Optimizing a Setting: Tweaks to make it work.

[Promethean]

Revisiting a series of threads for how a D&D setting would work if the inhabitants were semi-aware of optimization:

Clarification: The idea proposed 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.

Basically, the various societies in said world were able to figure out the "mechanics" by trial and error. They've gravitated toward improving magic/technology to improve their race/group's standard of living, and make efforts to standardize class education/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. It's a setting where optimization organically grew out of the circumstances as a form of technology.


Note: Inhabitants have semi-unlimited limited access to any material from any setting-specific books or *3rd party sources, including various production cost reducers, non-standard magic item types, and variant rules. By 3rd party I mostly mean the published 3rd party companies, leaving out out homebrew(even balanced homebrew), because anyone can homebrew anything and making an exceptions list would make things complicated.


Now question: What new rules are necessary to prevent inevitable infinity glitches or arbitrary Loops if this setting was left to run like a simulated computer program?

Things I've thought of:

Virtual Size(inspired from immortals handbook): Basically, for every +8 strength a character has above their species average(10 for humans), they go up 1 "virtual" size category. Each virtual size gives -2 DEX, +4 CON, increases their natural armor by 1, and allows them to use weapons 1 size category larger. These bonuses have no cap, so a Cancer mage with festering anger or a cleric abusing consumptive field + reserves of strength will quickly end up helpless Coup-de-Grace targets from DEX loss
Caster Boost Limit: Casters cannot stack caster level increases above twice their base.
Sarrukh have Rules: Manipulate form now functions off the monster creation rules in Dark Sun: Lifeshapers Handbook from Athas<dot>org + Legacy magic item creation rules(for SP and SU abilities)
Warshaper Limit: Warshapers have a Limit to the number of natural attacks they have based on the shape of their current form. For each Head or Limb they can have 1 of each type of natural attack. They can have multiple different attacks on the same limbs(so they can have an absurd number of Nat attacks if they want, but they can't have Infinite attacks.)
Action Limit: No player or NPC can take a number of actions in a round higher than their first initiative roll for that round. If a spell, magic item, or other effect would give them extra actions above this, it has no effect.(basically, no infinite action psionics or perpetual time-stop. A user can still make A Lot of actions, but not Infinite actions.)
More than Dead: Creatures that go below "Dead" in hit points(0 for undead/constructs, -10, or their CON with some feats) gain the "Shredded" status effect. Shredded creatures have All of their ability scores reduced to -(non-ability) and cannot make any actions or die rolls until brought above "Dead" in hit-points.

[Quertus]

Warshaper Limit: Warshapers have a Limit to the number of natural attacks they have based on the shape of their current form. For each Head or Limb they can have 1 of each type of natural attack. They can have multiple different attacks on the same limbs(so they can have an absurd number of Nat attacks if they want, but they can't have Infinite attacks.)
Action Limit: No player or NPC can take a number of actions in a round higher than their first initiative roll for that round. If a spell, magic item, or other effect would give them extra actions above this, it has no effect.(basically, no infinite action psionics or perpetual time-stop. A user can still make A Lot of actions, but not Infinite actions.)
More than Dead: Creatures that go below "Dead" in hit points(0 for undead/constructs, -10, or their CON with some feats) gain the "Shredded" status effect. Shredded creatures have All of their ability scores reduced to -(non-ability) and cannot make any actions or die rolls until brought above "Dead" in hit-points.
[/LIST]

The infinite crit fisher also gets infinite attacks. The d2 Crusader gets infinite damage.

Fast Time planes, Reverse time planes, and outright time travel allow more / infinite actions.

What is the point of “more than dead”? What problem is this trying to solve?

[icefractal]

For this kind of whole-setting consideration, I think you'll need to consider the basic foundations, not just the edge cases. Off hand, some of the big ones:

What Resources Matter?
Sans house rules, the answer is "very few of them". Not gold, not XP for components, maybe XP for levels (depending on how that works; see below), not magic items, not non-advancing (but very powerful) minions, not raw materials, not physical space, not even time (fast-time planes). The only things that a caster can't create ex-nihilo are artifacts and minions who are (eventually) capable of surpassing all existing people (because merely reaching 20th level? meh, got an Ice Assassin for that)

For your world, you probably want to make some of these actually be limited, which will require at least some amount of house-rules. Some would be easier than others - to make Gold truly limited you'd need to change a ton of things, where-as to make Time limited you just need to get rid of fast-time planes above a certain speed. This leads into ...


Where Does XP Come From?
This is pretty vague even for PCs, much less for a whole world where people are trying to optimize. Can societies super-level all their members by adopting a tradition of "Daily Sparring Hour"? If sparring isn't "real" enough, what if it was to the death but with Revivify on hand? Or appeared to be to-the-death using illusions but really wasn't? Or if the losers were punished in some way? Or if your aggregate score over the year determined your status in society for the next year?

Or maybe XP isn't just from any form of effort, it's a resource that's generally obtained by taking it from other people. There's a setting that's been posted on here - "World of Prime" IIRC - that runs with that approach, and as a result of that change alone it makes major differences in the setting and gameplay.

One idea that I was considering is that XP is constantly produced by true planes (not demiplanes) and absorbed by sapient creatures on those planes. The rate varies somewhat from person to person, and would depend on activity (nothing, studying, training, life-or-death situations) and also on proximity to ley-lines, with a few people being "Unanchored" - meaning they get the maximum leyline bonus whether they're near one or not (my attempt to square the fast level-rate of PCs with a more sane rate for most of the setting).

So there are a lot of options, but you'll need to pick one and figure out what rules changes it necessitates.


How Much Can People Advance?
Both in terms of speed and in terms of maximum potential. Can every single person reach 20th level with sufficient training? Or do most cap out earlier? If you've got a society with abundant resources and the goal of every citizen reaching their maximum potential, what level is most of the populace?

The current model I'm working with (for my own thought experiments) is tiers:
Common (1st-4th) - everyone can reach 4th level with the proper support and motivation, as a result advanced societies are largely 4th level.
Uncommon (5th-8th) - people who can reach this are uncommon but still plentiful; similar to advanced specialists in the modern day. Still available for hire, in a decent-sized city.
Rare (9th-12th) - it's not that hard to find someone at this level (meeting them in person could be), but finding a specific type (like a mage who can teleport) may take some research, and they're not necessarily available for hire - more likely to be the ones running things, or to have a major position like "commander in chief of a nation's army".
Legendary (13th-16th) - there's not all that many even in the whole world, and the famous ones are world famous. You can't just go pay one to help you, you'd have to convince them your goals were worthwhile - after getting an audience in the first place.
Mythic (17th-20th) - so rare that many people don't think they exist. At a given time, there might be one of a given class, or there might not. Like maybe there was an 18th level Cleric a decade ago, but she's dead now and her successor is only 15th level.

[Promethean]

The infinite crit fisher also gets infinite attacks. The d2 Crusader gets infinite damage.

Fast Time planes, Reverse time planes, and outright time travel allow more / infinite actions.

I've never seen the "infinite crit fisher" build, how does it work?

for the Others, how about:


Chaos Limit: Aura of Chaos(stance) is limited to double the attacks base damage(same as a crit). Can stack with a crit for up to triple damage.
Out of Phase: Planes with different rates of time Cannot interact. A character in a plane cannot effect events in planes with different flows of time without entering said plane and allowing themselves to adjust to the new flow of time(minimum 1 round in new plane).
Multiverse Theory: Anything that moves back in time is transported to an identical parallel plane that is currently experiencing the moment the creature or item is seeking to alter. The creature or item's original plane is not changed and they will be forced to interact with alternate versions of themselves or the original issue they ran from base on the situation.




What is the point of “more than dead”? What problem is this trying to solve?

Omnifiscer is able to give itself infinite damage and infinite bonus to all rolls by inflicting infinite damage on itself and surviving that process by using the "Delay Death" spell.

