Perverse Incentives and Magic

[SangoProduction]

Removed this

[Ramza00]

This is why my DM if he ever gets around to it (life is busy) is going to do vanican ritual casting, yet those wizard like spells will be like FF7 materia and are the pristine commodity that is valueless like lesser artifacts.

Thus there is lots of magic in such a world, but the control of rituals is the key differentiator of various forms of states, guilds, factions, powers, etc... of why this faction has power yet a different faction may not be disorganised and never gain critical mass.

Our characters may get 2 per level (maybe more via quests as rewards), yet vanican spells are literally “means of production” for they warp reality.

[Bullet06320]

Conjuration: Summoning things and stuff. Like demons. This one should go without saying. There are plenty of summoning effects that don't even reliably control the summoned creatures. And some of those summoned creatures can summon their own creatures.
Just one careless screwup by some teenager in their dad's basement after stealing his spell book, and suddenly you've got a problem - perhaps small... perhaps world-ending. And we all know teenagers are not good at judging risk and reward, especially when actively in their rebellious phase. "Oh? He thinks these rules are here to protect me? Well, I'll show him!"
Item summoning is much less risky, but might accidentally get wrapped up in the evolved disgust of summoning.


summoning is not the problem, the summonor retains control of the summons for the duration then poof the summons are gone, usually

its calling spells where the potential problems occur, improper precautions and trying to summon and bargain with things beyond ones ability to control them.

[SangoProduction]

summoning is not the problem, the summonor retains control of the summons for the duration then poof the summons are gone, usually

its calling spells where the potential problems occur, improper precautions and trying to summon and bargain with things beyond ones ability to control them.

I think the point being made is that the distinction to a non-caster, aka a typical person in the society, though whom the morals are passed, can't really judge the largely scholarly distinction. (Especially as "summon" was used as a generic word for the act of poofing things into existence.)

[Zanos]

I've put forth, several times, that necromancy creates perverse incentives where a living person can be considered, at least by some, to be more valuable than a living person. (And to summarize) Thus, a society that has no problem with necromancy eventually weakens and subsumes itself -opening itself to conquest (either soft or hard) by other societies. Meanwhile, those who happened to evolve (or created with, as there are literal deities of creation) a strong disgust reaction to necromancy would immunize themselves against succumbing to those incentives, because acting on the incentives means that you become an enemy of the society at large.
If the leadership is short sighted and foolish, sure. But such a society was likely to collapse anyway. We've got organ donor cards and cadaver dissection and haven't fallen apart yet. Perverse incentives can be controlled by responsible government, with, well, laws. When the graverobbing business in the UK was booming, the government didn't respond by making anatomical study, the primary purchasers of stolen bodies, illegal, it responded by giving them access to the bodies of the executed, and later, after a series of murders related to body snatching, those who died in workhouses. As you can imagine this meant that knowledge of anatomy in the UK was far above that of the rest of the world at the time. Not a particularly pleasant set of laws, but a society's necromancers can easily be absorbed into 'proper' society with regulation that provides them with corpses. I just don't think it's an inevitable outcome from tolerating necromancy that society has rulers that massacre their own people to create more 2hd zombies. You don't even need newly dead creatures to practice most necromancy.

But in general, sure. Powerful magic has a good chance of ending society as Medieval Fantasy knows it. Any sufficiently powerful wizard can annihilate society by being irresponsible. That's why adventurers exist.

[Mechalich]

D&D necromancy breaks the law of conservation of energy. As such, even the most basic undead is a perpetual motion machine. Ex. hooking a skeleton into a muscle-powered generator. This makes the incentive towards necromancy imminently logical, from an amoral perspective, because it can supply a civilization with infinite energy and, using slightly more intelligent and dexterous undead, infinite labor for functionally all tasks. Additionally, because D&D undead do not naturally decay, you will not, in fact, fun out of dead bodies, because the ones you already have just keep going and going.

The problem with this setup is nothing to do with necromancy, specifically - the exact same effect can be achieved using constructs or other options - the problem is that universes that permit perpetual motion machines are fundamentally broken.

