
Very Old


651
36
Very Old


601
108
Very Old


551
324
Old


501
972
Old


451
2,916
Old


401
8,748
Old


351
26,244
Mature Adult


301
78,732
Mature Adult


251
236,196
Mature Adult


201
708,588
Mature Adult


151
2,125,764
Adult


101
6,377,292
Adult


51
19,131,876
Young Adult


1
57,395,628
Wyrmling


Total
86,093,442





So...yeah. Even fairly casual mating for 750 years starting from a single breeding pair pumped out 86 million dragons. You can imagine how crazy the numbers got if I was doing even a 2-egg batch every year. >.>

[Promethean]

So...yeah. Even fairly casual mating for 750 years starting from a single breeding pair pumped out 86 million dragons. You can imagine how crazy the numbers got if I was doing even a 2-egg batch every year. >.>

Granted, these dragons would be Very inbred if they were pairing off from the same clutches of eggs.

But otherwise Yeah, lawful-aligned mated dragons are supposed to stay together for life and the half-dragon template applying to literally anything shows that they are Very horny.

[Batcathat]

Granted, these dragons would be Very inbred if they were pairing off from the same clutches of eggs.

As any dragon optimizer knows, inbreeding is just nature's minmaxing. :smalltongue:

[Darg]

Edit: From extensive discussion, let's say wish and epic spellcasting nerfed as needed. They're OP yeah, but other things are more interesting to talk about. The normal/non-word-twisty effects of wish like copying spellls of lower level and making price uncapped magic items is still fair game though.


When a wish creates or improves a magic item, you must pay twice the normal XP cost for crafting or improving the item, plus an additional 5,000 XP.

I wouldn't say the price is uncapped, just that you are spending something likely more precious than gold. On top of that, you can't spend xp if it would cost you a level. A 20th level character would ever at most have 19,999 xp to spend at any one time so the maximum base price of the item would be 187,488 gp

[AvatarVecna]

Granted, these dragons would be Very inbred if they were pairing off from the same clutches of eggs.

In this whiteroom theorycrafting, yeah they would. This is more showing how fast dragons can breed on a small scale though. If we ramped it up to something like...I think 50 original mating pairs? There should be enough genetic diversity to repopulate the species by the billions by the time the first of those initial 100 dragons loses fertility.

Also, idk how you'll feel about hearing this, but Ctrl+F couldn't find "inbre" or "incest" anywhere in the Draconomicon. And a quick google search isn't really turning up results for general rules on that subject elsewhere. So yeah, it's entirely possible that we've found one of those rare situations where 3.5 has absolutely no first-party rules for. If somebody can prove otherwise, I would be fascinated to hear a source. :smalltongue:


But otherwise Yeah, lawful-aligned mated dragons are supposed to stay together for life and the half-dragon template applying to literally anything shows that they are Very horny.

Half-Dragon technically has two requirements: the non-dragon half must be...
Alive
Have a physical form

That's it. So no undead, no constructs, no incorporeal. Basically anything else is fair game. Human? Naturally. Pixie? Yup. Fire elemental? You betcha. Black Pudding? Yup. Assassin Vine? Weird but valid.

Dragons are the Humans of the non-Humanoids.

[Promethean]

That's it. So no undead, no constructs, no incorporeal.

Well, those things aren't necessarily off the table so much as they can't have kids. I'd bet you 100 gold that more than one Steel dragon has been smitten with a vampire.



Basically anything else is fair game. Human? Naturally. Pixie? Yup. Fire elemental? You betcha. Black Pudding? Yup. Assassin Vine? Weird but valid.

Dragons are the Humans of the non-Humanoids.

I'm now imagining dragons having a weird kind of respect for human bards...

[Jervis]

Lol :smallbiggrin:



Aberrations definitely have some of the best flavor text and variety of any creature type. The stuff about how the far realm, their relation to psionics, and their time-travel shenanigans is enough to right an entire sci-fi universe on its own.

On constructs, there was a 3rd party book that went into a lot more detail on them. Like to the level of how Alchemy & Herbology did for... well alchemy and herbology. It split constructs into 3 categories for your basic golems(which it had a few more to add), you more mechanical robotic types(which it went into a lot more detail for creating and let you add new features to), and your vat-grown fleshy types like clones(and it had all new types of these too).

It was called something like "It's Alive!", but I'd recommend giving it a look!

Oooooh. I need to find that. I’ve been planning a construct building character for a while now. I’ve been looking for a 3rd party source book that expands on constructs, including lore, methods of making them, and ways to improve them with templates and add on abilities and things. I need to check this out. Any other recommendations?

[Promethean]

Oooooh. I need to find that. I’ve been planning a construct building character for a while now. I’ve been looking for a 3rd party source book that expands on constructs, including lore, methods of making them, and ways to improve them with templates and add on abilities and things. I need to check this out. Any other recommendations?

Honestly, If you want to add a lot of depth to magic that wasn't covered in the 1st party material, then encyclopedia Arcane, the quintessential series, and slayers guides are great. I warn you though, a lot of what it adds could very easily break a game if put in the hands of a half-decent minmaxer. The book I mentioned before was Encyclopedia Arcane: Constructs, It's Alive!

Other than that I primarily stick to Dragon/Dungeon or 3rd party setting material like Dark Sun and Ravenloft. I've been trying to find Iron kingdoms PDFs for a while now though.

[AvatarVecna]

Edit: From extensive discussion, let's say wish and epic spellcasting nerfed as needed. They're OP yeah, but other things are more interesting to talk about. The normal/non-word-twisty effects of wish like copying spellls of lower level and making price uncapped magic items is still fair game though.

I have bad news for you.

Wish is a 9th lvl spell and is in the Envy domain. That means a Divine Crusader would cast it at CL 9, which is now the lowest CL Wish can be cast at. An item that grants you a "Wish" effect 1/day that has a 5008 XP limit would have a market price of...

[(Spell Level 9 x Caster Level 9 x At Will Command Word 1800) + (XP Cost 5002 x Base 5 x unlimited 100)] / 5 = 529360 gp.

However, if such an item were built so that the user needed a specific skill, class, and alignment to use it, that would reduce the actual market price to 30% normal, or 158808 gp. This is well within the nonepic limit. Without any reduction, this would cost 79404 gp, 6353 XP, and 159 days to craft.


If spells are involved in the prerequisites for making the item, the creator must have prepared the spells to be cast (or must know the spells, in the case of a sorcerer or bard) but need not provide any material components or focuses the spells require, nor are any XP costs inherent in a prerequisite spell incurred in the creation of the item.

(This means we don't add the XP component of 100 wishes directly to the XP cost to craft this item. We just use whatever the XP cost would be to craft an item of that market price. And yes, this means that the tome and manual wondrous items aren't following the general guidelines for magic item creation.)

So here's the strategy: every day, we will use our "Amulet Of 1/Day Wish" to make the following wish: "I wish this amulet could grant more powerful wishes". This should try to increase the XP limit of the Wish effect the Amulet has. The way the "item improving" use of Wish works, it will be as if the original XP cost to craft were higher. The amount higher is "the Wish's XP limit, -5000, divided by 2". So that's (5002-5000) / 2 = 1 XP. Here's a peek at a slightly stronger item:

[(Spell Level 9 x Caster Level 9 x At Will Command Word 1800) + (XP Cost 5003 x Base 5 x unlimited 100)] / 5 = 529460 gp.

Post-restrictions, that's 158838 gp market price, and cost to craft is 79419 gp, 6354 XP, and 159 days.


cost 6353 XP
cost 6354 XP

So using this Amulet Of Wishing on itself to let it grant more powerful wishes would increase the XP limit by 1...with the first wish. But if you were to use the Amulet on itself again the next day as well, it would work again, this time with a very slightly higher XP limit. And the next day, and the next, and so on...

After 32 days of making this particular Wish 1/day, the Amulet's Wishes will have an XP limit of 76647, allowing them to improve an item such that it's XP cost would increase by 35823...or to wish a brand new item into existence whose XP cost would be 35823.

At-Will Command Word "Wish" CL 9, XP Limit 5008
[(Spell Level 9 x Caster Level 9 x At Will Command Word 1800) + (XP Cost 5678 x Base 5 x unlimited 100)] x 0.3 = 895440 gp market price; cost to craft is 447720 gp, 35818 XP, and 896 days.

...so yeah, after 32 days, the initial Amulet is strong enough to make a new Amulet that works at-will instead of 1/day. Then we'll start doing the same "I wish this amulet could grant stronger wishes" wish. Let's go for...hmm....15 minutes?

15 minutes and 150 wishes later, your second amulet now has an XP limit of 101,733,508 XP. A single wish from this amulet to make a new item could make anything that would have a crafting XP cost of 50,864,254 XP or less. For most items (that is, items that don't accrue additional XP costs during creation), that's going to mean an item with a market price of 1,271,606,350 gp (or, if we're taking advantage of restrictions so only you can use it, market price of 4,238,687,833 gp.)

So yeah, 32 days and 15 minutes of work for the ability to wish up items worth 4.2 billion gp per round. Of course, stopping at 15 minutes is an arbitrary self-limitation. We could just keep improving the power of our wishing ring forever. If we did this for an hour (600 wishes), the XP limit is now ~447 sextillion and can spit out items worth ~18 septillion. If we did this for 8 hours (4800 wishes), the XP limit is now 4.48 x 10169, and spits out items worth 1.86 x 10171. Not bad for 33 days of work.

Oh yeah, and the initial amulet can be crafted by an Artificer 7.

If we didn't bother wishing up a new amulet, and just kept using the 1/day amulet, then after 1 year, it would have an XP limit of 1.68 x 1055, and 1/day could make an item worth 7.03 x 1056 gp.

TL;DR

Using a wish item to improve itself in an infinite loop leads to items with market prices best measured using scientific notation. This loop can be kicked off by something as weak as an Artificer 7.

I don't like being a buzzkill, I just wanna make sure the possibility is something you're aware of. Most things you can use Wish for are actually perfectly fine and not broken.

Duplicating most spells? Perfectly fine. Duplicating certain binding spells? Potentially fine. Using those binding spells on genies? Mmmmmmmmm.

Upgrading most items? Perfectly fine, even if it can theoretically go on forever you'll reach a point where +N XP just isn't enough to boost the item's bonuses any further. Upgrading an item that grants wishes using its own wishes? Mmmmmmmmmm.

That's basically it. The only other thing that's sorta potentially broken is "do literally anything, but the wish gets twisted by the DM/powers that be", and that's the kinda thing where the broken-ness will likely be canceled out. Anything else - inherent bonuses, 25k gp of nonmagical items, resurrection, transport, undoing misfortune...they're all pretty powerful uses, but they're not going to break the game. This is just like...one of the ways to use Wish that's really easy to abuse.

[AvatarVecna]

Well, those things aren't necessarily off the table so much as they can't have kids. I'd bet you 100 gold that more than one Steel dragon has been smitten with a vampire.




I'm now imagining dragons having a weird kind of respect for human bards...

Oh I don't doubt there's some very sexy zombies and robots out there that have caught a dragon's eye. Those are just the limits for "can produce half-dragons", yeah.