Basically, "More than Dead" makes doing infinite damage to oneself render them entirely useless for the duration of "Delay Death", allow them to only able to die and resurrect after the spell ends.

[icefractal]

If you're trying to patch specific infinite-loop cases, I think you're missing the biggest one -

Any form of free-Wishes (which there are several ways to get) gives you unlimited minions each as powerful as the most powerful thing in the setting, and each loaded up with unlimited magic items and a full set of contingent spells.

Compared to that, what does patching the others do? There's an action limit? Ok, I just take one action, but I bring my 10 trillion minions to also take one action each. No d2 Crusader? Ok, I'll merely deal 35 trillion damage by each of those minions launching a 1d6 attack. Same applies to most of the others (although yes, Sarrukh limits are even more fundamental).

Even with limits, you'd want to make sure that the rules aren't encouraging a "the ideal empire is one ruler with free will, commanding as many magically-created minions as needed" approach - unless that's the type of setting you want.

[Promethean]

If you're trying to patch specific infinite-loop cases, I think you're missing the biggest one -

Any form of free-Wishes (which there are several ways to get) gives you unlimited minions each as powerful as the most powerful thing in the setting, and each loaded up with unlimited magic items and a full set of contingent spells.

Compared to that, what does patching the others do? There's an action limit? Ok, I just take one action, but I bring my 10 trillion minions to also take one action each. No d2 Crusader? Ok, I'll merely deal 35 trillion damage by each of those minions launching a 1d6 attack. Same applies to most of the others (although yes, Sarrukh limits are even more fundamental).

Even with limits, you'd want to make sure that the rules aren't encouraging a "the ideal empire is one ruler with free will, commanding as many magically-created minions as needed" approach - unless that's the type of setting you want.


For this kind of whole-setting consideration, I think you'll need to consider the basic foundations, not just the edge cases. Off hand, some of the big ones:

What Resources Matter?


Hmm, maybe I could take a note from Iron Kingdoms on this? A large portion of what makes things meaningless is the magic items loops and spells creating unlimited resources, so to nip that in the bud:


Cost of Magic: any time a magic, psion, etc. effect requires XP, the caster must take 1 HP of damage for every 20 xp spent. If the effect is permanent(say like magic item creation or the True Creation spell), then the HP cost is permanently removed from the caster's maximum HP pool and this can never be healed under any circumstance. If the effect is cast using an item, the item can be made to pay the HP damage from it's own hit points(though the user must still pay the normal xp cost unless the item is an intelligent construct with HD and an XP pool. Any HP or XP left over if the magic item doesn't have enough HP or XP to pay for the effect is paid by the user. If there is still more left over, the user's soul is consumed to help offset the difference. This prevent any kind of resurrection, including wish or miracle, save direct intervention by a god of death). If the xp Cost of an effect is waved for any reason, the HP damage is Not. There is no circumstance that will ever allow a user to wave the HP cost of an effect.


Now unlimited wishes will Never be a thing. I'll also resolve the weird "can you wish for artifacts thing" by saying artifacts cost infinite xp and hp do to being priceless.



Where Does XP Come From?

This one's easy: Souls and Emotions so powerful that they effect the Soul.

There are only 3 items that substitute for XP in 3.5, Souls(20 xp), Liquid Pain(3 xp), and Ambrosia(2 xp). As per the Magic Jar spell and Energy Drain, souls are also where class levels and xp are stored. So More XP and HD means stronger soul.

The way one acquires XP is either to kill something with a soul near to or greater than the power of the killer, or to experience something that effects the user deeply on an emotional level(thus strengthening their soul). Some creatures have souls that are just naturally more powerful than others(dragons are a prime example).



How Much Can People Advance?

Maximum potential is 20 for all humanoids that don't find some way to cheese above that and continue advancing.(prime example: acquire a template that adds HD like Lycanthrope and then "Do the Wight Thing" with thought bottles to turn your Lycan HD into class levels. Continue by finding new templates.)

However, there is a limited number of souls in the material plane and there are only so many things that can cause spiritual enlightenment(which aren't easy to acquire in the first place). The setting will eventually end up with a food "pyramid" with many low-HD creatures at the bottom and a few High HD creatures at the top simply from the resource limits. Most of the powerful creatures(level 15 + or HD 30+) will move out of the material plane for greater abundance of powerful creatures in the inner and outer planes.

You'd see a spread similar to what you suggested simply because of how resources are distributed.

[Saintheart]

The biggest, overwhelming alteration that knowledge of the setting could impart is the realisation that

(a) Everyone speaks one language in common. Definitively, everyone speaks Common. No need for translation, trade and information spread becomes much more efficient, similar concepts are available easily in the same tongue.

(b) Massive proportions of the population are literate. Even in a hamlet pretty well everybody bar some commoners and barbarians know how to read and write. This again makes information spread far more efficient and much faster as well.

Seriously, D&D as a medieval setting breaks outright just with these two features.

[Maat Mons]

That “Cost of Magic” thing makes Artificers sad. Really, it turns magic item creation into a horrifying fate forced onto people for the sake of societal advancement. Some questions also arise regarding cooperative magic item creation, or that one article from the WotC website about sharing XP costs. Makes me glad for Pathfinder, where XP costs just don’t exist.

As a bonus, permanent level loss doesn’t exist in Pathfinder either, not even on resurrection effects. And even a 20th-level character still gains XP from killing a rat.

But anyway, back to the dystopia you’ve crafted. Clearly, magic item mills mind-control the weak and disenfranchised, force them to gain levels in Artificer, and then work them until the dissolution of their souls producing the marvels that drive society forward. I don’t know why you thought making people’s lives the ultimate resource wasn’t going to be horrifying.

I think the lead candidate for most exploitable race under this rule is Midgard Dwarf (Frostburn, p124). Born with the innate ability to craft magic items, no other magical capabilities, and typing that makes them susceptible to Planar Binding. The trick is going to be figuring out how to breed them at scale, and keep any of them from ever gaining levels, and thus the might to oppose their masters.

[AvatarVecna]

How Much Can People Advance?
Both in terms of speed and in terms of maximum potential. Can every single person reach 20th level with sufficient training? Or do most cap out earlier? If you've got a society with abundant resources and the goal of every citizen reaching their maximum potential, what level is most of the populace?

The current model I'm working with (for my own thought experiments) is tiers:
Common (1st-4th) - everyone can reach 4th level with the proper support and motivation, as a result advanced societies are largely 4th level.
Uncommon (5th-8th) - people who can reach this are uncommon but still plentiful; similar to advanced specialists in the modern day. Still available for hire, in a decent-sized city.
Rare (9th-12th) - it's not that hard to find someone at this level (meeting them in person could be), but finding a specific type (like a mage who can teleport) may take some research, and they're not necessarily available for hire - more likely to be the ones running things, or to have a major position like "commander in chief of a nation's army".
Legendary (13th-16th) - there's not all that many even in the whole world, and the famous ones are world famous. You can't just go pay one to help you, you'd have to convince them your goals were worthwhile - after getting an audience in the first place.
Mythic (17th-20th) - so rare that many people don't think they exist. At a given time, there might be one of a given class, or there might not. Like maybe there was an 18th level Cleric a decade ago, but she's dead now and her successor is only 15th level.

If we're taking existing rules as laws of the universe, lvl 7 bare minimum, with lvl 9 as a more likely minimum (well sorta).

Toads are a fairly fast-breeding creature, and are started up as a CR 1/10 challenge. They are slow, easy to hit, easy to kill, and have no offensive options for direct damage (and even indirect ones like tripping you down stairs are basically impossible). If somebody capable of gaining XP were to kill 700 toads, they would be 7th lvl and no longer capable of gaining XP from any creature that isn't at least CR 1. Additionally, while there are no real guidelines on how frequently such a thing occurs, it is possible for a creature to possess the Elite Array instead of the standard array. This might he completely random, or it.might he a result of breeding the best creatures together for the best offspring; either way, if a 7th lvl character were to slay 67 elite toads, they would become 9th lvl (and no longer able to gain XP from CR 1 creatures). Alternatively, if you wished to reach lvl 9 from lvl 1 killing only elite toads, it would take 137 of them. This process can be done with other low CR fodder creatures, but most of them can fight back in some fashion, and it's rare they breed as fast as toads anyway.