[redking]

The problem with this setup is nothing to do with necromancy, specifically - the exact same effect can be achieved using constructs or other options - the problem is that universes that permit perpetual motion machines are fundamentally broken.

Fire elementals are potentially even more broken.

[SangoProduction]

If the leadership is short sighted and foolish, sure. But such a society was likely to collapse anyway. We've got organ donor cards and cadaver dissection and haven't fallen apart yet. Perverse incentives can be controlled by responsible government, with, well, laws. When the graverobbing business in the UK was booming, the government didn't respond by making anatomical study, the primary purchasers of stolen bodies, illegal, it responded by giving them access to the bodies of the executed, and later, after a series of murders related to body snatching, those who died in workhouses. As you can imagine this meant that knowledge of anatomy in the UK was far above that of the rest of the world at the time. Not a particularly pleasant set of laws, but a society's necromancers can easily be absorbed into 'proper' society with regulation that provides them with corpses. I just don't think it's an inevitable outcome from tolerating necromancy that society has rulers that massacre their own people to create more 2hd zombies. You don't even need newly dead creatures to practice most necromancy.

But in general, sure. Powerful magic has a good chance of ending society as Medieval Fantasy knows it. Any sufficiently powerful wizard can annihilate society by being irresponsible. That's why adventurers exist.

"Yet" may be the operative word, looking at demography and forced organ harvesting. [Actually, I'm going to cut that statement super short, because I don't know how much of that is even allowed in these threads.]


But let's get onto the statement about the rulers. Who cares if the ruler doesn't care for one more 2hd zombie. What about the greedy businessman who is upset that 50 other businesses are all bidding on the same graveyards as he is, and the cost of "labor" is subsequently eating into the profit margins? Who's going to notice that homeless person on the street just happening to die and work for his business, which already employees 500 other zombies, that have all already been prettied up so as to be more presentable?
Or the general on campaign who thinks that if you lose morale and run, then you should be cut down and forced to serve in unlife? Can't have soldiers going and ruining a general's good record, now can you? (Sure, a real thing that happened, but very much not too tempting unless you have a near-endless amount of meat to throw into the grinder, because that soaks manpower.... not so much with necromancy. And even at the relatively limited scale of real life, it (along with other very self-deadly policies) basically crippled the world's largest nation's population to where it never recovered to this day.)
Or the various other selfish acts, enabled by the acceptance of necromancy.


D&D necromancy breaks the law of conservation of energy. As such, even the most basic undead is a perpetual motion machine. Ex. hooking a skeleton into a muscle-powered generator. This makes the incentive towards necromancy imminently logical, from an amoral perspective, because it can supply a civilization with infinite energy and, using slightly more intelligent and dexterous undead, infinite labor for functionally all tasks. Additionally, because D&D undead do not naturally decay, you will not, in fact, fun out of dead bodies, because the ones you already have just keep going and going.

The problem with this setup is nothing to do with necromancy, specifically - the exact same effect can be achieved using constructs or other options - the problem is that universes that permit perpetual motion machines are fundamentally broken.

Yup. Of course, nearly all of the magics break the laws of physics, as we know them on Earth. Especially any spell that creates, animates or moves things. And so anything taken to logical conclusions about a world that utilizes that fact arrives to basically the exact same conclusion -post scarcity. So, strictly raw, you wouldn't have very many rusted out mechanical hulks from ancient times. They'd all be perfectly functional as though the day they were made, unless they specifically came across rusting attacks. (Heck, going further, there aren't even rules about chemistry (save for specifically alchemy), or eating. And so anything the like is DM fiat.)
But such a concept is fun to explore for a campaign or two.

But I didn't intend to try and get into that debate, as, it's not really more interesting than buying ladders, selling them as 2 10 ft poles, and repeating. It's a game mechanic, and not a simulation.

[Mechalich]

Fire elementals are potentially even more broken.

Yes, among many other things. There must be at least a dozen ways to unlock infinite energy in D&D. It's a problem of vast scope. Necromancy is highly prevalent though, since it takes effect at relatively low levels and the idea of using undead as humanoid robots whose batteries never run out occurs to a fairly large number of players.