[Jervis]

Honestly, If you want to add a lot of depth to magic that wasn't covered in the 1st party material, then encyclopedia Arcane, the quintessential series, and slayers guides are great. I warn you though, a lot of what it adds could very easily break a game if put in the hands of a half-decent minmaxer. The book I mentioned before was Encyclopedia Arcane: Constructs, It's Alive!

Other than that I primarily stick to Dragon/Dungeon or 3rd party setting material like Dark Sun and Ravenloft. I've been trying to find Iron kingdoms PDFs for a while now though.

For what it’s worth Iron Kingdoms is great. I’ve read it and it offers some great material. The magic weapon rules it adds are very complicated, though. You can add magical effects to weapons very cheaply if you work with them though, even if it requires maintenance. I will say if you allow rules from other sources it can get kinda weird though. The only character I made using them was a rogue that used two weapon fighting along with the rules for weapons built into swords to get off 4 sneak attacks minimum a turn and adding my Dex mod from 2-8 times depending on the situation. Required weapon enhancement cheese to apply crossbow reloading feats to guns which came online much earlier than normal due to aforementioned magic items rules. Also ended up accidentally having better AC and HP than the party crusader due to picking Fairy Mysteries Initiate, but my damage was lower when I couldn’t shoot and didn’t have maneuvers so in practice we ended up about equal as frontliners.

[Promethean]

For what it’s worth Iron Kingdoms is great. I’ve read it and it offers some great material. The magic weapon rules it adds are very complicated, though. You can add magical effects to weapons very cheaply if you work with them though, even if it requires maintenance. I will say if you allow rules from other sources it can get kinda weird though. The only character I made using them was a rogue that used two weapon fighting along with the rules for weapons built into swords to get off 4 sneak attacks minimum a turn and adding my Dex mod from 2-8 times depending on the situation. Required weapon enhancement cheese to apply crossbow reloading feats to guns which came online much earlier than normal due to aforementioned magic items rules. Also ended up accidentally having better AC and HP than the party crusader due to picking Fairy Mysteries Initiate, but my damage was lower when I couldn’t shoot and didn’t have maneuvers so in practice we ended up about equal as frontliners.

And that's the kind of weird combo stuff I still play 3.PF for. It's the kind of pushing the envelope, "doing it to see if you could" stuff I' never seen since.

[Mechalich]

So...yeah. Even fairly casual mating for 750 years starting from a single breeding pair pumped out 86 million dragons. You can imagine how crazy the numbers got if I was doing even a 2-egg batch every year. >.>

Exponential growth of essentially anything allows for some pretty stupidly huge numbers. In a hypothetical optimized setting this is important because magic can produce essentially infinite resources (including space once demiplanes and such are brought into the equation) so population growth is limited only by reproductive potential.

The reproductive potential of humans is actually very low, because we are placental mammals. This actually means there's a considerable advantage to any species not limited in that way. That probably means either insect people or fish people, with a preference for whomever has the broadest environmental tolerance. Thri-Kreen do well by this standard. So do several aquatic species such as Cecaelias.

[Jervis]

Exponential growth of essentially anything allows for some pretty stupidly huge numbers. In a hypothetical optimized setting this is important because magic can produce essentially infinite resources (including space once demiplanes and such are brought into the equation) so population growth is limited only by reproductive potential.

The reproductive potential of humans is actually very low, because we are placental mammals. This actually means there's a considerable advantage to any species not limited in that way. That probably means either insect people or fish people, with a preference for whomever has the broadest environmental tolerance. Thri-Kreen do well by this standard. So do several aquatic species such as Cecaelias.

Someone post that comic about the Tiefling population growing in relation to immortal succubi

[Mechalich]

Someone post that comic about the Tiefling population growing in relation to immortal succubi

The funny thing is that with exponential growth immortality is largely irrelevant to the calculation because the new generations so massively outnumber the old as to reduce them to tiny fraction of the total.

[Promethean]

It does kind of reiterate the question of How humanoids become the most numerous and active class of creature in Any D&D setting.

With the dragon example, even if you factor in mating limitations based on the fact that they're supposed to Sleep for most of their time passed a certain age, you'd still end up with billions of dragons before there are equivalent numbers of humanoids just from the factz that they've existed for so much longer And that they have much higher survival chances at birth-to-newborn than even most Adult humanoids.

Food isn't really a factor on their numbers like it is for most predators either. Dragons can subsist on Rock or Metal if need be and they have enough innate spellcasting ability to just teleport or hop to other planes if their home starts running low on food.

[Mechalich]

It does kind of reiterate the question of How humanoids become the most numerous and active class of creature in Any D&D setting.

In 1e and 2e the answer was 'class and level limits' and in fact this was explicitly given as the reason why those limits existed, there's a whole section on it in the 2e DMG.

3e removed those limits, which is good for gameplay, but it produced all sorts of bizarre world-building contortions as a result.

[Maat Mons]

There is the possibility that some beings may just not be culturally predisposed to the sorts of behaviors that are needed to realize that rate of expansion.

[Crake]

Pun-pun would be the Creator deity, and the world would look however they wanted it to look.

Anything else would be suboptimal.

If NPCs can optimize, then wouldnt the sarruhk themselves be the creator deities, since they came before pun-pun and would thusly have access to their own abilities and the capability to optimize that?

[Promethean]

In 1e and 2e the answer was 'class and level limits' and in fact this was explicitly given as the reason why those limits existed, there's a whole section on it in the 2e DMG.

3e removed those limits, which is good for gameplay, but it produced all sorts of bizarre world-building contortions as a result.

That's what this thread is for, to highlight some of those weird contortions and take a 3.PF setting to it's logical conclusion(within reason, entire Pun-Pun races shouldn't be a thing)


If NPCs can optimize, then wouldnt the sarruhk themselves be the creator deities, since they came before pun-pun and would thusly have access to their own abilities and the capability to optimize that?

Yeah, The sarruhk fall into the same category as wish and epic spellcasting cheese of "things that need to be toned down to reasonable levels or things inevitably lead to Pun-Pun".

I'm all for pushing to theoretical limits of optimization, but "alter reality as a racial ability" is not really something that can exist in any setting.

Any ideas for making the sarruhk racial ability less fun-endingly broken? Initial thoughts are having it function off of the same rules as magic item creation or the creature creation rule in "The Life-Shaping Handbook" Dark Sun supplement.

[Maat Mons]

The end of the first paragraph in the text for Manipulate Form says something about Sarrukh bein immune. It's unclear if it means Sarrukh are immune to Manipulate Form as a whole, or if they're only immune to unconsciousness caused by the use of the ability. The interpretation that they're immune to Manipulate Form altogether would explain why they didn't Manipulate themselves in godhood.

[Promethean]

The end of the first paragraph in the text for Manipulate Form says something about Sarrukh bein immune. It's unclear if it means Sarrukh are immune to Manipulate Form as a whole, or if they're only immune to unconsciousness caused by the use of the ability. The interpretation that they're immune to Manipulate Form altogether would explain why they didn't Manipulate themselves in godhood.

Maybe, but it doesn't prevent them from making a race of slave-gods so fundamentally programmed to follow the Sarruhk that even the Idea of rebelling against their masters is repulsive to them the same way that animals are instinctively programmed to find specific sights, smells, or actions repulsive.

[Mechalich]

That's what this thread is for, to highlight some of those weird contortions and take a 3.PF setting to it's logical conclusion(within reason, entire Pun-Pun races shouldn't be a thing)

In order to do that we need to take things to their logical beginning first, meaning hypothesizing what a setting looks like at the start.

So I'll throw out some parameters. The idea here is to try and figure out what the world looks like in the moments following its creation by the gods

The world is a quasi-earth. Standard gravity, Earth-like atmosphere, 24 hour days, 365 day year, mixture of continents and islands with a mixture of climatically appropriate biomes. Natural terrain only, no bizarre fantasy environments and there's only one moon with functionally normal tidal fluctuations. Basically, D&D-isms aside everything works in an Earth-like manner.
The initial creation includes no secondary creative acts and no outside meddling. The means on Day One there's no constructs, no undead, and no outsiders (including native outsiders). That also means there's no cross-breeding yet, so things like half-dragons and mongrelmen and changelings (the PF version) don't exist yet. This also means Sorcery is impossible, because there are no bloodlines to carry the gift.
Initial population size is small, in the low five figures for a many species (ex 10-20k humans or elves) and at the edge of viability for more powerful ones (ex ~300 for a giant type or a powerful monster like stone giants), bizarre creatures that can sustain themselves at even smaller numbers, especially aberrations like Aboleth or Ropers, might have only a few dozen.
Initial populations consist of a mixture of adults, juveniles, and children. No one is created elderly.
The initial technology level is Paleolithic. Simple stone tools are the height of knowledge. Only species with the memory and genius to unlock written languages mentally (ex. aboleth) possess them, and they have no written records. Everyone else has yet to develop writing. Wizardry and other forms of magic that rely upon spellbooks are not presently possible.
Everyone starts out at the minimal possible power. No advanced HD monsters, no special templates, and all the adult humanoids start out as Commoner 1, since no other class has developed yet.


So what happens? My guess is that certain high-powered monsters with social organization quickly seize power and either eliminate or enslave many lesser beings. Note that that this includes not just humanoids but pretty much any weak monster that operates in a societal grouping, so things like Dark Folk get oppressed too. Good candidates for the oppressors include: Hags (natural cooperative magic), Giants (naturally build tribes, massive raw physical power), Fey Courts (if this is a thing), Thriae (bee-people with massive reproductive potential), and yes Dragons.

This sort of oppression can't get everyone, however, population density is just too low, and humanoids (and other monsters, because face it, the average tribe of giants doesn't want to share territory with a hydra or serpentfolk or anything like that) will flee into the wilderness and live as outlaw families or even alone. This precludes the development of a number of classes, including clerics who rely on an organized religious doctrine, but not the Druid, Oracle, Shaman, or Witch classes, so these (alongside some lower tier ones like Adept and Ranger but that doesn't really matter). Figure that some small number of children from the initial generation start to unlock these classes as they mature, starting around year 5.

However, because of the widespread enslavement, oppression, and extermination by high-powered monsters (whose youth will also in some cases start to unlock classes but their advancement will be so comparably slow that it won't matter), the number of people doing this, and especially who survive to actually reach even the mid-levels will be so small as to be essentially random. For example, let's say 10,000 Elves are created. By year 5 90% have been killed, enslaved, or otherwise removed from the advancement board. That leaves one thousand. Of those, half were incarnated as adults and have been advancing in NPC classes (mostly commoner, but also expert and warrior), stunting their ability to reach for real power just as badly as a monster with a couple of RHD. That leaves 500. out of those maybe 1% manage to advance into the high-tier spellcasting classes available. Of the five emergent casters, each has maybe a 10% chance of reaching level 10. This means the most common state for each humanoid species is to not possess a tier I caster of power during the first generation.

However, 3.PF has a lot of 'races' and while many of them are crossbreeds that won't yet exist, there's still like 30 to start with. Someone is going to defy the odds and emerge as the 1st surviving Archdruid, Master Oracle, Grand Shaman, and High Witch. These individuals are the ones who will reshape the world, but you might as well choose them randomly and their influence will be totally character driven. At least one will probably be sufficiently vengeful to wage an extermination campaign against the oppressor species, but beyond that, who knows.