Suppose we have a metropolis of 100000 adults. This will on average have 25000 children. Assuming they're all human, they reach adulthood at 15, and so 1/15th of them will become adults this year (~1700). To that end, the city needs about 1.2 million toads (and maybe 120k elite toads) produced each year to ensure the population can level properly. Toads sexually mature in 2-3 years, and lay in clutches that (while varying due to species and corcumstance) tend to have thousands of eggs. To quote an expert: "If every egg from one pair of toads survived to adulthood, and each toad lived for five years, and all of the eggs from their descendents survived, the entire surface of the earth would be covered in toads in fifteen years."

Having toad farms churning out a million toads per year is actually probably not that hard. In fact we probably want even more than that - partly for redundancy in case of sabotage, partly because some adults may backslide due to XP expenditure and need to top off.


If we're taking existing rules as laws of the universe, lvl 7 bare minimum, with lvl 9 as a more likely minimum (well sorta).

"Well sorta" is because none of this toad nonsense has to be done with toads. As long as it's easy to breed and raise and kill, you can set up a farm. I went with toads for two reasons. First, they're the best straightforward option: they breed quickly, can't fight, and can't escape. Bats don't breed as quick and can fly away, although at least they have no attacks. Rats breed quickly, but are hard to contain and can bite you.

The second reason is hard data: all the info on toad life cycles is a Google away, but most monsters don't have their entire life cycle painstakingly documented. You could theoretically make a farm of CR 10 creatures, and it only takes killing 8 of them to reach the previous "maximum" - and if you kill 134 instead, and reach the new maximum of lvl 18. Of course, that requires the society to have trial-and-errored their way into finding a CR 10 monster that can't fight back or run away, and breeds fast enough to supply the city with 14k-230k of them each year (depending on which max you wanna hit). Does such a monster exist? Would it be easy to trip over it through trial-and-error? Gut answer would be something silly like just slapping more and more templates on the toad, but most of those are gonna be hard to breed. Maybe instead of toads, we breed shriekers/elite shriekers? They can't fight back, and have even less mobility than toads, plus they don't remind people uncomfortably of their familiars. The only downside is, we have no idea how fast shriekers breed.

[Promethean]

That “Cost of Magic” thing makes Artificers sad. Really, it turns magic item creation into a horrifying fate forced onto people for the sake of societal advancement. Some questions also arise regarding cooperative magic item creation, or that one article from the WotC website about sharing XP costs. Makes me glad for Pathfinder, where XP costs just don’t exist.

As a bonus, permanent level loss doesn’t exist in Pathfinder either, not even on resurrection effects. And even a 20th-level character still gains XP from killing a rat.

But anyway, back to the dystopia you’ve crafted. Clearly, magic item mills mind-control the weak and disenfranchised, force them to gain levels in Artificer, and then work them until the dissolution of their souls producing the marvels that drive society forward. I don’t know why you thought making people’s lives the ultimate resource wasn’t going to be horrifying.

I think the lead candidate for most exploitable race under this rule is Midgard Dwarf (Frostburn, p124). Born with the innate ability to craft magic items, no other magical capabilities, and typing that makes them susceptible to Planar Binding. The trick is going to be figuring out how to breed them at scale, and keep any of them from ever gaining levels, and thus the might to oppose their masters.

Actually yeah, I'll give artificers a extra HP pool equal to crafting reserve/20.

Otherwise, enslaving creatures to build magic items is the default assumption anyway. Dedicated Wrights are already the backbone of most magic item factory builds I've seen.

As for xp Sharing cooperative creation, may as well let them share the HP loss as well.

[AvatarVecna]

Cost of Magic: any time a magic, psion, etc. effect requires XP, the caster must take 1 HP of damage for every 20 xp spent. If the effect is permanent(say like magic item creation or the True Creation spell), then the HP cost is permanently removed from the caster's maximum HP pool and this can never be healed under any circumstance. If the effect is cast using an item, the item can be made to pay the HP damage from it's own hit points(though the user must still pay the normal xp cost unless the item is an intelligent construct with HD and an XP pool. Any HP or XP left over if the magic item doesn't have enough HP or XP to pay for the effect is paid by the user. If there is still more left over, the user's soul is consumed to help offset the difference. This prevent any kind of resurrection, including wish or miracle, save direct intervention by a god of death). If the xp Cost of an effect is waved for any reason, the HP damage is Not. There is no circumstance that will ever allow a user to wave the HP cost of an effect.


Now unlimited wishes will Never be a thing. I'll also resolve the weird "can you wish for artifacts thing" by saying artifacts cost infinite xp and hp do to being priceless.

Violation of Grod's Law. It's essentially banning magic item creation by making it too punishing to ever be worth using, except it's being inflicted on a whole setting, past present and future. Magic item creation would never become a thing in this universe, unless somebody cheesed their way into unlimited HP, in which case it's only punishing people who wouldn't abuse it while leaving the abusers unpunished.

[Promethean]

If we're taking existing rules as laws of the universe, lvl 7 bare minimum, with lvl 9 as a more likely minimum (well sorta).

Toads are a fairly fast-breeding creature, and are started up as a CR 1/10 challenge. They are slow, easy to hit, easy to kill, and have no offensive options for direct damage (and even indirect ones like tripping you down stairs are basically impossible). If somebody capable of gaining XP were to kill 700 toads, they would be 7th lvl and no longer capable of gaining XP from any creature that isn't at least CR 1. Additionally, while there are no real guidelines on how frequently such a thing occurs, it is possible for a creature to possess the Elite Array instead of the standard array. This might he completely random, or it.might he a result of breeding the best creatures together for the best offspring; either way, if a 7th lvl character were to slay 67 elite toads, they would become 9th lvl (and no longer able to gain XP from CR 1 creatures). Alternatively, if you wished to reach lvl 9 from lvl 1 killing only elite toads, it would take 137 of them. This process can be done with other low CR fodder creatures, but most of them can fight back in some fashion, and it's rare they breed as fast as toads anyway.

Suppose we have a metropolis of 100000 adults. This will on average have 25000 children. Assuming they're all human, they reach adulthood at 15, and so 1/15th of them will become adults this year (~1700). To that end, the city needs about 1.2 million toads (and maybe 120k elite toads) produced each year to ensure the population can level properly. Toads sexually mature in 2-3 years, and lay in clutches that (while varying due to species and corcumstance) tend to have thousands of eggs. To quote an expert: "If every egg from one pair of toads survived to adulthood, and each toad lived for five years, and all of the eggs from their descendents survived, the entire surface of the earth would be covered in toads in fifteen years."

Having toad farms churning out a million toads per year is actually probably not that hard. In fact we probably want even more than that - partly for redundancy in case of sabotage, partly because some adults may backslide due to XP expenditure and need to top off.

There's also the issue of feeding those toads.

With "Cost of Magic", wish traps to feed everyone is now non-viable thanks to the fact magic items can't scale without abusing kind of slavery system Drow and Mind Flayers can only dream about.

This means those Toad Breeding farms would require secondary insect farm just to keep the toad populations stable, which will need their own crop fields in turn. This makes in-house character farming largely impossible outside of massive empires, and expensive production lines like that mean that said character farms are going to be reserved for the military and nobility rather than the general populous.


Violation of Grod's Law. It's essentially banning magic item creation by making it too punishing to ever be worth using, except it's being inflicted on a whole setting, past present and future. Magic item creation would never become a thing in this universe, unless somebody cheesed their way into unlimited HP, in which case it's only punishing people who wouldn't abuse it while leaving the abusers unpunished.

I don't care about abuse. Abuse is the assumption here.