[Zanos]

"Yet" may be the operative word, looking at demography and forced organ harvesting. [Actually, I'm going to cut that statement super short, because I don't know how much of that is even allowed in these threads.]
I think it's unlikely that, considering the vast number of more likely apocalypses before us, this will be the thing that ends us.


But let's get onto the statement about the rulers. Who cares if the ruler doesn't care for one more 2hd zombie. What about the greedy businessman who is upset that 50 other businesses are all bidding on the same graveyards as he is, and the cost of "labor" is subsequently eating into the profit margins? Who's going to notice that homeless person on the street just happening to die and work for his business, which already employees 500 other zombies, that have all already been prettied up so as to be more presentable?
This assumes that magic is generally available. Animate dead is a 4th level spell for arcane casters and a 3rd level spell for divine casters. Any decent society that allows necromancy is, again, going to have some degree of oversight over the people who can use spells of a decent level. In fact, any functioning society should probably keep an eye on people who can turn a bar into an inferno with a standard action. I forget exactly what the demographics table is, but I think even in a metropolis the number of individuals capable of casting 3rd or higher level spells is probably under a hundred.

So really I don't see how this is different from any other murder case. If you have an imperfect society, then this is something that happens and society continues to function as is because nobody really cares when the under-served go missing, and it only really ends if adventurers intervene. Society can exist imperfectly, and necromancy only makes this society vulnerable to its competitors if the value added from necromancy is less than the value subtracted by people following perverse incentives. But perverse incentives exist in plenty of activity that's allowed, but managed, regulated, and restricted. Sometimes people get away with things they shouldn't, but that's not the end.

Or if you want a more functional society, the same people who are capable of casting animate dead to begin with, who the rulers police, are perfectly capable of solving some missing persons issues with a combination of magic and regular investigation. Of course, it's perfectly plausible that the rulers are capable of solving the issue, but simply do not. That doesn't make the society collapse, it makes it flawed. Which is fine, because most society's kind of need to be flawed for the game to happen. Adventuring in a magocratic utopia where all crimes and injustice are solved by competent authority figures, wars are fought with unfeeling automations who can't experience pain or horror, and the people live in peace and plenty probably wouldn't be a very exciting place to adventure in.

But really, society collapses entirely because murders or disappearances go unsolved? I have some bad news for you on that one, too.


Or the general on campaign who thinks that if you lose morale and run, then you should be cut down and forced to serve in unlife? Can't have soldiers going and ruining a general's good record, now can you? (Sure, a real thing that happened, but very much not too tempting unless you have a near-endless amount of meat to throw into the grinder, because that soaks manpower.... not so much with necromancy. And even at the relatively limited scale of real life, it (along with other very self-deadly policies) basically crippled the world's largest nation's population to where it never recovered to this day.) Or the various other selfish acts, enabled by the acceptance of necromancy.
Entirely plausible, but again, generals aren't without people they report to. Maybe his boss is fine with this and the army goes more heavily towards using necromancy. I fail to see how that destroys society, considering that war still has the same problems(destroying your working age population) if you're using undead soldiers or living ones. Arguably, not using undead to fight your wars is actually a larger issue, since at least undead soldiers don't run, don't need to eat, don't get sick(actually most war casualties), and don't need to be particularly young or well trained to kill someone. Simply because the option technically exists doesn't mean that the army is going to start butchering everyone they can to make the largest army possible, for the same reason that armies that don't use necromancy don't draft everyone possible unless absolutely necessary. If you're at the point in a war that you're just sending everything at it, without regards to how it will impact the economic and social makeup of your nation, then it's not your military policy with regards to the undead that is destroying your nation. Its the war. The people that you're referring to didn't throw young, poorly trained, and poorly armed men into the meat grinder because they wanted to. I see no reason the undead army needs to slaughter its own citizens for more fighting power unless external circumstances would pressure that action. But the loss of life would happen either way given those dire circumstances.