[Promethean]

However, 3.PF has a lot of 'races' and while many of them are crossbreeds that won't yet exist, there's still like 30 to start with. Someone is going to defy the odds and emerge as the 1st surviving Archdruid, Master Oracle, Grand Shaman, and High Witch. These individuals are the ones who will reshape the world, but you might as well choose them randomly and their influence will be totally character driven. At least one will probably be sufficiently vengeful to wage an extermination campaign against the oppressor species, but beyond that, who knows.

Sooo... The early civilization will be Mind-flayer-empire-lite and prove the rule that over-the-top oppression and genocide are not viable long term strategies for even the most powerful civilizations or races. This would go to explain why locus swarms of dragons, Titan/Giant magic-tech megacities, Tippyverse Aboleths, Illithed savant brain-farmers or Beholder mage Universities haven't gained an eternal stranglehold on all reality.

However, It still leaves the power vacuum for how the world will look once we fast-forward a few thousand years after the first classes are discovered and the first level 20s break the old empires. What does the world look like after it's discovered that humanoids game in strength faster than any other race? How does the world change after the powers that be iron out their understanding of the In-Universe explanations for how XP, classes, and feats work?

Similarly, Assuming that humanoids aren't stupid and won't jump to using medieval architecture when mages can set up and knock down standard castle fortifications like a casual game of dominoes, how does technology and fortress defense evolve in this kind of world? I'm going to assume A-Lot of alchemically enhanced fantasy metals thanks to abuse of fabricate or similar spells combined with a Lot of anti-magic and counter-magic defenses is the first idea, but how do they defend against things like locate-city-bomb abuse?

[Mechalich]

However, It still leaves the power vacuum for how the world will look once we fast-forward a few thousand years after the first classes are discovered and the first level 20s break the old empires. What does the world look like after it's discovered that humanoids game in strength faster than any other race? How does the world change after the powers that be iron out their understanding of the In-Universe explanations for how XP, classes, and feats work?


The problem is that the first level 20s, assuming optimized builds, are functionally omnipotent. They can do whatever they want, and since we can't predict their species, personality, or even their precise class we have no idea what they would do. History becomes completely dependent upon the choices of theoretical individuals, there are no greater patterns, all that unfolds is personal.

The comparable test case here is Dark Sun, where Rajaat was the first person to discover arcane magic, became a living god, and reshaped the world according to his extremely genocidal whims.

[Promethean]

The problem is that the first level 20s, assuming optimized builds, are functionally omnipotent.

Honestly, I'd argue the opposite. Being the first, they're the people the Least likely to be able to optimize as they have no idea what they're doing.

Basis of the assumption being everyone didn't wake up with full knowledge of how to optimize, everyone kind of figured it out trial-and-error style. So the first optimized creature wouldn't exist until Loooong after the first Level 20s would have long since died off after teaching apprentices, those apprentices having long since died after forming schools teaching how to X class, and the classes had become common enough for people to start experimenting on their own, forming their own "How to X Class" schools.



The comparable test case here is Dark Sun, where Rajaat was the first person to discover arcane magic, became a living god, and reshaped the world according to his extremely genocidal whims.

Granted, Dark Sun still exists as a setting because Rajaat wasn't as invincible as he thought he was and ultimately Lost. He's not even an sealed invincible evil. After he's Unsealed in the cerulean storm incident he get's killed shortly afterward because world progressed without him and new magic and powers now existed that didn't in his time.

[Maat Mons]

I feel I already answered the fortress defense question, but I'll reiterate.

Trying to keep enemies out with physical barriers is a fools errand. Planar boundaries are more effective than any wall could ever hope to be. Just cast Genesis enough times to house whatever number of people you're trying to protect. You're effectively surrounded by an impenetrable barrier, because teleportation magic is the only way anyone could get to you.

Protecting against teleporting enemies has long been a solved issue as well. Player's Guide to Faerun has Weirdstones.

[Promethean]

I feel I already answered the fortress defense question, but I'll reiterate.

Trying to keep enemies out with physical barriers is a fools errand. Planar boundaries are more effective than any wall could ever hope to be. Just cast Genesis enough times to house whatever number of people you're trying to protect. You're effectively surrounded by an impenetrable barrier, because teleportation magic is the only way anyone could get to you.

Protecting against teleporting enemies has long been a solved issue as well. Player's Guide to Faerun has Weirdstones.

Unless they invade from the astral plane. All demiplanes created by the spell exist physically within the astral plane and nothing about the spell inherently bars creatures next to the demiplane in the astral from just floating in.

[Maat Mons]

I don't think that's true. The Material and Ethereal planes occupy the same physical space, but that doesn't mean you can just walk into one from the other.

[Mechalich]

Basis of the assumption being everyone didn't wake up with full knowledge of how to optimize, everyone kind of figured it out trial-and-error style. So the first optimized creature wouldn't exist until Loooong after the first Level 20s would have long since died off after teaching apprentices, those apprentices having long since died after forming schools teaching how to X class, and the classes had become common enough for people to start experimenting on their own, forming their own "How to X Class" schools.

20th level characters do not die off. Immortality is trivially achieved for such beings even at stupidly low optimization levels (which is why it's been long assumed even at the much lower 2e power cap). And they only train apprentices if they want to. It is entirely possible for the first characters to hit max level to make it so they are the only characters to do so ever. This is part and parcel of the whole unpredictable variability issue. The first person to achieve apotheosis can totally alter the world on a functionally systemic level.


Granted, Dark Sun still exists as a setting because Rajaat wasn't as invincible as he thought he was and ultimately Lost. He's not even an sealed invincible evil. After he's Unsealed in the cerulean storm incident he get's killed shortly afterward because world progressed without him and new magic and powers now existed that didn't in his time.

Dark Sun was built around a 2e framework, which means the true ultimate power available to max level characters was significantly less powerful than that available to 3.PF characters, even without optimizing. There were simply fewer spells and items and they did less stuff. Even so, there's a whole lot of stuff that isn't in Dark Sun because Rajaat successfully exterminated it (also the Dark Sun metaplot was controlled by Troy Denning and therefore should not be taken seriously in regards to well, anything whatsoever).


I don't think that's true. The Material and Ethereal planes occupy the same physical space, but that doesn't mean you can just walk into one from the other.

It is technically feasible, though logistically complicated, to physically move an army into the Ethereal or Astral and charge into a Demiplane hidden within one of them. However, it's also really dumb. One you've unlocked the ability to do such things that means you've unlocked infinite space and also infinite energy at which point competition becomes really, really pointless. Once you breach the bounds of Planescape fighting for all the conventional things that people from the Material fight for becomes a waste and the only thing left is to fight for meaning.

[AvatarVecna]

Sooo... The early civilization will be Mind-flayer-empire-lite and prove the rule that over-the-top oppression and genocide are not viable long term strategies for even the most powerful civilizations or races. This would go to explain why locus swarms of dragons, Titan/Giant magic-tech megacities, Tippyverse Aboleths, Illithed savant brain-farmers or Beholder mage Universities haven't gained an eternal stranglehold on all reality.

This paragraph seems written from the assumption that the old empires are aware of and make use of powerful classes/PrCs.


However, It still leaves the power vacuum for how the world will look once we fast-forward a few thousand years after the first classes are discovered and the first level 20s break the old empires. What does the world look like after it's discovered that humanoids game in strength faster than any other race? How does the world change after the powers that be iron out their understanding of the In-Universe explanations for how XP, classes, and feats work?

This paragraph seems written from the assumption that the old empires didn't figure that stuff out until humanoids cracked the code.

Personally I'm more inclined to go along the lines of the first paragraph, where the monsters are also aware of class levels before humanoids have even really become a thing. Here's my thoughts on how the old empires were overthrown:

Mind Flayers kind of have a bum deal. They're really powerful, and have native access to "build your own class: the PrC", but at the same time, they need those brains. They need brains for sustenance, personal growth (via Illithid Savant class features), reproduction (via illithid tadpoles), and industrialization (thralls).

Needing us to be thralls means they'll breed us to be more physically capable.

Needing us for personal growth means they'll breed us to be more mentally capable.

Needing us for sustenance encourages them to breed us to be more mentally capable (so our brains are more nutritious and delicious).

Needing us for reproduction means breeding us to survive the transformative process...so more physically capable.

You might be noticing a pattern. Humanoids are to illithids what cows are to us...except if, instead of needing cows for food and labor, we also needed them for schools and reproduction. Illithids will take the proto-apes and breed them over a million years into various humanoid species. And they'll never consider us a threat, because we're like cows to them - too stupid and incompetent to ever really be dangerous. They're too busy worrying about jockeying for position in the illithid hierarchy to worry about those weird monkeys that are planning things out loud instead of telepathically.

At some point, the slaves will get smart enough to figure out classes, and they'll start up fight clubs to get one of their own to a significant level. It's probably going to take a lot of work, but it should be doable. And once we've got somebody abusing 9ths, the world is our oyster.

A proto-humanoid comes along with a basically perfect statblock - 16+ across the board. It's a 1 in 100 million chance, but go through enough proto-humanoids and it's bound to happen. Let's make that guy a cleric. Human Cleric 1, 16+ across the board for attributes. He's a cleric of a cause and his cause is murdering the illithid masters before they realize how screwed they are. Every now and then, he kills a different proto-humanoid. Assuming that none of them are more than like...lvl 6 (which is what that Alexandrian article purports), that's CR 5, so he'll kill enough to reach lvl 13. It probably took a few hundred kills, maybe as many as 1000, but if that's spread out over like...10 years, there's no way the illithids would notice. What's a few hundred missing slaves, we've got tons of them because we use them for literally everything.

It's nighttime. The slave barracks are quiet. They're stuffed 30 to a room or whatever because human rights haven't been invented yet, and the doors are pretty solid metal. He uses divine metamagic to cast Greater Consumptive Field with Persistent Spell applied (along with another big persistent buff, some mid-level buffs with long durations, and probably some low level buffs that were persisted honestly?). Everyone in the room except him has fewer than 9 HP. Will save DC 20, but honestly it doesn't matter cuz they're locked in there with him; eventually they roll a 1, and die, and grant him power. 5 minutes later, he's all but guaranteed to have a room full of corpses, Str +60, and 30d8 temp HP. He taps the prison door and the wall disintegrates. He walks through the halls of the slave pens, casually killing hundreds or even thousands more before 15 minutes have passed from the spell being cast. At this point, his melee can't miss except on a nat 1, he disintegrates anything he touches that isn't straight-up immune to weapon damage, and he's functionally unkillable via damage himself.

The goal right now is to get enough XP one-punching illithids to reach 9th lvl spells before somebody with the magic chops to smack you around hears what's going on.

It'd probably be more complicated than that, but that's a basic gist at least?