The thing I care about is not allowing infinite loops. So Removing unlimited wish traps or other wish loops is higher priority. Besides, Anyone who's read Iron Kingdoms(where I got the idea from) knows there are other avenues for magic item substitutes.

Temporary magic items that run off power sources are still open thanks to the fact permanent HP is only lost for a permanent effect.

[Maat Mons]

I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that food would be an issue. If you can train people up to 7th (or whatever) level, you can get silly amounts of food from Create Food and Water (and other spells). All that food easily feeds the frogs that power the leveling. It’s a self-sustaining process.

[AvatarVecna]

Actually yeah, I'll give artificers a extra HP pool equal to crafting reserve/20.

Otherwise, enslaving creatures to build magic items is the default assumption anyway. Dedicated Wrights are already the backbone of most magic item factory builds I've seen.

As for xp Sharing cooperative creation, may as well let them share the HP loss as well.

Dedicated Wrights handle the time cost of crafting, they do not shoulder any of the XP burden. Enslaving creatures to build the magic items for you (with their own magic/feats) is gonna be difficult to keep them controlled and doing as desired, and you're likely to get a lot of cursed items. If they're just suckers providing you with XP via transferrence, they need to be mind controlled, which will be rough en masse; additionally, they need to possess XP (which monsters themselves generally don't; they provide XP, but they themselves have 0 XP; if they gained XP, they would level up into something). Giving monsters class levels and then mind controlling them into giving them up is certainly an option, but feels like it can lead to some serious problems down the road.


There's also the issue of feeding those toads.

With "Cost of Magic", wish traps to feed everyone is now non-viable thanks to the fact magic items can't scale without abusing kind of slavery system Drow and Mind Flayers can only dream about.

This means those Toad Breeding farms would require secondary insect farm just to keep the toad populations stable, which will need their own crop fields in turn. This makes in-house character farming largely impossible outside of massive empires, and expensive production lines like that mean that said character farms are going to be reserved for the military and nobility rather than the general populous.

You're acting like wish is the only spell capable of making food. A first level cleric can make food. A mid-level wizard can make food. Wish makes a lot of food, but it's not the only option, by far. More likely, though, it's going to be a series of farms being maintained by high level druids. Plus, it's like what it says in the OP: this isn't knowledge that was suddenly bestowed on everybody, this is stuff that's been slowly more and more understood as time goes on. We're not building a toad farm around a town - we're building a town around a toad farm.

A few thousand years ago, some druid or ranger or whoever found that this particular forest had huge swampy areas full of toads, so many toads that it was unbalancing the local ecosystem. "Killing toads" is not something that the most powerful druids are gonna be spending their time, so they send the new blood to do it, and find that the low-level characters are actually accumulating spell power amazingly quickly by murdering toads. So the druids set up camp to take advantage of this new knowledge they've discovered. It doesn't start out industrialized, because it's druids, but it becomes local ritual that a young person, upon reaching adulthood, is to head out into the swamp and not come back until they've killed 700 toads. The toads naturally breed so quick that there's enough toads to sustain a surprisingly-large community more or less indefinitely, and it's impossible to kill them all. A few centuries of this go by, and the community is becoming a real powerhouse, with every able-bodied adult being a mid-level adventurer of some kind. Maybe a lot of them are commoners still, but the weakest adult in your community being a Commoner 7 still has them as far more resilient than one with Commoners 1s. But it's not quite sustainable: they're becoming so popular that the natural frog population just can't keep up with demand.

Pause. Rewind. Refocus.

100 miles down the road, there is another swamp, with a similar backstory, with one small difference: this swamp was in a forest that was frequented by the king and his hunting party, and when they ran into surprisingly-powerful druid issues while hunting in the forest, they started up a crusade; the naturalists, while over-average, cannot stand against the king's army, and perish. The court mage is naturally curious how so many mid-level druids and rangers came to be, and starts investigating. Whether by reading through notes, casting divinations, or doing his own experimentation, he realizes the power in these toads, and informs the king of his findings. A new training program arises, where new soldiers are trained by sending them into the woods to hunt 700 frogs, with special permission available to others who wish to become powerful. Because they are already a large kingdom, they more quickly reach that point where natural frog reproduction is unsustainable.

Both communities find themselves at a decision point: either they cut back on the frog murder, or they need to industrialize the toad murder. The demand for toads to kill is higher than the number of toads available to kill, at least in the long term. The first community, being largely druids, holds back from industrializing, and instead uses social controls to restrict demand - now, instead of a ritual for all young adults to partake it, it is a privilege granted to those who are acceptable in the eyes of the druid circle. The second community, having to compete with other kingdoms for resources already, and no moral compunction against screwing up ecosystems, is not going to let this resource go to waste out of principle. They're going to industrialize the **** out of it. Scholars and rangers throughout the kingdom are called upon to use their expertise to create The Efficient Toad Farm - reworking farmland to be more amenable to toad breeding, clearing out any potential predators and scaring off any that come calling from elsewhere, figuring out the ideal diet to feed their toads, even breeding for the biggest toughest toads so that they have elites instead of regular ones. The more people who use it, the more assets the kingdom has, and so productions is gradually ramped up. Create warehouses to house the toads and their food and their food's food. Get some mages to cast some high level food production spells. Hell, with your resources, maybe you can even manage to get your hands on an infinite-food machine - costing XP and HP is expensive, but I'm sure the court wizard can cheat his way out of it if needed.

A few centuries pass. The first community consists of several hundred mid-level druids and rangers (due to the kind of person being approved most likely becoming a druid) and several thousand less powerful beings who were deemed unworthy of power by the druid circle. The second community consists of many thousands of mid-level characters of all kinds of classes. The kingdom has grown, and their farms have grown, but it's never been all at once. It's always been manageable; it's gotten big, but IRL chicken farms are almost certainly bigger.

The two communities come into conflict. Guess which one survives.

Is every community that finds out about "easy XP" gonna industrialize it? No. But the ones that do are the ones that are gonna survive, because at the end of the day they're the ones with more power and versatility at their disposal, by orders of magnitude. The first community fades into obscurity, their swamp turned into yet another toad factory for the second community. The second community expands and expands and expands and it couldn't do that if it didn't have the toads. Maybe the industrial toad farm started small and the community started small, but if they're willing to industrialize, growing to something monolithic is inevitable. It only gets stopped if somebody who went further than you sooner than you stomps you down.

There's obstacles that can make things harder. But they can be gotten around with magic and optimization. Not every community is gonna do that, but the ones that do will be orders of magnitude more successful, and that success in achieving easy levels is going to cascade into successes with conflicts with other communities.


There's also the issue of feeding those toads.

With "Cost of Magic", wish traps to feed everyone is now non-viable thanks to the fact magic items can't scale without abusing kind of slavery system Drow and Mind Flayers can only dream about.

This means those Toad Breeding farms would require secondary insect farm just to keep the toad populations stable, which will need their own crop fields in turn. This makes in-house character farming largely impossible outside of massive empires, and expensive production lines like that mean that said character farms are going to be reserved for the military and nobility rather than the general populous.



I don't care about abuse. Abuse is the assumption here.

The thing I care about is not allowing infinite loops. So Removing unlimited wish traps or other wish loops is higher priority. Besides, Anyone who's read Iron Kingdoms(where I got the idea from) knows there are other avenues for magic item substitutes.

Temporary magic items that run off power sources are still open thanks to the fact permanent HP is only lost for a permanent effect.

If the goal is to get rid of infinite loops, maybe just ban repeating traps, rather than "basically all magic item creation"?

[Promethean]

If the goal is to get rid of infinite loops, maybe just ban repeating traps, rather than "basically all magic item creation"?

It's not though?

The Rule is from Iron kingdoms, and in iron kingdoms(a third party supplement mentioned to be valid to pull from in the OP) they have versions of every type of magic item that's less then half price, but uses a limited number charges rather than a times/day.

It's basically just squashing permanent magic items into a rarer type of loot and replaces them with temporary counterparts that need to be recharged via a lengthy industrial process.