Or maybe his boss isn't fine with him cutting down anyone who flees battle, because routs are a thing that's known to happen fairly commonly, and he has the guy killed for mass murder. Again, I just don't agree with this idea that once you tolerate some necromancy, you automatically tolerate every act of murder under the sun, and any other values you had go out the window. You can tolerate something distasteful in some circumstances and not others. That's sort of how humans work.

Of course, you could just reanimate your enemies, or save the reanimation until after your own people die. Unless undead soldiers are dramatically outperforming living ones, you probably wouldn't kill your own folks just to get more of them. And if they did outperform dramatically, that's actually a point in favor of the undead army outcompeting the living.

I think the more likely outcome of tolerating necromancy, and immortal sentients in general, is power concentration. While I don't think a society of necromancers is doomed to collapse, I think it would probably trend towards an autocracy of a few very old and powerful sentient undead lording over hordes of mindless thralls and various bootlickers. The nice thing about high level enchanters, evokers, illusionists, conjurers, and abjurers, is that they tend to die given enough time. Barring plot armor for having sex with the god of magic, people who aren't big into necromacy will at least fall over eventually, creating a good ol' power vacuum that's perfectly capable of destroying society by itself. Or at least reorganizing it a bit.


Yes, among many other things. There must be at least a dozen ways to unlock infinite energy in D&D. It's a problem of vast scope. Necromancy is highly prevalent though, since it takes effect at relatively low levels and the idea of using undead as humanoid robots whose batteries never run out occurs to a fairly large number of players.
I use undead as infinite manual labor, but I don't really bother with the whole "industrial revolution" thing. Drastically altering the technology level of the setting using IRL knowledge is something I find to be far too metagamey for my taste, and realistically my characters probably care far more about researching the next tier of spells then they care about trying to design a hand crank battery powered by skeletons. A mill powered by undead instead of water is about as far as I would go.

[SangoProduction]

-Stuff-
OK, so I think we are missing each other.
So, what makes it different from any other murder wasn't the act of murder itself, but the temptation to do so. The valuation of the death of a person can exceed their life. We could equate this to the discussions around private prisons and occupancy contracts. Critics argue that such arrangements incentivize heavy sentencing, potentially to the point of creating more reason to incarcerate than to address root causes of criminality.
Let me stress that I'm not endorsing this conspiracy, but rather using it as an illustrative point. In such a scenario, it isn't the individual case of imprisonment that's problematic. Rather, it's the incentives that encourage misuse and excessive application of power, especially by those whose role it is to uphold the law.

Now, take that concept and apply it to necromancy, which essentially implicates everyone, not just criminals. With necromancy, any individual could theoretically be replaced by their own reanimated corpse. The looming threat of such a fate could, paradoxically, drive people to work harder. They may strive to prove their worth and productivity, to avoid being replaced by an unending, uncaring, tireless version of themselves. That is, until they suffer from burnout or mental breakdowns. Once a living person succumbs to these pressures and can no longer keep up with their undead counterpart, they risk being seen as a societal burden... and thus their value as living beings suddenly dips. And the relative value of just letting that person "pass peacefully" to join the undead labor force rises.

There are always Evil people in society, but not every Evil person acts on their impulses, or has those impulses strong enough to act on. Add more temptations, especially powerful ones, and more will act on them. Not everyone will steal a wallet with 10 dollars in it. A lot more people would pocket money if that wallet had a couple grand.

The role of the devils / demons in (non-D&D) stories tends to be that of the corruptor. The one who encourages giving into temptation. Small at first, then growing. A single potato chip is never enough to satisfy. There must always be more.