Beyond spending most of their lives sleeping and plotting and eating, dragons have a resource management issue: namely, even if they're successfully outbreeding their competition using the barest minimum effort, dragons still need to eat. They are extremely large creatures for the most part, they live basically forever, and every living dragon is going to be consuming something to stay alive. And sure, dragons can eat dirt if they need to do that to survive - a diet of literal rocks and sawdust is an option on the table - but not only do they not prefer that, there's only so much dirt in the world.

Earlier I calc'd that a single mating pair of dragons that breeds extremely slowly will end up with a family ~86 million strong after 750 years. If we assume those were black dragons, we can use their size/weight, and Kleiber's Law, to figure out daily caloric intake for the whole family. I'll spare you the details of the math and just say that the single mating pair of black dragons and their relatively small dragon family will be consuming 324 billion calories per day (well, kCal). 15 lbs of dirt is about 6 calories, according to a quick google search. Dirt has a density of ~75 lbs/cubic ft. So every cubic ft of dirt has about 30 calories in it. This family wipes out a cube of dirt ~2200 ft to a side every day. If we assume the whole family immediately stopped breeding where I stopped them before, and they eat that much dirt every day for the rest of their lives until they all collectively die, growing bigger and eating more until their dying days...they'll eat a cube of dirt 95 miles to a side.

This was one breeding pair to start, they bred super-slow, and they stopped after 750 years. They ate a millionth of the earth.

If you took a black dragon and fed it nothing but dirt for its whole life, it would consume ~50 billion kg of dirt. If you took 100 trillion of them, they would consume the world. Okay, realistically, it'd take a lot more than that, because there's lots of parts of our planet that are way denser than earth and will take longer to eat through. But blacks are also a pretty average species, both in size and lifespan. Doing the same math but for gold dragons, they'd consume ~616 billion kg of dirt, and it would take "only" 9 trillion of them to eat the earth.

I'm mentioning all this just to show that while the world is big, dragons breed too fast and live too long and eat too much to realistically live here...and that's okay, because dragons have magic. The older dragons have magic and wisdom - they'll know that breeding like rabbits on the material will eventually end with like 1% of dragons fleeing a collapsing planet to the outer planes, and 99% of dragons being SOL because they don't have plane shift or a handy planar gate in the vicinity. So those older dragons will set events into motion properly: they will lay clutches of eggs elsewhere in the multiverse, ideally in planes that are well-suited to birthing their particular eggs (or less well-suited, if they're fine babysitting and like the challenge).

The dragons breed fast and eat ravenously, but the planes are infinite. And while dragons are dangerous and tough, so are the outsiders: where on the material dragons would have nothing to fear from humanoids, demons and devils and modrons and so on wage infinite war on infinite fronts and everyone is caught in the crossfire. The material plane is a place that's actually dangerous for dragons, depending on who's set up shop there (probably the illithids?), and the dragons will likely wanna stick to planes that aren't part of the alignment wars, so they probably gravitate towards the elemental planes anyway. A pilgrimage to the Motherland (the Material Plane) when you get old enough to cast Plane Shift yourself is a privilege most dragons will likely never experience because of the rough life they live - and will probably be done to visit their eldest relatives. It doesn't matter though - even if only the barest most insignificant fraction of dragons live to see such an age, the number of wyrmlings to young adults across the planes are beyond counting. The only dragons that live there are great wyrms enjoying their remaining centuries before the Twilight sets in, with their descendants occasionally popping in to say hi.

This gives us a setting that's not too different from what most adventurers experience: dragons are rare on the material plane at any age (likely some rogue clutch of eggs laid there, or stolen from a planar nest for some reason), but where there be dragons, everybody marks their maps to make note of that because the dragons that do exist are epic creatures of impossible magic and power that will flatten you like a bug. Why yes, they are sleeping on a literal mountain of stolen gold. Why yes, they have been sleeping for a full century. Why yes, they are literally next door to an illithid empire. Wtf are they gonna do, try and steal so much as a cup? They'll kill you. Kill them? Only if you want a literal army of angry old dragons breaking down your door sometime in the next decade because you interrupted their great-great-great-great-grandmother's retirement.

While beholders are capable of great power via optimization, beholders already have a severe issue when it comes to cooperation - not because they're evil, but more because they're basically all completely freaking insane, and in a particular way where they have an unpoppable superiority complex and paranoia issues up the ass. Communities of beholders are small and rare and held together by Hive Mothers...who, incidentally, have at-will Dominate Monster that only works on Beholders and Beholderkin. Have you ever seen one of those TO discussions where "taking over the world" basically involves constantly mind-controlling literally everybody, and they have to spend basically all their time running back and forth between puppets to re-dominate them to prevent their pyramid scheme of power from crumbling because they tried to do everything themselves? That's what the Hive Mother is doing, except with Beholders.

Because the only way to have a community of beholders working together and not trying to genocide their own species out of paranoia and narcissism is spamming a 20 day duration mind control spell on your own followers. Oh yeah and ~25% of the time they break out of it anyway and that puts you behind schedule for dominating the next one. Assuming a Hive Mother has perfectly coordinated her slaves schedules such that they're coming around exactly when they should to get re-dominated, she can still only have about 245k dominated at once. If she can find a way to force save rerolls en masse, she can raise that number up to 288k, but past that, she's going to need another hive mother. Oh yeah, and if the beholders gain any power that comes with Will save bonuses (like, say, levels in a casting class/PrC), they're going to be even harder to keep dominated. It's a giant mess that would require extreme coordination...and Hive Mothers have Int 21. That's "Venerable Human Genius" smart, not "perfectly coordinate 250k monsters on your own".

(Oh yeah, and those numbers are assuming that dominating and giving mental orders is literally all the hive mother does...which means no taking time out of her busy schedule for things like eating or sleeping or making out with her own reflection or plotting the downfall of her enemies.)

Most likely, a Hive Mother is going to keep enough Beholders dominated to get some serious work down, without having so many that some accidental "main eye" opens don't leave her suddenly surrounded by enough beholders that she could be killed before reasserting dominance. How many beholders does it take to give the Hive Mother an even fight? According to CR math, three. I've gotta be honest: even with how confident a hive mother would be in herself, I seriously doubt she'll be domming more than 1000 at once. It's just too risky.

[icefractal]

If they exist, the presence of Ascension methods - by which I mean any method of getting unbound Wishes - really dominates things. Once you have that, you have an arbitrarily large number of minions who are each arbitrarily powerful. At which point it doesn't matter much how you got there - a 20th level caster and a random jackass who managed to get a single (Sp) Wish are on equal footing. In PF-only, it's not quite as powerful, you only get an arbitrary number of finitely-powerful minions, and I think you need to be high-level or at least have significant resources to get started, a single scroll won't do it. But still, nothing can really compete except other ascended beings.

So there are a few options:
A) Ascension is possible, with no limits. In this case, the world looks however the first person to ascend wants it to. Might not be the first person actually, not everyone would even want to run the world, but as soon as someone does then there you go.

B) Ascension is possible, but restricted in some way. For example, maybe the first ascended being decided that the prime material plane should remain untouched, so everybody gets sent to the astral when they ascend and can't return. In which case the prime material has optimized but not NI stuff on it, and the rest of the planes are total chaos* and/or under the rule of a single being.

C) Ascension isn't possible. All methods for such are banned. Same as B, but for all the planes.


In any case, there's one thing in common - nobody is going to sell you Ascension tools (Candle of Invocation, Scroll of Shapechange, etc) at any price. If Efreet have Wish, they're all either ascended or wiped out. Ditto for Zodar and so forth.

This probably applies to a number of items - things are going to be sold for what they're really worth, and if the item in question can produce infinite gold then it's not going to be sold for finite gold. Spellcasting services ... are probably not available at all beyond low-level stuff, at least not for mere gold.


* I'd note that if there are multiple ascended beings fighting each-other, it's over ideology or paranoia, not resources. Being ascended means you don't need resources, not even people when you can make your own, and it's easy to set up a self-contained world (and invite everyone you want to) if you just want a quiet life.

[Gavinfoxx]

Personality, I always thought it'd look like the setting Milo comes from, from here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Natural-20 or possibly the Pathfinder versions of this: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18738010/chapters/44446768 or maybe the shenanigans that happen here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3xe9fn/ffrt_the_two_year_emperor_is_back_and_free/

[Promethean]

This paragraph seems written from the assumption that the old empires are aware of and make use of powerful classes/PrCs.



This paragraph seems written from the assumption that the old empires didn't figure that stuff out until humanoids cracked the code.

Urg, I didn't word my thoughts right.

My assumption was that classes and PRCs would be a thing, especially racial specific classes, but that A.) The vast, Vast, Overwhelming Vast majority of "empire level" creatures would never reach 20 because of monster LA and experience costs, and B.) none of them would be optimized because the full range of classes and feats hadn't been explored yet simply because of how Slowly the societies of Immortal races change.


Personally I'm more inclined to go along the lines of the first paragraph, where the monsters are also aware of class levels before humanoids have even really become a thing. Here's my thoughts on how the old empires were overthrown:

Huh, I like these ideas.


I don't think that's true. The Material and Ethereal planes occupy the same physical space, but that doesn't mean you can just walk into one from the other.

You definitely can. That's one of the reasons ghosts are able to do their thing.

Granted I need to correct myself: the magic varient of Genesis is coterminous with the Ethereal plane. It's the psionic Varient that exists coterminous with the astral.

This means that it's much easier to invade a spell-demiplanes because all you'd need is a magic item or spell that can shift in and out of the ethereal, like blink.



C) Ascension isn't possible. All methods for such are banned. Same as B, but for all the planes.

I think NI stuff like Pun-Pun isn't really fun to think about as part of a setting. Lets assume C.

[Quertus]

There is the possibility that some beings may just not be culturally predisposed to the sorts of behaviors that are needed to realize that rate of expansion.

Randy Dragons? Hard to say. Are they too busy making half-Dragons to actually make more Dragons? :smallamused:


If NPCs can optimize, then wouldnt the sarruhk themselves be the creator deities, since they came before pun-pun and would thusly have access to their own abilities and the capability to optimize that?

True. My comment was more, “where did this world of perfect optimization come from?”, and my answer was, “Pun-Pun created it, to have some beings that he can relate to.”

And the world will look however Pun-Pun wants it to.

Probably “no infinite, no arbitrary (except Pun-Pun)” is coded into the laws of reality.


The problem is that the first level 20s, assuming optimized builds, are functionally omnipotent. They can do whatever they want, and since we can't predict their species, personality, or even their precise class we have no idea what they would do. History becomes completely dependent upon the choices of theoretical individuals, there are no greater patterns, all that unfolds is personal.

The comparable test case here is Dark Sun, where Rajaat was the first person to discover arcane magic, became a living god, and reshaped the world according to his extremely genocidal whims.

See also, “the world looks however Pun-Pun wants it to”.


Honestly, I'd argue the opposite. Being the first, they're the people the Least likely to be able to optimize as they have no idea what they're doing.

Basis of the assumption being everyone didn't wake up with full knowledge of how to optimize, everyone kind of figured it out trial-and-error style. So the first optimized creature wouldn't exist until Loooong after the first Level 20s would have long since died off after teaching apprentices, those apprentices having long since died after forming schools teaching how to X class, and the classes had become common enough for people to start experimenting on their own, forming their own "How to X Class" schools.