[Maat Mons]

With regard to monsters/NPCs not having enough XP to spend on crafting, the Cost of Magic thing said crafters can consume their own souls to create items they lack the XP/HP to craft normally. This is great, because it lets you use a renewable recourse, people, to produce something with everlasting benefits, permanent magic items.

When an Artificer uses Retain Essence to salvage a magic item, do they also recover XP previously lost to crafting?

[Bohandas]

There's also the issue of feeding those toads.

With "Cost of Magic", wish traps to feed everyone is now non-viable thanks to the fact magic items can't scale without abusing kind of slavery system Drow and Mind Flayers can only dream about.

Why on earth would you use Wish for something like that when Create Food And Water is level 3, and Goodberry is level 1. Even in the regular rules these would generally be better and would definitely be available much earlier

For 30000 gp, and without any rules chicanery, you can create an at will create food and water device that produces enough food to feed up to 2160 humans per day (or a presumably much larger number of toads). And for an additional 1000 gp you can also create a Purify food and drink-based device that makes the quick rotting of Create food and water's fare irrelevant.

A use activated goodberry device would be even cheaper, weighing in at only 2000 gp, and could create sufficie t sustinence to feed at least 28800 medium sized creatures per day. It would, however, require a berry farm to support it (I'm not sure how much that affects things; it's surprisingly hard to find statistics on how many berries a farm produces)

EDIT:
Ok, so I've found some stats for cranberries specifically, and it looks like a cranbery farm produces about 5-15 tons per acre per year (https://www.agmrc.org/commodities-products/fruits/cranberries), and there's about 440 cranberries in a pound (https://www.cranberries.org/faqs). So a low yield cranberry farm would produce about 4400000 berries per acre per year. This would be about 12054 berries per day on average.

Some other type of berry would likely be optimal however as the goodberry spell stipulates that the berries be fresh, and cranberries are harvested once per year (https://www.cranberries.org/faqs) (and I am trying to work this without relying on quibbles like "it doesn't say they have to be ripe").

Can anyone think of a berry that can be harvested more often?

EDIT:
Ok, so partridgeberries seem to grow year round and yield 2-25 tons per acre (https://www.gov.nl.ca/ourfoodourfuture/files/Crop-Prod-Partridgeberry.pdf), but I can't find how many are in a pound

[Promethean]

Why on earth would you use Wish for something like that when Create Food And Water is level 3, and Goodberry is level 1

For 30000 gp, and without any rules chicanery, you can create an at will create food and water device that produces enough food to feed up to 2160 humans per day (or a presumably much larger number of toads). And for an additional 1000 gp you can also create a Purify food and drink-based device that makes the quick rotting of Create food and water's fare irrelevant

under "Cost of Magic", those items would cost the crafter 60 and 2 Permanent HP respectively. Your average joe Cleric(standard array) would need to be at least level 11 to not die instantly from making those and would be permanently crippled for life. The magic item you just described would be sacred beyond measure considering a high level cleric is required sacrifice themselves to make it.

Making temporary versions that didn't kill the maker would also not allow you to feed a population indefinitely without the kind of charging infrastructure equivalent to an electric power grid. Your civilization would have to be powerful, wealthy, and advanced enough to already have a farming economy already built before they could even hope to reach that mile-stone, which in turn means a lot of farmers(who would need to be at least low-tier adventurer levels of power to farm in D&D's messed up "ecosystem") angry about how they're suddenly unemployed(The first IRL clothing factory was burned down by angry seamstresses).


A use activated goodberry device would be even cheaper, weighing in at only 2000 gp, and could create sufficie t sustinence to feed at least 28800 medium sized creatures per day. It would, however, require a berry farm to support it (I'm not sure how much that affects things; it's surprisingly hard to find statistics on how many berries a farm produces)

This one is more Feasible(only costs a druid 4 permanent HP).

This also means the average Civilization would probably have their food supply ruled by the druid-circle mafia, who won't be thrilled about things like the pollution caused by the alchemical infrastructure needed to power temporary magic items. Seems like an interesting story hook.


When an Artificer uses Retain Essence to salvage a magic item, do they also recover XP previously lost to crafting?

It says that Retain Essence is added to their craft reserve, so I'd say it's fair that it adds to their HP reserve as well(I think that's what you were asking).

[Maat Mons]

An Everful Larder (Stronghold Builder’s Guide, p76) is a WotC-published infinite food machine with a market price of 15,000 gp. That winds up being 600 XP and 30 HP under the Cost of Magic rule. A 5th-level Cleric with Con 12 could make that and live. Though, to be fair, they’d need to still hit that Con after the -6 penalty for venerable age if they don’t want to shorten their lifespan.

Are people in this setting using shenanigans to live forever? If not, taking an HP penalty for the rest of your life isn’t that much of a sacrifice if you do it when you’re already on the verge of dying of old age. The trick would be getting a really accurate estimate of when you’re going to die. Ideally, you’d finish crafting the item the day before you kick the bucket.

You mentioned negating the XP cost doesn’t negate the HP cost. Does reducing the XP cost reduce the HP cost? That is, do Legendary Artisan et al. remain useful feats?

My current scheme is to use Polymorph any Object to turn animals or inanimate objects into people, then have those people make +1 swords with that dwarven forge that lets anyone do it without feats or spellcasting. An Artificer can recover the energy of those swords to recoup the HP from crafting whatever magic items are actually needed.

[Bucky]

This also means the average Civilization would probably have their food supply ruled by the druid-circle mafia, who won't be thrilled about things like the pollution caused by the alchemical infrastructure needed to power temporary magic items.

Not really, since people will use other food sources if the druids get too demanding.

[Promethean]

Are people in this setting using shenanigans to live forever? If not, taking an HP penalty for the rest of your life isn’t that much of a sacrifice if you do it when you’re already on the verge of dying of old age. The trick would be getting a really accurate estimate of when you’re going to die. Ideally, you’d finish crafting the item the day before you kick the bucket.

Some would and some wouldn't based on availability. Any civilization wouldn't necessarily have the magic and know-how to create effective immortality.

Most of the ways to immortality in D&D are pretty difficult to actually implement. For example: Elan conversion(requires existing elans to implement and they aren't a naturally occuring race...), the "Kissed by the Ages" spell(is 9th level and costs 5,000 xp[250 permanent HP with "Cost of Magic"]. Now it makes a little too much sense for why the caster can't use it on themselves, they'd be dead.), Type conversion(most ways to change type to undead, construct, outsider, or Fey are either inherited templates, chause the character to lose their mind/alignment, forces them under another's control, or any combination of the pervious), and the rest require constant upkeep either because they're a body-swapping method or some form of "extend life by X for Y cost".

Honestly, Lichdom gets the best deal as long as you find a way to sacrifice/drain HP from someone else for the ritual.



You mentioned negating the XP cost doesn’t negate the HP cost. Does reducing the XP cost reduce the HP cost? That is, do Legendary Artisan et al. remain useful feats?

Not sure.

On one hand that sounds fair, but on the other there's ways to stack XP cost reducers until all HP costs for any item would be reduced to 1 even for epically powerful magic items.

I might actually have to go with sure, but only the highest discount applies for HP.

[Quertus]

Oh boy.

So, *without shenanigans* / so long as people pay the costs associated and don’t consider HP a river, nobody would ever build temporary / charged magical items, because the permanent HP cost isn’t worth it. Nor would they build random vendor trash. Every item would be purposeful and deliberate - optimized, you might say.

Eternal Wands and Repeating Traps are pretty high value; Simulacra and Ice Assassins are probably even more efficient.

Mindrape, Necrotic Tumor/Domination, Dominate Person/Monster, and Thrullherd, already powerful options, become even more appealing for creating items in this scenario.