[Zanos]

My disagreements with the presented scenario are twofold:

1. It assumes that profiting off something negative(in this case, death), will be taken to its absolute maximum, to the point that everyone in society who can be replaced with an undead will be worked to death and then replaced. There are a million versions of a necromantic society that don't do this. Incentives compete against other incentives, and people generally do not want to be killed or worked to death. But just because people have incentives against being replaced with undead doesn't mean there's no possible variations of a system that includes both the undead and the living. We manage productive enterprises that cause human suffering all the time, and we typically wind up allowing them to operate so long as we determine that the suffering is either happening far away or is an 'acceptable' amount. Again, as far as I'm aware, the massive waiting list for donor organs hasn't caused a massive increase in the number of perfectly healthy 20 something men with strong hearts dying in freak accidents. If we follow your logic, the only possible end goal of an organ donor system is that we would be rounding up everyone who doesn't 'contribute' to society and pulling out their organs to put them in more 'useful' people. I don't disagree that there's incentives for and against necromancy. I disagree that the only possible outcome is 100% one way or the other.

2. Assuming that the presented scenario is true, and anyone who can be replaced with an undead laborer is, that's not a collapsed society; it's an Evil one. The nation that works all of its manual workers to death then reanimates them doesn't cease to exist, just the only people who are allowed life are those that can't be replaced. That is less people than you would think, considering many tasks referred to derogatorily as "manual labor" can't be performed by mindless undead. A zombie can turn a mill, sure, but it can't really plant crops, build a roof, raise a barn, etc. etc.

If you want to frame being undead as a type of emerging technology, this means that people will obviously be displaced by undead laborers and new careers will be created around that, like an undead foreman that micromanages the perpetual motion idiots. The standard of education to be considered a useful cog goes up, and the people who can't meet that standard fall through the cracks. A good society would use it's new prosperity to help them, and an unethical one lets them die and reanimates them. I just don't see where the "you're out competed by everyone around you and cease to exist" comes in, when you're the one immorally leveraging emerging technology to gain a massive advantage. If anything, the undead society with soldiers that don't have any of the problems that plagued traditional warfare and drastically less people who can complain about the powerful abusing their power should do a pretty good job of killing their neighbors.

[Mechalich]

I use undead as infinite manual labor, but I don't really bother with the whole "industrial revolution" thing. Drastically altering the technology level of the setting using IRL knowledge is something I find to be far too metagamey for my taste, and realistically my characters probably care far more about researching the next tier of spells then they care about trying to design a hand crank battery powered by skeletons. A mill powered by undead instead of water is about as far as I would go.

Infinite manual labor (which includes super-strength labor, since, you know, giants and dragons can be reanimated too), is a pretty massive game changer by itself. That alone changes a quasi-medieval fantasy world into an unrecognizable necropunk reality.


So, what makes it different from any other murder wasn't the act of murder itself, but the temptation to do so. The valuation of the death of a person can exceed their life. We could equate this to the discussions around private prisons and occupancy contracts. Critics argue that such arrangements incentivize heavy sentencing, potentially to the point of creating more reason to incarcerate than to address root causes of criminality.
Let me stress that I'm not endorsing this conspiracy, but rather using it as an illustrative point. In such a scenario, it isn't the individual case of imprisonment that's problematic. Rather, it's the incentives that encourage misuse and excessive application of power, especially by those whose role it is to uphold the law.

Now, take that concept and apply it to necromancy, which essentially implicates everyone, not just criminals. With necromancy, any individual could theoretically be replaced by their own reanimated corpse. The looming threat of such a fate could, paradoxically, drive people to work harder. They may strive to prove their worth and productivity, to avoid being replaced by an unending, uncaring, tireless version of themselves. That is, until they suffer from burnout or mental breakdowns. Once a living person succumbs to these pressures and can no longer keep up with their undead counterpart, they risk being seen as a societal burden... and thus their value as living beings suddenly dips. And the relative value of just letting that person "pass peacefully" to join the undead labor force rises.

You're not projecting out far enough. The potential labor supply produced by 3.X D&D undead is functionally infinite. There's no need to produce additional skeletons past a certain point because there's nothing for them to do and they'll just end up standing around (yes, initially there will be wars, but this will stabilize in some fashion rather quickly). The contribution of essentially infinite undead labor means the transition to a post-labor-scarcity necropunk economy. And, because it is highly unlikely that you are playing a campaign in a setting were someone just figured out to use undead as a labor force yesterday, this has already happened.