Ah. That’s a different question than many of us were answering.

Hmmm… I guess, again, it depends on how those who came into power first set it up. If they created Dark Sun, it’ll look different than if they created Tippyverse, or threw off their benevolent squid-faced masters, or retreated to their own private demiplanes, or genocidally killed *everything*, and this is the *second* round of evolution.



I think NI stuff like Pun-Pun isn't really fun to think about as part of a setting. Lets assume C.

So, Pun-Pun made the world, and coded “no infinite, no arbitrary (except Pun-Pun)” into the laws of reality?

[Promethean]

Ah. That’s a different question than many of us were answering.

Hmmm… I guess, again, it depends on how those who came into power first set it up. If they created Dark Sun, it’ll look different than if they created Tippyverse, or threw off their benevolent squid-faced masters, or retreated to their own private demiplanes, or genocidally killed *everything*, and this is the *second* round of evolution.

Yeah, I'm starting to wonder If I should edit the Original post with a "assuming no Pun-Pun or NI/Abitrary power builds"



So, Pun-Pun made the world, and coded “no infinite, no arbitrary (except Pun-Pun)” into the laws of reality?

That or a normal overdeity like Ao or Io. Pun-Pun need not apply.

[Elves]

some ideas here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?593513-Sketching-Out-A-High-Magic-Setting)

[Quertus]

Yeah, I'm starting to wonder If :smallbiggrin:I should edit the Original post with a "assuming no Pun-Pun or NI/Abitrary power builds"



That or a normal overdeity like Ao or Io. Pun-Pun need not apply.

But it (Pun-Pun creating the world) explains why everyone is optimized. :smallbiggrin:

And why no one (else) is able / allowed to go infinite.

That is, it explains whatever arbitrary rules you come up with for the question.

Because, otherwise, it might be difficult to find a “reasonable” starting point for the world.

[Promethean]

But it (Pun-Pun creating the world) explains why everyone is optimized. :smallbiggrin:

And why no one (else) is able / allowed to go infinite.

That is, it explains whatever arbitrary rules you come up with for the question.

Because, otherwise, it might be difficult to find a “reasonable” starting point for the world.

Everyone isn't necessarily optimized though.

The assumption is just that optimization is a thing that civilizations are aware of because they have enough education and scientific discoveries to have a vague grasp of how the "mechanics" work. Not everyone will be optimized for the same reasons not everyone will be a soldier for example.

Best analogy I can think of is that being an optimized build could be like their version of a stem job for example, a highly specialized set of meant to build on each other for a highly specific job.

A particular society might be a warlike empire with an army of optimized uberchargers for example, but the head of state is still just as likely to be an aristocrat(assuming a minionmancy diplomancer or enchanter/illusion mage does take power).

[Mechalich]

* I'd note that if there are multiple ascended beings fighting each-other, it's over ideology or paranoia, not resources. Being ascended means you don't need resources, not even people when you can make your own, and it's easy to set up a self-contained world (and invite everyone you want to) if you just want a quiet life.

You don't even need 'ascension' for this to happen. Demiplane creation unlocks essentially endless resources and space even without limitless wishes. It takes longer and requires some slightly different shenanigans (raiding the Elemental Plane of Earth for crystal spheres and so forth), but it can still be done.

The real trick is that the first group of true powerhouses - meaning whichever handful of Tier I full casters manages to make it to level 17 in the first generation post-creation and survives the conflicts among their tiny group - can secure such time for themselves by either bamfing off to some secure spot in the planes to secure eons to work with, or by taking control of their homeworld and setting up a system where they summarily annihilate everything above level 10 for thousands of years to provide breathing space for their experiments.

There is, of course, the curious case where all the big names (including some monsters, dragons can also plane shift off into the sunset if they so desire) just leave and you're left with a world that simply constantly bleeds off all its high level talent.

[Promethean]

There is, of course, the curious case where all the big names (including some monsters, dragons can also plane shift off into the sunset if they so desire) just leave and you're left with a world that simply constantly bleeds off all its high level talent.

So the ethereal and astral planes could be full of random demiplanes overseen by high level casters farming resources, raiding the elemental planes for crafting ingredients, or running Vault-tech style experiments on their populous?

Cool.

[AvatarVecna]

So the ethereal and astral planes could be full of random demiplanes overseen by high level casters farming resources, raiding the elemental planes for crafting ingredients, or running Vault-tech style experiments on their populous?

Cool.

FWIW, we have a real-world case study for what's going on in the ethereal/astral: Minecraft's oldest anarchy server, 2b2t. :smalltongue:

[Promethean]

FWIW, we have a real-world case study for what's going on in the ethereal/astral: Minecraft's oldest anarchy server, 2b2t. :smalltongue:

I wonder how that would effect things cosmologically. If the vast majority of high-to-epic level creatures are raiding each other for magic items and XP in an eternal War in the astral and/or deep ethereal planes, wouldn't that essentially create another Blood War(or three)?

The fact they're happening in the ethereal and astral planes also means that they'll be screwing with most forms of planer travel. d&d lore has most spells function by using the astral(for outer plane travel) or ethereal(for inner/elemental plane travel) as a medium.The "Ascension War" raging across what are essentially the major highways of the multiverse would have interesting implications.

[Jervis]

FWIW, we have a real-world case study for what's going on in the ethereal/astral: Minecraft's oldest anarchy server, 2b2t. :smalltongue:

Every caster is constantly casting sending to shout profanities at random other casters

[Raven777]

This isn't really avoidable. If it's possible for more than one person in the world to get access to Epic Spellcasting, or wish loops, or any other "infinite power" trick, those people are going to be in conflict. If one aims for it and the other doesn't, the one that didn't gets taken out, and now the world is "whatever the only guy with epic spellcasting wants it to be". If both aim for it, it's a matter of who got there first. This is true regardless if it's two people who can possible reach epic spellcasting, or 200, or 200 million. Somebody's with the motive to properly use that power is going to reach it before anybody else does, and that person is going to get to shape the world as they please. The only thing that can stop them from doing that is if somebody else in the world already has Epic Spellcasting or deific power or infinite wishes as a result of the settings.

So basically, the world is whatever the gods decide it is, and the mortals just kinda have to live with it, and they're allowed to abuse the rules if the gods allow them to, or they get smote off the face of the earth two weeks before they would've pulled a wish loop to solve world hunger because the goddess of the harvest didn't feel like having her domain rendered obsolete.

Basically, an optimized universe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE) is The Dark Forest (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheThreeBodyProblem).

[Promethean]

Basically, an optimized universe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE) is The Dark Forest (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheThreeBodyProblem).

"Functional Gods" like pun-pun have been ruled out for the sake of talking about anything other than a universe that houses nothing but to a single pun-pun or universes populated exclusively by variants of pun-pun.

[AvatarVecna]

Every caster is constantly casting sending to shout profanities at random other casters

I was more thinking like, the ocean at spawn, or how you basically have to go hundreds of miles away from spawn just to have a chance of getting to actually play minecraft in piece for five minutes without getting griefed by hackers, and your only chance of survival is that people don't get lucky and notice where you're building your base. That's basically what demiplane defense is going to be: prevent anybody from teleporting there directly, and then just hope nobody stumbles across you.


I wonder how that would effect things cosmologically. If the vast majority of high-to-epic level creatures are raiding each other for magic items and XP in an eternal War in the astral and/or deep ethereal planes, wouldn't that essentially create another Blood War(or three)?

The fact they're happening in the ethereal and astral planes also means that they'll be screwing with most forms of planer travel. d&d lore has most spells function by using the astral(for outer plane travel) or ethereal(for inner/elemental plane travel) as a medium.The "Ascension War" raging across what are essentially the major highways of the multiverse would have interesting implications.

I'm just imagining the poor people who try to do it without knowing the danger that's been brewing there for 1000 years.

An excited lvl 9 caster who's finally picked up Plane Shift and wants to go talk with ghosts without them disappearing all the time. Plane Shift, and...you die immediately. It happened so fast that you're not even sure what did you in. Whatever, a friend rezzes you back on the material, and you try again, this time using some cheap nonsense to be immune to HP damage. You survive the Plane Shift, but you still can't see anything, and it feels like you're swimming. Darkvision lets you see a small circle around you, but there's nothing to see.

You realize you're going to need to start breathing soon or you'll die despite your damage immunity. That's an easy quick spell to solve, though. You cast Teleport to get another 900 miles up, just to be on the safe side. You're still in endless water, and you can feel the pressure trying and failing to instantly kill you. This happens twice more. You've got one 5th lvl slot left, you should really Plane Shift back and research to see what the hell is going on here. But...eh, you can get rezzed again, it's no big deal. You teleport again, 900 miles in the exact same direction. You should be 3600 miles up, possibly as much as 4100 miles up. You're still in water - enough water to instantly kill you from pressure if you were killable. Eventually your buff spell runs out and you're no longer pressure-immune and you die.

What's happened is that 1000 years ago, an Artificer thought it would be funny to make a spell clock immune to pressure damage, and then have it spit out Gate spells that open holes to the Elemental Plane Of Water. An infinitely-large ocean has been draining into the ethereal for a millennia, and the only way you're going to escape is plane shifting at least 10000 miles away from where the Ethereal Earth would be. Guess now we know why ghosts are so lonely.

...

You give up on the Ethereal, and head for the Shadow plane that also mirrors the material. Your spell fizzles - probably a Forbiddance in just the wrong place. You try a couple more times for a nearby location, but they keep failing. You finally get fed up and burn a Wish scroll on it, because you really need to go there and you don't wanna deal with this nonsense. When you arrive, you immediately die again - once more, so fast and so blind that you don't even know what happened. Another rez, another total damage immunity, and you port back over. The air is so thick with overlapping abjurations that you can't actually see anything else...and they're all Forbiddance spells with various metamagic on them in various combos and alignments so that no one Forbiddance is identical to another (and thus, can overlap with other Forbiddance spells). They punched through your DC, you only succeeded on saves on a nat 20, and there were so many dealing damage that they'd instantly kill you if you weren't immortal.

What's happened here is that awhile back, some epic cleric of a cause (that cause being "**** planar travelers", apparently) started doing Reserves Of Strength'd (DMM-?) Persisted or Extended "Consumptive Field" (or the Greater version), and chaining them back to back so that by the time the first one ran out, the next one would still be giving absurd CL boosts. That cleric finally reached a point where they couldn't kill people fast enough to maintain more CL than they had (let's not do the math and just guess about CL 1 Sextillion). And then, using their stupid high CL, they started blanketing the planet in Forbiddance spells, twisting their own alignment as necessary to cast new ones. I took a quick look over viable metamagic feats, and if you've got the spell levels/MM reducers for it, you could cast Forbiddance 53,084,160 times. Millions of impossibly strong rolls vs your SR, millions of saves vs impossibly high DCs, and millions upon millions of damage dice. The non-Widened ones cover a sphere ~372,210,294 ft in radius, or ~70494 miles. The Widened ones cover a sphere with twice that radius.

All for whoever got mad enough to use a Wish to enter the Plane Of Shadow. How dare.