Frog farms, Mouse farms, or (for creatures with natural DR) rat farms are commonly used to level your citizens. Repeating traps of Goodberry / Create Food and Water - or just 7th level citizens casting such spells - will be common. After that, “my civilization” would use Repeating traps of Animate Objects to provide higher-CR foes. Coming in sizes up to CR 7, properly monitored / overseen traps can really boost your baseline citizenry.

And, for added giggles, RAW shenanigans for arbitrary HP haven’t been banned, so I wouldn’t even *need* to use slave labor to craft items. That’s just a backup plan / added bonus.

“Good” does have some advantages, in that the altruistic, self-sacrificing nature will more readily lend itself to the creation of Create Food and Water traps and the like that will give their civilizations a huge edge.

Pathfinder, of course, has an advantage, in not having XP costs. 2e would have an even bigger advantage, what with *gaining* XP (and, therefore, HP) from item creation. But that’s probably not a rabbit hole we want to go down.

Personally, I’m much more interested in imagining the society where *muggle* crafts cost permanent HP, too, to balance things out. Where every house, every article of clothing, every utensil is precious, forged of sweat and blood and life force, a family heirloom that you cherish and Make Whole.

[Promethean]

Oh boy.

So, *without shenanigans* / so long as people pay the costs associated and don’t consider HP a river, nobody would ever build temporary / charged magical items, because the permanent HP cost isn’t worth it. Nor would they build random vendor trash. Every item would be purposeful and deliberate - optimized, you might say.

Temporary magic items don't incur a permanent HP Cost. They incur regular HP damage that can be healed.

Only permanent magic items and Permanent/Instantaneous effects do.



Mindrape, Necrotic Tumor/Domination, Dominate Person/Monster, and Thrullherd, already powerful options, become even more appealing for creating items in this scenario.

Frog farms, Mouse farms, or (for creatures with natural DR) rat farms are commonly used to level your citizens. Repeating traps of Goodberry / Create Food and Water - or just 7th level citizens casting such spells - will be common. After that, “my civilization” would use Repeating traps of Animate Objects to provide higher-CR foes. Coming in sizes up to CR 7, properly monitored / overseen traps can really boost your baseline citizenry.

Sounds like a good way to repeat the history of the mind flayers and githyanki




And, for added giggles, RAW shenanigans for arbitrary HP haven’t been banned, so I wouldn’t even *need* to use slave labor to craft items. That’s just a backup plan / added bonus.

They have. Every Arbitrary/Infinite loop is effectively banned. This thread is for making rules to close them with specific tweak, so If you know ways of gaining arbitrary HP, please point them out so a new rule can be added.



Personally, I’m much more interested in imagining the society where *muggle* crafts cost permanent HP, too, to balance things out. Where every house, every article of clothing, every utensil is precious, forged of sweat and blood and life force, a family heirloom that you cherish and Make Whole.

Why?!?

How would anything advance if making a fragile stone axe cost you one of your 6 HP?

[Quertus]

Temporary magic items don't incur a permanent HP Cost. They incur regular HP damage that can be healed.

Only permanent magic items and Permanent/Instantaneous effects do.

Reading comprehension, why must you be so hard? :smallredface:

Ok, that changes things a bit. Hmmm… I’ll have to ponder what various societies might look like under such conditions.


Why?!?

How would anything advance if making a fragile stone axe cost you one of your 6 HP?

Exactly! That challenge, that “what would society look like?”? It’s just really cool to think about.

[Promethean]

Reading comprehension, why must you be so hard? :smallredface:

Ok, that changes things a bit. Hmmm… I’ll have to ponder what various societies might look like under such conditions.

The way Iron Kingdoms treats it, one option is to build a society that uses magic like we use electricity. A large industrial complex build around using a mixture of alchemy and spellcraft to transport arcane energy to various places in a city. This has 2 major problems though, 1.) you aren't going to be re-charging your items in a dungeon, so even the fighter will have a limited number of spells slots for their magic sword, and 2.) this process is entirely closed off to divine casters, they either make permanent magic item or none at all.

Druids and rangers have another way around this though, especially if you include 3rd party material. Druids are already known to breed magical beasts(they invented the "dire" template) and coulds easily serve a role similar to the Daelkyr in eberron if they breed creatures to serve as living magic items. There are even rules for this kind of play in Dark Sun, the quintessential series and encyclopedia Divine: fey magic.

Clerics, paladins, etc. are pretty out of luck, until you remember gods can create artifacts and relics at no cost thanks to a number of divine salient abilities with no xp expense(this unfortunately does mean that each item would require some kind of trial or quest by the deity, and the divine caster wouldn't be allowed to keep it forever). As another user pointed out, this is shenanigans. Self and forced sacrifice fits the D&D religions well enough, and the gods would have serious reasons to be pissed when someone steals or destroys their created artifacts.

Magic items would still exist, they'd just be rarer or weirder depending on type.

[Quertus]

I don’t want to go all, “Iron Kingdoms is a case study in how to do everything wrong”, but it certainly is the case that the mindset is incoherent when applied to the mechanics of 3e.

The rules 3e has for rechargeable items, the cost to recharge them is *greater* than the cost to just craft a new one. So you’d never get “Iron Kingdoms” by playing 3e.

Even if you count Rings of Spell Storing and the Spell Storing enchantment on weapons as “temporary”, and thus not costing HP (is this the case?), you’d still not have some electricity-like universal power source to plug into - you’re still dealing with D&D discrete packets, and no centralized distribution method.

Now, if Rings of Spell Storing don’t cost permanent HP to create, that shifts the balance yet again, and I’ll need to adjust my thoughts accordingly.

[Promethean]

I don’t want to go all, “Iron Kingdoms is a case study in how to do everything wrong”, but it certainly is the case that the mindset is incoherent when applied to the mechanics of 3e.

The rules 3e has for rechargeable items, the cost to recharge them is *greater* than the cost to just craft a new one. So you’d never get “Iron Kingdoms” by playing 3e.

Even if you count Rings of Spell Storing and the Spell Storing enchantment on weapons as “temporary”, and thus not costing HP (is this the case?), you’d still not have some electricity-like universal power source to plug into - you’re still dealing with D&D discrete packets, and no centralized distribution method.

Now, if Rings of Spell Storing don’t cost permanent HP to create, that shifts the balance yet again, and I’ll need to adjust my thoughts accordingly.

Edit: corrections

Iron kingdom uses an industrial system of "Mechanika", which are temporary magic items that can simulate permanent items(but with charges instead of times/day) and can be recharged for 20 gold a charge(can be reduced by crafting reducers and no XP cost).

Mechanica have Much less charges than a wand, but I reiterate, the gold and xp cost to recharge is Low-to-None. Spell-energy is the main requirement.

[lylsyly]

So ... my little town of Killoren with 2 toad farms and 4 insect farms can gain inifinite xp??? Craft anything they want forever and eventually rule the world???

[martixy]

I see optimizing a setting as "allowing it to function semi-believably".

Possibly not what you're looking for in this thread, but I do not care about infinity loops, because they're an out-of-setting problem. I see them as an artefact of the model of the world rather than inherent to the world itself. A feature of the map, not the territory.

Things I've done to "optimize" my setting (towards how I want it to look):
Blanket "No something out of nothing" law.
Effects that create stuff cost XP (or its material substitute in my world - diamonds; since I don't use xp).
Create food or water, walls of stuff - that's gonna cost ya. You cannot ignore the logistics of entire armies with a bleedin CANTRIP.

Blanket "No time travel" law.
It's impossible to make time travel plots consistent and it irks me and just no.
Enforced by the "Institute for preserving narrative sanity", which employs a veritable army of Quaruts.
Demiplane time stuff is limited to 2x difference from the material plane.

Blanket "No omniscient abilities" rule.
No spell, effect or ability in my game has baked in automatic meta access to the entirety of published material.
It all happens in-world. You cannot polymorph into anything arbitrary, you the player knows about. Acquire a tissue sample of the creature and do some research. Study a live specimen. Artificers can't just emulate the entire breadth of arcane lore. Get a spell an infusion book and hunt down the spells. Etc, etc.