Now, the question of 'what does a post-labor-scarcity' necropunk economy look like is broadly unanswered, at least in the specific context of D&D 3.5 (there are a number of other projects that have taken a stab at it, I recommend The Empire of Corpses, an anime film by Project Itoh, for one conceptualization), and of course 3.5 allows for any number of alternative paths to a post-scarcity magitech utopia/dystopia of which the Tippyverse is perhaps the best known on these boards.

If one takes the implications of 3.5 D&D seriously, then the central question in designing a D&D world is 'which infinity do you pick?'

[Zanos]

Infinite manual labor (which includes super-strength labor, since, you know, giants and dragons can be reanimated too), is a pretty massive game changer by itself. That alone changes a quasi-medieval fantasy world into an unrecognizable necropunk reality.
It's very useful, but as mentioned above, not to the degree that people assume. I wouldn't trust a D&D 3.5 zombie to nail two boards together straight, and more direct uses of 'energy' are a ways off. The fact that the smallest possible engine is, well, the size of a man also is fairly limiting. You could have zombie powered transportation and simply machinery fairly easily, but for the most part the lack of intelligence or manual dexterity is going to see most undead powered machines to be about as limited as any device that could run off animal power, just without the same necessary inputs. It's more "what if a horse was smaller, didn't need to eat, and did what you told it to without training?" than a sci-fi robot. Since undead naturally know how to fight, they change warfare a great deal, but mostly because undead soldiers don't require supplies and don't get sick or cold or afraid. In a time where nearly all battles were decided by routs and had fairly low casualties, a force that will fight until it physically is hacked to pieces is a nightmare to combat.

It also presumes that 5th level clerics and 7th levels wizards actually care about inventing necro-engines instead of being religious zealots or eating paper and drinking ink.

[Mechalich]

It's very useful, but as mentioned above, not to the degree that people assume. I wouldn't trust a D&D 3.5 zombie to nail two boards together straight, and more direct uses of 'energy' are a ways off. The fact that the smallest possible engine is, well, the size of a man also is fairly limiting. You could have zombie powered transportation and simply machinery fairly easily, but for the most part the lack of intelligence or manual dexterity is going to see most undead powered machines to be about as limited as any device that could run off animal power, just without the same necessary inputs. It's more "what if a horse was smaller, didn't need to eat, and did what you told it to without training?" than a sci-fi robot. Since undead naturally know how to fight, they change warfare a great deal, but mostly because undead soldiers don't require supplies and don't get sick or cold or afraid. In a time where nearly all battles were decided by routs and had fairly low casualties, a force that will fight until it physically is hacked to pieces is a nightmare to combat.


Well, the trick is exactly where the setting designer draws the line at 'unskilled labor.' That could range from 'only tasks normally performed by draft animals' all the way up to '90+% of common tasks in the pre-industrial context.' My opinion is that skeletons (not zombies), can do quite a lot, certainly any broadly repetitive single-motion task like cutting hay, digging holes, spinning yarn, grinding grain, and so forth. Even if the undead don't power machines and trigger an industrial revolution, they can still drastically alter the way the world works simply through labor replacement. This is notably true given that undead can labor 24/7, which makes them incredibly efficient at certain tasks.

[SangoProduction]

My disagreements with the presented scenario are twofold:

1. It assumes that profiting off something negative(in this case, death), will be taken to its absolute maximum, to the point that everyone in society who can be replaced with an undead will be worked to death and then replaced. There are a million versions of a necromantic society that don't do this. Incentives compete against other incentives, and people generally do not want to be killed or worked to death. But just because people have incentives against being replaced with undead doesn't mean there's no possible variations of a system that includes both the undead and the living. We manage productive enterprises that cause human suffering all the time, and we typically wind up allowing them to operate so long as we determine that the suffering is either happening far away or is an 'acceptable' amount. Again, as far as I'm aware, the massive waiting list for donor organs hasn't caused a massive increase in the number of perfectly healthy 20 something men with strong hearts dying in freak accidents. If we follow your logic, the only possible end goal of an organ donor system is that we would be rounding up everyone who doesn't 'contribute' to society and pulling out their organs to put them in more 'useful' people. I don't disagree that there's incentives for and against necromancy. I disagree that the only possible outcome is 100% one way or the other.