[Jervis]

I was more thinking like, the ocean at spawn, or how you basically have to go hundreds of miles away from spawn just to have a chance of getting to actually play minecraft in piece for five minutes without getting griefed by hackers, and your only chance of survival is that people don't get lucky and notice where you're building your base. That's basically what demiplane defense is going to be: prevent anybody from teleporting there directly, and then just hope nobody stumbles across you.



I'm just imagining the poor people who try to do it without knowing the danger that's been brewing there for 1000 years.

An excited lvl 9 caster who's finally picked up Plane Shift and wants to go talk with ghosts without them disappearing all the time. Plane Shift, and...you die immediately. It happened so fast that you're not even sure what did you in. Whatever, a friend rezzes you back on the material, and you try again, this time using some cheap nonsense to be immune to HP damage. You survive the Plane Shift, but you still can't see anything, and it feels like you're swimming. Darkvision lets you see a small circle around you, but there's nothing to see.

You realize you're going to need to start breathing soon or you'll die despite your damage immunity. That's an easy quick spell to solve, though. You cast Teleport to get another 900 miles up, just to be on the safe side. You're still in endless water, and you can feel the pressure trying and failing to instantly kill you. This happens twice more. You've got one 5th lvl slot left, you should really Plane Shift back and research to see what the hell is going on here. But...eh, you can get rezzed again, it's no big deal. You teleport again, 900 miles in the exact same direction. You should be 3600 miles up, possibly as much as 4100 miles up. You're still in water - enough water to instantly kill you from pressure if you were killable. Eventually your buff spell runs out and you're no longer pressure-immune and you die.

What's happened is that 1000 years ago, an Artificer thought it would be funny to make a spell clock immune to pressure damage, and then have it spit out Gate spells that open holes to the Elemental Plane Of Water. An infinitely-large ocean has been draining into the ethereal for a millennia, and the only way you're going to escape is plane shifting at least 10000 miles away from where the Ethereal Earth would be. Guess now we know why ghosts are so lonely.

...

You give up on the Ethereal, and head for the Shadow plane that also mirrors the material. Your spell fizzles - probably a Forbiddance in just the wrong place. You try a couple more times for a nearby location, but they keep failing. You finally get fed up and burn a Wish scroll on it, because you really need to go there and you don't wanna deal with this nonsense. When you arrive, you immediately die again - once more, so fast and so blind that you don't even know what happened. Another rez, another total damage immunity, and you port back over. The air is so thick with overlapping abjurations that you can't actually see anything else...and they're all Forbiddance spells with various metamagic on them in various combos and alignments so that no one Forbiddance is identical to another (and thus, can overlap with other Forbiddance spells). They punched through your DC, you only succeeded on saves on a nat 20, and there were so many dealing damage that they'd instantly kill you if you weren't immortal.

What's happened here is that awhile back, some epic cleric of a cause (that cause being "**** planar travelers", apparently) started doing Reserves Of Strength'd (DMM-?) Persisted or Extended "Consumptive Field" (or the Greater version), and chaining them back to back so that by the time the first one ran out, the next one would still be giving absurd CL boosts. That cleric finally reached a point where they couldn't kill people fast enough to maintain more CL than they had (let's not do the math and just guess about CL 1 Sextillion). And then, using their stupid high CL, they started blanketing the planet in Forbiddance spells, twisting their own alignment as necessary to cast new ones. I took a quick look over viable metamagic feats, and if you've got the spell levels/MM reducers for it, you could cast Forbiddance 53,084,160 times. Millions of impossibly strong rolls vs your SR, millions of saves vs impossibly high DCs, and millions upon millions of damage dice. The non-Widened ones cover a sphere ~372,210,294 ft in radius, or ~70494 miles. The Widened ones cover a sphere with twice that radius.

All for whoever got mad enough to use a Wish to enter the Plane Of Shadow. How dare.

Turns out the gods just don’t like munchkins and made a cosmic law that all high level rules abuse must be done outside of the material plane. As such everywhere else is a mess of wards, arbitrary CL spells, and Ice Assassins of Pun Pun going around killing each other after their masters long sense died of old age.

[Raven777]

"Functional Gods" like pun-pun have been ruled out for the sake of talking about anything other than a universe that houses nothing but to a single pun-pun or universes populated exclusively by variants of pun-pun.

Oh, but that's only the terminal state of a Dark Forest. The intermediery state is quite more interesting: a scattering of very quiet, very deadly, very prepared people. That's what I claim that world has potential to devolve into. Nobody needs to reach "functional God" levels for sufficiently optimized civilizations or individuals to become existential threats to each other. Your very first example is a Fel-Drain Locate-City Bomb!

That's a society where anyone can cook a nuke in their shed. So you'll either a) need regulators to hide or regulate that knowledge and come down hard on any transgressor and/or b) everyone is crazy prepared with backup clones stashed in secure demi-planes and/or c) everyone important conducts business through Astral Projections and nobody ever risks their own person.

[Maat Mons]

One issue with mass-training Uberchargers is that there's no way to get all the pieces in place before level 6. That's quite a lot of training to invest in forces that will never be good for anything besides dealing damage.

If you want to get everything, including proper swift-action movement, in by level 6, I think you're pretty much locked into the following build:

Human Barbarian (Lion Spirit Totem, Whirling Frenzy) 1 / Paladin of Freedom 4 / Fighter 1
Feats
H: Power Attack
1: Travel Devotion
3: Improved Bull Rush
6: Leap Attack
F1: Shock Trooper

I guess you don't strictly need Whirling Frenzy, but what kind of optimized Barbarian doesn't have it? There are also some other ACFs you could slap on without any meaningful change in power.

Once you hit 6th level, you're a full member of the Leonian Liberators, an order of Paladins of Freedom sponsored by Sharess. They give you a two-handed weapon of your choice enhanced with the Valorous ability, and send you out into the world to heedlessly fling yourself at the forces of Evil.

If you can deliberately train people to have Flaws, you could expand this to other races too, like Cat Hengeyokai, Shifter, Tibbit, or some sort of homebrew Nekomimi. Just don't pick Curious as the flaw you train people with. It's far to likely to get them killed.

[Mechalich]

What's happened is that 1000 years ago, an Artificer thought it would be funny to make a spell clock immune to pressure damage, and then have it spit out Gate spells that open holes to the Elemental Plane Of Water. An infinitely-large ocean has been draining into the ethereal for a millennia, and the only way you're going to escape is plane shifting at least 10000 miles away from where the Ethereal Earth would be. Guess now we know why ghosts are so lonely.

Infinities are funny. Draining an infinitely large ocean into an infinitely large space won't ever fill it up. More practically, the Planes have correction mechanisms embedded into them both lawful ones that actively fix things like Inevitables, and chaotic ones like Slaadi who wander around and break stuff so that complex attempts to modify the system are reduced to status quo ante, and these forces are infinitely numerous. This is the central thesis of Planescape - you cannot change anything through power, you can only change things through meaning.

Really in order for Prime Material Worlds to exist at all, rather than facing functionally instantaneous conquest by some extraplanar power the minute anyone opens an extraplanar portal for the first time, active divine intervention is required (ex. in order for Sigil to exist, the writers had to create an infinitely powerful un-statted plot device). It is implied, throughout various D&D materials, that the pantheon of any given Crystal Sphere have arrangements with the extraplanar powers that be (Asmodeus, etc.) about just how much meddling is allowed in a given world, and that if the deities weaken too much worlds can, and do, get conquered outright.

However, fluff of this nature is all built around 1e and 2e paradigms, not the capabilities of Optimized 3.PF full casters, which involve too much gonzo madness to be measured.


Oh, but that's only the terminal state of a Dark Forest. The intermediery state is quite more interesting: a scattering of very quiet, very deadly, very prepared people. That's what I claim that world has potential to devolve into. Nobody needs to reach "functional God" levels for sufficiently optimized civilizations or individuals to become existential threats to each other. Your very first example is a Fel-Drain Locate-City Bomb!

That's a society where anyone can cook a nuke in their shed. So you'll either a) need regulators to hide or regulate that knowledge and come down hard on any transgressor and/or b) everyone is crazy prepared with backup clones stashed in secure demi-planes and/or c) everyone important conducts business through Astral Projections and nobody ever risks their own person.

The Dark Forest relies on deep space's tyranny of distance, signal attenuation, and the speed of light limit in order to function. No such limits apply in D&D, high level people can preemptively detect everyone capable of threatening them. This means that, within a bounded space the first person to unlock overwhelming destructive power can identify and destroy anyone else who is close to doing so before they breach that threshold. The first person to achieve God-Wizard status in a given world can therefore maintain that status forever so long as they are not attacked from without.

This suggests that the multiverse ends up divided into endless bubbles each converted to the utopian vision of the first person(s) to unlock 'infinite power' within them. This is actually similar to how in some survival games individual servers are dominated by single clans forever (especially clans that cheat, which is functionally what epic magic does). Intriguingly, in such games the overpowered clans/guilds tend to eventually get bored and leave and be replaced by some other group that claims the space, which might represent the civilizational cycle in optimized D&D. God-Wizard A rules for thousands of years until they decide to up-sticks and wander the multiverse, a brief chaotic scramble results until God-Wizard B emerges and reinstates rule under new parameters, and then when God-Wizard B gets bored the cycle repeats.

This suggests all D&D campaigns unfold in the brief window of opportunity after the almighty overlord abandons their holdings.

[Promethean]

What's happened is that 1000 years ago, an Artificer thought it would be funny to make a spell clock immune to pressure damage, and then have it spit out Gate spells that open holes to the Elemental Plane Of Water. An infinitely-large ocean has been draining into the ethereal for a millennia, and the only way you're going to escape is plane shifting at least 10000 miles away from where the Ethereal Earth would be. Guess now we know why ghosts are so lonely.

...
All for whoever got mad enough to use a Wish to enter the Plane Of Shadow. How dare.

Honestly, I think if an artificer or cleric tried this then they'd have to deal with angry dragons and genies of similar powerlevel using wish to "return to sender" their shenanigans.

I give it 5 days tops before that artificer is randomly teleported to the elemental plane of water with their spell clock and its total output over its lifetime stuffed inside its master's chest cavity.

I imagine the explosion would be a sight to behold.

[AvatarVecna]

Infinities are funny. Draining an infinitely large ocean into an infinitely large space won't ever fill it up.

I'm aware. Only so much can drain so quickly, and it's been draining for a finite time. That's why the next-to-last sentence is the section you quoted specifies that you'd need to go 10000 miles up to break the surface of the ocean. The "infinite" ocean I mentioned is the one on the elemental plane of water, where a large-but-finite amount has drained into the Ethereal plane and created a pure water planet a little smaller than neptune. With the Ethereal Earth somewhere at the center.

[AvatarVecna]

Honestly, I think if an artificer or cleric tried this then they'd have to deal with angry dragons and genies of similar powerlevel using wish to "return to sender" their shenanigans.

I give it 5 days tops before that artificer is randomly teleported to the elemental plane of water with their spell clock and its total output over its lifetime stuffed inside its master's chest cavity.

I imagine the explosion would be a sight to behold.