Other stuff:
Magical travel follows in-world rules and mechanics.
If you can think of it, so can other inhabitants of the world. Scry-n-die? Teleporting armies? Any of the tippyverse shenanigans? The world has seen these before any PC ever plopped onto the scene and developed countermeasures and mitigations.
There is no meta-level XP (I just can't be bothered tracking creature XP and EL). Characters advance by milestone meta-wise and by gaining in world experience, unlocking inner potential and acquiring power through various rituals, patrons, locations or events. XP as a resource to spend is replaced by something else and at that point follows basic in-world rules of resource scarcity.

Make time, space and energy have meaning and you solve like 99% of all problems with a setting. (Well, depending on what you consider a problem. In our universe space/time and energy/matter have meaning, and we have developed intuitions regarding those. Relying on that shared understanding is, I feel, valuable for doing less work when creating a fictional setting.)

[Promethean]

So ... my little town of Killoren with 2 toad farms and 4 insect farms can gain inifinite xp??? Craft anything they want forever and eventually rule the world???

XP gain would cap off by character level relative to toad level(7 for farming normal toads and 9 for farming elite toads), unless their residents resorted to killing each other in gladiatorial blood sport.

Permanent Magic items would also cost permanent HP, so your crafter would likely die and become someone's intelligent sword(according to 1e lore, mileage may very).

Granted, a society of immortals built on regularly sacrificing the older generations to crafting and blood sport in order to increase the strength of their descendants would be possible. Not sure where it would fall on the alignment spectrum considering it'd be build on both selfless sacrifice for future generation And cold-blooded murder of the innocent. Killoren's wouldn't really have an advantage over mortal races here though, any society could do the same thing and some races are Much more powerful than killorens

[Quertus]

Clerics, paladins, etc. are pretty out of luck, until you remember gods can create artifacts and relics at no cost thanks to a number of divine salient abilities with no xp expense(this unfortunately does mean that each item would require some kind of trial or quest by the deity, and the divine caster wouldn't be allowed to keep it forever).

I call shenanigans! Gods can’t mitigate HP cost - that goes against the whole point / theme of the thought experiment! Otherwise, the answer becomes, “ascension is the key to optimized civilization development”. And that’s… boring.

That said, “losing permanent HP for item creation” sounds like a case of “the cure is worse than the disease” in terms of choosing a minimal set of tweaks necessary to produce a “no infinite, no arbitrary” version of 3e in which to evaluate what sort of optimized society would reasonably form therein.

So, not that letting gods ignore the central rules, and create free Create Food and Water traps for their followers *isn’t* total hacks, and not that evaluating, “what if permanent items cost permanent HP?” isn’t an interesting question to answer, but, if our goal was to evaluate an optimized D&D setting with “no infinite, no arbitrary”, we never should have gotten to that point in the first place.

[Promethean]

I call shenanigans! Gods can’t mitigate HP cost - that goes against the whole point / theme of the thought experiment! Otherwise, the answer becomes, “ascension is the key to optimized civilization development”. And that’s… boring.

Hmm, that would mean the people of the cloth would be Really **** out of luck when it came to magic items unless they started sacrificing people.

Granted, it would also be on brand for a lot of D&D religions... Sure I see your point.


That said, “losing permanent HP for item creation” sounds like a case of “the cure is worse than the disease” in terms of choosing a minimal set of tweaks necessary to produce a “no infinite, no arbitrary” version of 3e in which to evaluate what sort of optimized society would reasonably form therein.

So, not that letting gods ignore the central rules, and create free Create Food and Water traps for their followers *isn’t* total hacks, and not that evaluating, “what if permanent items cost permanent HP?” isn’t an interesting question to answer, but, if our goal was to evaluate an optimized D&D setting with “no infinite, no arbitrary”, we never should have gotten to that point in the first place.

Honestly, the HP loss thing was a spur of the moment though, but the longer the thread went on, the more I liked it.

It soundly destroys a lot of easy post-scarcity routes and post scarcity societies with no conflicts are Also boring. It also nips a large amount of "I cast this spell for free stuff" and "I use thought bottle to..." because it causes permanent/instantaneous spell effects to Also incur a permanent cost on the user.

[Quertus]

Hmm, that would mean the people of the cloth would be Really **** out of luck when it came to magic items unless they started sacrificing people.

Granted, it would also be on brand for a lot of D&D religions... Sure I see your point.

I mean, they can’t get items via Domination tactics, but they could still craft them themselves… including the all-important food sources. Also, sacrifices (in both senses). So I’m really not feeling bad for them.


Honestly, the HP loss thing was a spur of the moment though, but the longer the thread went on, the more I liked it.

It soundly destroys a lot of easy post-scarcity routes and post scarcity societies with no conflicts are Also boring. It also nips a large amount of "I cast this spell for free stuff" and "I use thought bottle to..." because it causes permanent/instantaneous spell effects to Also incur a permanent cost on the user.

Fair enough. Do Djinn have enough HP to actually support granting 3 wishes? And poor Pazuzu likely wasted away millennia ago.

Speaking of things that sound cool, with time travel creating alternate realities, I can see “my civilization” having an immortal leader, who sends his children back in time to conquer the world in his name. Custom magic to hold group “Skype” calls between all the realities for family time. For bonus giggles, he can have everyone worship him as the “god emperor”.

As for Illithids and gith… we didn’t breed wolves to become *more* aggressive to create dogs. The slave races would be bred for submissiveness, as well as for *lack* of resistance to the *numerous* *redundant* forms of control used to keep them in check.

Anything else would be suboptimal bordering on True weapons-grade stupidity.

[Bohandas]

As for Illithids and gith… we didn’t breed wolves to become *more* aggressive to create dogs. The slave races would be bred for submissiveness, as well as for *lack* of resistance to the *numerous* *redundant* forms of control used to keep them in check.

Anything else would be suboptimal bordering on True weapons-grade stupidity.

The illithids are psychic vampires. A weak willed and stupid servitor race wouldn't serve their purpose.

(although I can't think of any reason for the illithids to not have made them physically frail to compensate)

EDIT:
On reflection though, the gith are physically frail compared to illithids. Illithids have eight hit dice

[Quertus]

The illithids are psychic vampires. A weak willed and stupid servitor race wouldn't serve their purpose.

(although I can't think of any reason for the illithids to not have made them physically frail to compensate)

EDIT:
On reflection though, the gith are physically frail compared to illithids. Illithids have eight hit dice

Regardless of any supposed failings of the Illithid race, my point was that we’d not see a repeat of the emergence of such a foil race caused by the Domination practices in this exercise outside nigh-unimaginable utter folly.

[Promethean]

Fair enough. Do Djinn have enough HP to actually support granting 3 wishes? And poor Pazuzu likely wasted away millennia ago.

Adds another layer to the cruelty of binding Djinn for free wishes.

Though I imagine Pazuzu would pull shenanigans with who pays the HP cost. For example: He probably could just drain a random mephit or one of the billions of sacrifices made to him dayly across the planes, but taking it out of the person making the wish or their closest loved ones by finagling who counts as the one "casting" the wish is also on brand. Seems sufficiently demonic to have a demon lord not tell their victim about the horrible consequences of their actions before making a deal.


Regardless of any supposed failings of the Illithid race, my point was that we’d not see a repeat of the emergence of such a foil race caused by the Domination practices in this exercise outside nigh-unimaginable utter folly.

So... Like Most of IRL human history? Like the Current modern era?

Odds aren't looking good for the domination empire...

[Maat Mons]

I'm still figuring on shifting the HP cost to literal livestock. You know what's as docile as a lamb? An actual lamb. That lamb has an HP pool just waiting to be exploited, and tastes delicious in shepherd's pie.

This is, of course, only even necessary because Animated Objects don't stick around long enough without XP expenditure.

[ToranIronfinder]

Warfare certainly does lead to "optimization" of a sort, based on the threats faced, though in some cases (world war 1) adaptation is highly delayed.