Honestly it's a lot of effort for one person to flood/forbid a whole plane like that, but it's also not that huge a deal either. If you can survive the damage (better stats, or just damage immunity), there's only one spell clock, and while there's 50 million forbiddance spells, they're literally everywhere. A single disjunction will shut down the forbiddance entirely, I think? And it'll end that spell clock spitting out more gates. You'd need to do something to drain the water somewhere, but since there's lots of infinite planes, you could probably just open a whole bunch of gates to the Astral and call it a day. A few million wyrms could knock that out in an afternoon.

And of course, since we're already considering NI CL nonsense, it must be considered that a simple way of solving the problem would be judicious use of Teleport Through Time. Everything gets infinitely more complex when time travel becomes a casual tool in the planar toolbox.

[Mechalich]

I'm aware. Only so much can drain so quickly, and it's been draining for a finite time. That's why the next-to-last sentence is the section you quoted specifies that you'd need to go 10000 miles up to break the surface of the ocean. The "infinite" ocean I mentioned is the one on the elemental plane of water, where a large-but-finite amount has drained into the Ethereal plane and created a pure water planet a little smaller than neptune. With the Ethereal Earth somewhere at the center.

Ah, but the Ethereal doesn't function according to real world laws of physics. If you open a gate from the Elemental Plane of Water into the Ethereal, water does indeed rush through that gate, as a column of water the shape of the gate that spews out forever. It disperses a little and forms a foggy cloud around the edges, but otherwise you just have a tube of water spewing endlessly off into the billowing potentiality of the Ethereal.

[Promethean]

Honestly it's a lot of effort for one person to flood/forbid a whole plane like that, but it's also not that huge a deal either. If you can survive the damage (better stats, or just damage immunity), there's only one spell clock, and while there's 50 million forbiddance spells, they're literally everywhere. A single disjunction will shut down the forbiddance entirely, I think? And it'll end that spell clock spitting out more gates. You'd need to do something to drain the water somewhere, but since there's lots of infinite planes, you could probably just open a whole bunch of gates to the Astral and call it a day. A few million wyrms could knock that out in an afternoon.

Yeah, it wouldn't take much more than teleporting some voidstone to the location of the spellclock to fix things before it spins out of control, but that doesn't have any style or dramatic flare.

Exploding an artificer with his own invention also has a level of karmatic justice.



And of course, since we're already considering NI CL nonsense...

I'd rather not. As per original post: near infinite and arbitrary stat inflation strats always lead to turning a setting into an excercize in "what does pun-pun want?"

Honestly, I think that's ultimately less interesting than building around practical or Limited theoretical optimization.

[Raven777]

This suggests all D&D campaigns unfold in the brief window of opportunity after the almighty overlord abandons their holdings.

You could make a religion setting out of that!

[icefractal]

One issue with mass-training Uberchargers is that there's no way to get all the pieces in place before level 6. That's quite a lot of training to invest in forces that will never be good for anything besides dealing damage. If you just want soldiers who can deal a lot of damage, you get one really good Ubercharger and make a bunch of Simulacra/IAs. Even assuming no cheats and you're paying full price, it's pretty cheap for what you get.

If the resources used are meaningfully limited, then you might get more efficient results by starting a training program, but only in the long term. And so you probably still want the instant-army in the mean time.

Of course, if you're going extremely RAW, there's the "School of Hard Knocks" method someone came up with a while ago - if sparring counts as an encounter which gives XP, then a group of students sparring every day can level up amazingly fast.

[AvatarVecna]

Ah, but the Ethereal doesn't function according to real world laws of physics. If you open a gate from the Elemental Plane of Water into the Ethereal, water does indeed rush through that gate, as a column of water the shape of the gate that spews out forever. It disperses a little and forms a foggy cloud around the edges, but otherwise you just have a tube of water spewing endlessly off into the billowing potentiality of the Ethereal.

That's only if it's a single gate that's open forever. What we have is a series of gates, each open for about 2 minutes. Put two of them facing each other, and the waters will crash into each other. The "Ethereal Earth" might not have mass, and thus not have gravity, but the water does. As long as you dont just let the water shoot out into space unobstructed, the water from the first few hundred gates crashing into each other will create a small moon of water to start out. From there, remaining gates will just be flooding into that moon of water that's all already floating in the same place.

Of course, if we wanna get physics involved, some very strange things start happening. XKCD did a "What If" (https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/) where a portal opened from Earth to Mars. The pressure calc'd was pretty impressive because the hole was so small and the oceans were so deep...but this hole in not only smaller, it's "draining" from the infinite ocean of the Plane Of Elemental Water. Does that mean infinite water pressure? I'm sure there's some dumb nonsense that could be done with that.

[Promethean]

That's only if it's a single gate that's open forever. What we have is a series of gates, each open for about 2 minutes. Put two of them facing each other, and the waters will crash into each other. The "Ethereal Earth" might not have mass, and thus not have gravity, but the water does. As long as you dont just let the water shoot out into space unobstructed, the water from the first few hundred gates crashing into each other will create a small moon of water to start out. From there, remaining gates will just be flooding into that moon of water that's all already floating in the same place.

Of course, if we wanna get physics involved, some very strange things start happening. XKCD did a "What If" (https://what-if.xkcd.com/53/) where a portal opened from Earth to Mars. The pressure calc'd was pretty impressive because the hole was so small and the oceans were so deep...but this hole in not only smaller, it's "draining" from the infinite ocean of the Plane Of Elemental Water. Does that mean infinite water pressure? I'm sure there's some dumb nonsense that could be done with that.

The physics for this don't really check out with d&d lore. Objects that enter the the near ethereal keep their physics because the near ethereal mimics the physics of the plane you enter the near ethereal from, but thing change when you go further and enter the deep ethereal.

Objects and creatures in the deep ethereal stop operating by prime material physics entirely. Creatures can't even move from cause and effect alone, instead relying on intent and force of will. Objects left unattended by a conscious creature dissolve into the elemental possibility that the ethereal mists are made of.

Essentially, only the immediate reflection of the plane in the ethereal would flood, starting at ground level and ending at the atmospheric surface. Any water past that would break down into fundumental particles.


A "water planet" larger than the prime would be impossible. The water in the ethereal wouldn't even have its own gravity because object in the ethereal don't Have their original physics, they "borrow" the physics of nearby planes by being close enough to still interact.

[AvatarVecna]

The physics for this don't really check out with d&d lore. Objects that enter the the near ethereal keep their physics because the near ethereal mimics the physics of the plane you enter the near ethereal from, but thing change when you go further and enter the deep ethereal.

Objects and creatures in the deep ethereal stop operating by prime material physics entirely. Creatures can't even move from cause and effect alone, instead relying on intent and force of will. Objects left unattended by a conscious creature dissolve into the elemental possibility that the ethereal mists are made of.

Essentially, only the immediate reflection of the plane in the ethereal would flood, starting at ground level and ending at the atmospheric surface. Any water past that would break down into fundumental particles.


A "water planet" larger than the prime would be impossible. The water in the ethereal wouldn't even have its own gravity because object in the ethereal don't Have their original physics, they "borrow" the physics of nearby planes by being close enough to still interact.

That's fair. So we'd end up with an ocean the actual size of the Earth, rather than extending out for thousands of miles. Still gonna really suck for people who popped in even 5 miles beneath the surface, although now that's only half of them because the other half appeared 5-500 miles in the wrong direction. Ah well.

[Promethean]

That's fair. So we'd end up with an ocean the actual size of the Earth,

*surface and atmosphere of the planet.

Things in the near ethereal interact with physical objects as normal unless they're a Creature actively Trying to pass through them(because the ethereal is a plane that functions off intent). The water would just take up the space that air normally does.

It likely wouldn't even have high pressure because gravity is less powerful than intent there and water has no will of its own. More annoying than dangerous really.

[AvatarVecna]

*surface and atmosphere of the planet.

Things in the near ethereal interact with physical objects as normal unless they're a Creature actively Trying to pass through them(because the ethereal is a plane that functions off intent). The water would just take up the space that air normally does.

It likely wouldn't even have high pressure because gravity is less powerful than intent there and water has no will of its own. More annoying than dangerous really.

It's less powerful the further out you get, but that close to earth it's still gonna have some strong pull. It won't be as strong as normal, but I don't think it'll be so weak that you can ignore it. You've still got a planet worth of water under you that's pulling at the ~100 miles of water above you. Normally, pressure damage accumulates 1d6 per 100 ft below the surface you are. Just how much weaker should the gravity be? 5280d6 if you're standing on what would in another plane be the earth's surface. That number can be made much smaller, but I don't think it would be made smaller enough to be non-deadly unless you were exceptionally powerful or already immune to pressure.

(Also, slightly different counterpoint: if anything was living in the planet-worth of water that got pulled from another plane - like water elementals - "drown wizards" or "crush wizards to death with water pressure" might be among their points of intent. but we have no idea how many got brought over, or how badly they wanna murder people, so that's a moot point.)

(Also, slight counterpoint to my own argument: the pressure rules are really stupid, because the damage threatens you once per minute of exposure to that level of pressure, and it's a DC 15 Fort save to not be hurt, +1 DC per additional minute spent at that pressure level. So if you teleported to the bottom of the ocean, it would be a full minute before it could even theoretically hurt you. Which is kinda stupid.)

[Promethean]

(Also, slight counterpoint to my own argument: the pressure rules are really stupid, because the damage threatens you once per minute of exposure to that level of pressure, and it's a DC 15 Fort save to not be hurt, +1 DC per additional minute spent at that pressure level. So if you teleported to the bottom of the ocean, it would be a full minute before it could even theoretically hurt you. Which is kinda stupid.)

Yeah, d&d isn't exactly the best place for modeling physics. The rules for it are bananas

Ever heard of the "peasant rail gun"?

[AvatarVecna]

Yeah, d&d isn't exactly the best place for modeling physics. The rules for it are bananas

Ever heard of the "peasant rail gun"?

I have indeed. Quite silly. Maybe I should stop murdering catgirls. :smalltongue::smalltongue:

[Quertus]

Regarding preventing planar travel… how long does it take to set up those septillion (or whatever) castings of ____ on the plane of shadow? Contrast with the time it took for life to evolve from single-celled organisms into engineers, mathematicians, and programmers capable of traveling to other planets(planes). Even if this caster had genocided the world back to single-celled organisms, would it be reasonable to expect that they had time to so enchant the plane of shadow before the scenario of a planetary visitor occurred?

[AvatarVecna]

Regarding preventing planar travel… how long does it take to set up those septillion (or whatever) castings of ____ on the plane of shadow? Contrast with the time it took for life to evolve from single-celled organisms into engineers, mathematicians, and programmers capable of traveling to other planets(planes). Even if this caster had genocided the world back to single-celled organisms, would it be reasonable to expect that they had time to so enchant the plane of shadow before the scenario of a planetary visitor occurred?

53,084,160. That's million, not septillion. Septillion would be 53,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Big difference.

Two-thirds of those (35,389,440) are cast with Rapid Spell, and so go off in one round. The rest (17,694,720) go off in 6 rounds. Casting them all takes 141,557,760 rounds, not counting whatever time for regaining spell slots. That's 14,155,776 minutes, or ~235,930 hours, or 9,831 days, or ~27 years of casting. Since you're a caster, you could use spell shenanigans to mimic planes with weird time traits and cast/recover spells faster. Casting more spells before you need to rest is a good move as well - boosting casting stat using epic items fueled by looting an entire plane. It's possible that the cleric has somehow gotten ahold of Teleport Through Time, and was just in a million places at once, all specifically coordinated so no cleric could see another. Then they could knock it out in a couple weeks, even without any super-Wis shenanigans.

[Jervis]

53,084,160. That's million, not septillion. Septillion would be 53,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Big difference.

Two-thirds of those (35,389,440) are cast with Rapid Spell, and so go off in one round. The rest (17,694,720) go off in 6 rounds. Casting them all takes 141,557,760 rounds, not counting whatever time for regaining spell slots. That's 14,155,776 minutes, or ~235,930 hours, or 9,831 days, or ~27 years of casting. Since you're a caster, you could use spell shenanigans to mimic planes with weird time traits and cast/recover spells faster. Casting more spells before you need to rest is a good move as well - boosting casting stat using epic items fueled by looting an entire plane. It's possible that the cleric has somehow gotten ahold of Teleport Through Time, and was just in a million places at once, all specifically coordinated so no cleric could see another. Then they could knock it out in a couple weeks, even without any super-Wis shenanigans.

Also if that cleric is a Illumian that uses strength for bonus spells then consumptive field can give them an arbitrary number of spell slots assuming they can keep it up all night (persist) and kill a lot of creatures with the initial casting (drown a ant hill).

[AvatarVecna]

Also if that cleric is a Illumian that uses strength for bonus spells then consumptive field can give them an arbitrary number of spell slots assuming they can keep it up all night (persist) and kill a lot of creatures with the initial casting (drown a ant hill).

True. I mean, this particular cleric was already using Consumptive Field for the CL boost in my initial write-up - may as well get something from the Str boost too.

[Promethean]

True. I mean, this particular cleric was already using Consumptive Field for the CL boost in my initial write-up - may as well get something from the Str boost too.

This might put a hole in your plan, but their's an argument to be had that consumptive field doesn't stack because of the "from the same source" clause when it comes to the rules for bonuses. The max you can get in this case would be 4x caster level between Consumptive field and greater consumptive field.

Still doable, but it will take A Lot longer.

Edit: As per SRD:


Same Effect More than Once in Different Strengths:
In cases when two or more identical spells are operating in the same area or on the same target, but at different strengths, only the best one applies.

[Jervis]

This might put a hole in your plan, but their's an argument to be had that consumptive field doesn't stack because of the "from the same source" clause when it comes to the rules for bonuses. The max you can get in this case would be 4x caster level between Consumptive field and greater consumptive field.

Still doable, but it will take A Lot longer.

Edit: As per SRD:

Alternating between the two lets you buff one with the other to eventually climb up the arbitrary CL latter

[Promethean]

Alternating between the two lets you buff one with the other to eventually climb up the arbitrary CL latter

Maybe, If they stack. Greater/normal consumptive field might not stack because the wording in greater consumptive field "works as consumptive field".

I went back to read the spells to make sure, but I've noticed that they both say "original" caster level, not caster level. It's vague enough that it could mean the "caster level you had last round" or "caster level before applying Consumptive field". Which would max out both at +15 including cross-stacking.

When the optimization is built on a foundation that vague, it might be better to say that the cleric in question is instead using Hathran circle magic + Consumptive stacking to get at least 80 on the CL. I'm sure I remember a version of the "red-wizard handbook" that hit 200+ CL without consumptive field loops and could be adapted to a divine hathran build.

Hathran also had the bonus of being able to use Acorn of far travel to get the same Cast as spontanious/learn as prepared caster stuff normally reserved for Beholder mages.

[AvatarVecna]

Firstly, my original write-up was using DMM persist for arbitrary duration and Reserves Of Strength to uncap the CL bonuses limit.

Secondly, they don't need to stack bonuses to climb to NI. The second spell benefits from being cast at a higher CL because it changes, and the third from the second, and so on. The second spell doesn't arbitrarily lose duration just because you lost the first CL buff - the CL you had when you cast it determines those things.

1) You cast CF at CL 13. You build to CL +6.
2) You cast GCF at CL 19. End CF. You build to CL +9.
3) You cast CF at CL 22. End GCF. You build to CL +11.
4) You cast GCF at CL 24. End CF. You build to CL +12.
5) You cast CF at CL 25. End GCF. You build to CL +12.

Let's up the ante and start at CL 40.

1) You cast CF at CL 40. You build to CL +20.
2) You cast GCF at CL 60. End CF. You build to CL +30.
3) You cast CF at CL 70. End GCF. You build to CL +35.
4) You cast GCF at CL 75. End CF. You build to CL +37.
5) You cast CF at CL 77. End GCF. You build to CL +38.
6) You cast GCF at CL 78. End CF. You build to CL +39.
7) You cast CF at CL 79. End GCF. You build to CL +39.

This is why the non-stacking combo needs Reserves Of Strength: if you aren't limited to +50% CL each cycle, you can vastly increase your gains. Let's do it again, at 1 kill per round.

1) cast 13, build +13.
2) cast 26, build +26.
3) Cast 39, build +39.
4) Cast 52, build +52.
5) Repeat at +13/round until you run out of slots or reach CL 1 trillion.

Obviously this version either needs endless slots pre-CF, or we need enough duration to get sleep and reprepare spells, or we need arbitrarily long duration through some other method. Illumian is still a good option, but so is epic. Since we want NI slots after the CL 1 trillion, let's go Illumian Cleric 40 who's casting one per day persisted or extended, with Reserves Of Strength.

1) Cast CL 40 (persisted), build CL +14400.
2) Cast CL 14440 (extended), build CL +28880.
3) Cast CL 28920 (extended), build CL +57840.
4) Cast CL 57880 (extended), build CL +115760.
5) and so on.

Each of those spells lasts at least a day so you can sleep and reprepare spells with your new stupid-high Str thanks to Illumian. If I repeated the above to step 26, he'd be casting at CL 966 billion or so. Of course, building that at 1 kill per round would take some 2 trillion days (5 billion years), which we don't have time for.

Assuming we Widen it as well (why not, deep epic anyway), we can have 2400 cubes within range at a time. 1000 fine creatures per cube without squeezing, that makes up to 2.4 million kills per round. This gets us to CL 1 trillion (which takes roughly 2 trillion kills given the methods we're using) in about 1000 years instead of 5 billion. That's short enough that it's plausible somebody started setting this up forever ago.

Of course, if CF and GCF don't count as the same source, their bonuses can stack with each other and this gets a lot easier. But CL 1 trillion is perfectly plausible if they don't stack, because the first spell's CL still boosts the second spell's duration.

[AvatarVecna]

Of course, if we wanna really cheese it, Reserves Of Strength on Greater Consumptive Field can be made into a Permanent Emanating. That doesn't even require duration stacking - that one spell will just eventually get you arbitrary CL over the course of your life.

[Promethean]

Firstly, my original write-up was using DMM persist for arbitrary duration and Reserves Of Strength to uncap the CL bonuses limit.

Secondly, they don't need to stack bonuses to climb to NI. The second spell benefits from being cast at a higher CL because it changes, and the third from the second, and so on. The second spell doesn't arbitrarily lose duration just because you lost the first CL buff - the CL you had when you cast it determines those things.

Oooh. Clerics are OP.

In other news, the Sun rose today.

[AvatarVecna]

Oooh. Clerics are OP.

In other news, the Sun rose today.

Yeah. I mean, Reserves Of Strength has an incredibly obvious RAW reading, and an incredibly obvious way it was intended to work, and they're very different from each other. RoS being poorly written breaks lots of things wide open. Cleric 13 having potential access to NI str and CL is stupid strong.

Edit: Cleric 7, my bad.

[Promethean]

Yeah. I mean, Reserves Of Strength has an incredibly obvious RAW reading, and an incredibly obvious way it was intended to work, and they're very different from each other. RoS being poorly written breaks lots of things wide open. Cleric 13 having potential access to NI str and CL is stupid strong.

Edit: Cleric 7, my bad.

Honestly, might want to put that under wish and Epic spells/powers as "things so OP they let casters mold the setting to their Will". The fact that it takes 1 spell and 1 feat, both of which you'd want to take anyway, is just icing on the cake.

If you do like the guy above said and switch your casting stat to strength(Like with the Lost Tradition feat), you can gain Infinite spell slots because your strength stat is effectively infinite.

Okay yeah, this is straight pun-pun levels.

[sreservoir]

Yeah. I mean, Reserves Of Strength has an incredibly obvious RAW reading, and an incredibly obvious way it was intended to work, and they're very different from each other. RoS being poorly written breaks lots of things wide open. Cleric 13 having potential access to NI str and CL is stupid strong.

Is this about the "You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell with this feat" line, where the broken reading is "You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of [a spell with this feat]" and the not-particularly broken reading is "You can [[exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell] with this feat]"?

I feel like one of these is both a plausible RAW reading and an obvious way it was intended to work and the other is ... a plausible reading, but one you'd have to choose by motivated reasoning after having the other one pointed out.

[Quertus]

Is this about the "You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell with this feat" line, where the broken reading is "You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of [a spell with this feat]" and the not-particularly broken reading is "You can [[exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell] with this feat]"?

I feel like one of these is both a plausible RAW reading and an obvious way it was intended to work and the other is ... a plausible reading, but one you'd have to choose by motivated reasoning after having the other one pointed out.

In what way are those two things you said supposedly different?

[AvatarVecna]

Is this about the "You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell with this feat" line, where the broken reading is "You can exceed the normal level-fixed limits of [a spell with this feat]" and the not-particularly broken reading is "You can [[exceed the normal level-fixed limits of a spell] with this feat]"?

I feel like one of these is both a plausible RAW reading and an obvious way it was intended to work and the other is ... a plausible reading, but one you'd have to choose by motivated reasoning after having the other one pointed out.

Reserves Of Strength has two effects:

1) A slight CL boost, in exchange for either spending a few rounds stunned, or taking some nonlethal damage.
2) You get to exceed the CL-based limits of the spell.

The obvious RAW reading is that 2 applies to your CL no matter what is boosting it, full stop. If you have CL 15, and you cast Fireball with this feat at full power, your CL counts as 18 and the spell deals 18d6 damage. If you have CL 15 and a Consumptive Field boost CL by 7 points, and you cast another Fireball at full power, your CL counts as 25 and the spell deals 25d6.

The obvious RAIntended reading is...2 is only supposed to apply to the CL boost from 1. Nothing else gets to break the CL caps on your spells. Just this feat.

EDIT: So to be clear, the parsing question you asked is exactly the reason.

EDIT: Incidentally, clearing this up wouldn't have required much change to the text. The example is a wizard who hasn't hit cap using the feat to bypass cap. If the wizard was already past cap (say, wizard 12), we would then see the example show him dealing either 13d6 (10 cap, +3 from feat) or 15d6 (12 CL, +3 from feat).