For this kind of setting maybe start with recent conflicts and tensions, how are various nations adapting their strategies around enemy powers.

However, it would seem to me that the balance points you seek would have a bigger impact, game wise, on special forces, and not on guards, etc. And you will need to think through how advanced things are magically and technologically.

[AvatarVecna]

Can creatures choose to donate XP/HP to a magic item someone else is crafting? Is this a physical action or a mental one?

[Promethean]

Can creatures choose to donate XP/HP to a magic item someone else is crafting? Is this a physical action or a mental one?

If they have relevant feats, class abilities or effects.

I'd rule XP sharing like in that one wizards web enhancement would be valid for allowing creatures to share HP cost. For XP reducers, I'd only have the highest one apply to HP reduction, otherwise people would be stacking reducers to the point even something absurd(Like an intelligent ring of three wishes/day) would only cost 1 HP.

Other abilities that allow you to transfer the cost to someone else would be valid, like sacrifice rituals in the BoVD.

As far as actions go, It would probably be a physical action just like crafting an item would be.

[AvatarVecna]

If it's a physical action, then the loop I was worried about doesn't exist, so that's fine:


Virtual Size(inspired from immortals handbook): Basically, for every +8 strength a character has above their species average(10 for humans), they go up 1 "virtual" size category. Each virtual size gives -2 DEX, +4 CON, increases their natural armor by 1, and allows them to use weapons 1 size category larger. These bonuses have no cap, so a Cancer mage with festering anger or a cleric abusing consumptive field + reserves of strength will quickly end up helpless Coup-de-Grace targets from DEX loss

There's ways to take advantage of this for more HP and thus more crafting, but at least it's not NI.

The only other thing that looks loopy would be hiveminds.

[Promethean]

If it's a physical action, then the loop I was worried about doesn't exist, so that's fine:

There's ways to take advantage of this for more HP and thus more crafting, but at least it's not NI.

The only other thing that looks loopy would be hiveminds.

The old Hivemind rules got scrapped when Dark speech was updated in 3.5.

[AvatarVecna]

The old Hivemind rules got scrapped when Dark speech was updated in 3.5.

Dark Speech is not the source of the hivemind rules. The 3.0 feat references the hivemind rules, as does the updated 3.5 version, but no new rules for how hiveminds work were introduced in 3.5, and Dark Speech isn't the only way to make one anyway. Unless you've got a book and page quote from a 3.5 book of new rules for how hiveminds work that I've just never seen or heard of?

EDIT: If anything, the 3.5 version of the Dark Speech feat makes it even worse, but it makes it explicit that you can induce a hivemind in a swarm.

[Prime32]

One idea that I was considering is that XP is constantly produced by true planes (not demiplanes) and absorbed by sapient creatures on those planes. The rate varies somewhat from person to person, and would depend on activity (nothing, studying, training, life-or-death situations) and also on proximity to ley-lines, with a few people being "Unanchored" - meaning they get the maximum leyline bonus whether they're near one or not (my attempt to square the fast level-rate of PCs with a more sane rate for most of the setting).

So there are a lot of options, but you'll need to pick one and figure out what rules changes it necessitates.


How Much Can People Advance?
Both in terms of speed and in terms of maximum potential. Can every single person reach 20th level with sufficient training? Or do most cap out earlier? If you've got a society with abundant resources and the goal of every citizen reaching their maximum potential, what level is most of the populace?

The current model I'm working with (for my own thought experiments) is tiers:
Common (1st-4th) - everyone can reach 4th level with the proper support and motivation, as a result advanced societies are largely 4th level.
Uncommon (5th-8th) - people who can reach this are uncommon but still plentiful; similar to advanced specialists in the modern day. Still available for hire, in a decent-sized city.
Rare (9th-12th) - it's not that hard to find someone at this level (meeting them in person could be), but finding a specific type (like a mage who can teleport) may take some research, and they're not necessarily available for hire - more likely to be the ones running things, or to have a major position like "commander in chief of a nation's army".
Legendary (13th-16th) - there's not all that many even in the whole world, and the famous ones are world famous. You can't just go pay one to help you, you'd have to convince them your goals were worthwhile - after getting an audience in the first place.
Mythic (17th-20th) - so rare that many people don't think they exist. At a given time, there might be one of a given class, or there might not. Like maybe there was an 18th level Cleric a decade ago, but she's dead now and her successor is only 15th level.
I like the idea of a series of level caps, where you can only break a cap by incurring some kind of cost. A geis if you will. This could be mental like an obsession or a restrictive code of honour, or physical like being harmed by sunlight or bound to a specific location. But the end result is that high-level characters have reduced agency, and often have to rely on low-level characters to do things for them.

You could even have a mechanic where casting a spell requires you to have a number of geasa equal to the spell level, so characters like wizards have more of them than normal.

[Quertus]

So... Like Most of IRL human history? Like the Current modern era?

Odds aren't looking good for the domination empire...

Why? Have we recently bred cats with thumbs, that will kill is in our sleep now that they can open the cat food cans, carnivorous horses that rove the plains in packs, eating small towns, or dogs with the Intelligence and disloyalty to be sabotaging their owners’ cars?

Regardless of what foolish biological things humanity may have done recently (of which love bugs are doubtless one of the more benign examples) you’re not gonna find an instance of people breeding for X and producing anti-X. So there’s no reason for the Domination-based Empire to produce Domination-resistant slaves. And that goes double for a system where it’s mindless levels of effortless to know whether or not something has resisted your spell.

——-

This thread is asking a few too many different questions simultaneously for my taste.

What are the sources of infinite / arbitrary? What would a set of minimal rules tweaks to remove all infinite / arbitrary look like? Those are pretty much moot at this point.

What’s would these specific changes do? What would an optimized “no infinite, no arbitrary” 3e civilization look like? Same as always. They’d farm XP (through things like non-hazardous creature farms, or, my personal favorite, non-hazardous traps). They’d give themselves every advantage, from economic to military to educational. They’d try to provide their “in” crowd (the royal family, the nobles, the citizens, everyone, depending on the society) with the best items, the best classes, the best opportunities.

Any drawbacks, advantage will go to the society that mitigates it most effectively. So societies that mitigate HP loss from item creation through sacrifices (somehow), enslaving crafting races, trade, or outright theft will have an advantage over those with no such plan. In the lower-op spectrum, Civilizations with the self-sacrificing nature or forethought to create items anyway will have the advantage over those that don’t. As will races with high Con scores.

What would “proper roleplaying” rather than “optimizing by reading the books” look like? That… depends on too many factors to properly answer. One particularly silly factor, where most people gloss over how the map really is the territory even though it probably shouldn’t be in their dreams, is the discrete nature of “levels”.

Ignoring that, the optimization habits that might seem odd to those accustomed to a more omniscient view… hmmm… if they don’t have full control / comprehension of their class selection, then before they develop “retraining quests”, their version of optimization in a world with hard level limits might actually include level drain. And the concept of “build” vs “class” might be harder to tease apart properly, leading to weird kinds of suboptimal builds. As examples of such oddities.

And individual plans. The Trans-Temporal Domination empire would definitely be a society with tiers / casts. The Imperial family can be assumed to be 20th level. Citizens would likely be advanced to a 14th level minimum, through traps and animated objects. Slaves (which would be bred for their subservient nature and lack of resistance to the various Domination techs used)… would be trickier. They’d actually be more likely to get more advancement after receiving a death sentence (and being transferred to the Imperial Crafting Division), for example.

It’s hard to say whether the Empire would benefit more by instilling a culture that extols the value of sacrifice for the community (ie, craft away your HP before you become a burden to society), or the value of Immortality. Perhaps that would vary by caste within the citizens? I’ll have to ponder.

Another question is whether Clerics of deities, Clerics of ideas, or Ur-Priests would be optimal. And, for my society, which wins out might depend on whether the gods were willing to get behind society-improving ideas, like “good behavior will be rewarded with reincarnation into a higher caste” or not.