2. Assuming that the presented scenario is true, and anyone who can be replaced with an undead laborer is, that's not a collapsed society; it's an Evil one. The nation that works all of its manual workers to death then reanimates them doesn't cease to exist, just the only people who are allowed life are those that can't be replaced. That is less people than you would think, considering many tasks referred to derogatorily as "manual labor" can't be performed by mindless undead. A zombie can turn a mill, sure, but it can't really plant crops, build a roof, raise a barn, etc. etc.

If you want to frame being undead as a type of emerging technology, this means that people will obviously be displaced by undead laborers and new careers will be created around that, like an undead foreman that micromanages the perpetual motion idiots. The standard of education to be considered a useful cog goes up, and the people who can't meet that standard fall through the cracks. A good society would use it's new prosperity to help them, and an unethical one lets them die and reanimates them. I just don't see where the "you're out competed by everyone around you and cease to exist" comes in, when you're the one immorally leveraging emerging technology to gain a massive advantage. If anything, the undead society with soldiers that don't have any of the problems that plagued traditional warfare and drastically less people who can complain about the powerful abusing their power should do a pretty good job of killing their neighbors.

Again, I think we are just missing each other. Rolls are very low today. lol.
I did not say that it will be taken to its absolute maximum. Ever. That's an inference that you are taking away from examples of how the incentive structure goes wrong, and you're kind of the one extremifying the argument. Indeed, I reiterate repeatedly that there are the evil outliers that are attracted by the increased incentives.
It is a corrupting force that adds value to the dead.
(A very substantive value, I might add. Especially if taken entirely as raw, and unless interfered with, they are well and truly immortal. Of course, entirely as raw, there is actually no system for any sort of wear and tear, unless actively inflicted by a hostile force. A nonmagical sword made a hundred thousand years ago is as good today as it was the day it was buried. Also strictly RAW, Animate Dead can't actually do anything other than follow and attack, in Pathfinder and 3.5 - anything other than that goes beyond the scope of the spell's rules.)

And I will note that forced organ harvesting does happen on a rather large scale in China.[Scrubbed]
But hey, if all you, as a fabulously wealthy and irreplaceable person, had to do was to have someone somewhere far off get killed so that you could live, why not? Aside from being totally immoral. But you are just one person. What is your choice of dying instead of feeding the perverse system really going to do?
No, seriously, what's your individual choice to not contribute to the corrupt system, really going to do from a individual perspective? But at the end of the day, it's the collective choices of everyone coming to the conclusion that their choice doesn't matter. That morality isn't worth upholding, because their choice doesn't matter.

And, it does happen in the West as well. It's certainly less pervasive, but there are individual stories of people getting killed for their organs. Most famously depicted are scenes of people waking up in ice baths, missing the "less important" organs. (That particular depiction's not killing, but also... in the "red market" as it's called by the WHO, there were over 6,000 known illegal heart transplants in 2005. Just the known stuff. And it's pretty hard to extract a heart without killing the patient.)

This in no way should be taken as an argument against legitimate organ donation. Just a demonstration that it does happen.

OK, I'm going off on a deep tangent. Likely because it's 3 in the morning. I'm going to call it a night. (Cannot wait to respond to Vecna. That's actually a really fun post.)

To summarize: When incentives exist, and the punishments are not great and reliable enough to stop the acting upon those incentives (and even then, see The War on Drugs), people will partake of those incentives. The greater the incentives, the more it's taken part in. Especially when the illicit partaking of it camouflages very well with the perfectly legit partaking.

[AvatarVecna]

More of a world building question, really.

I've put forth, several times, that necromancy creates perverse incentives where a living person can be considered, at least by some, to be more valuable than a living person. (And to summarize) Thus, a society that has no problem with necromancy eventually weakens and subsumes itself -opening itself to conquest (either soft or hard) by other societies. Meanwhile, those who happened to evolve (or created with, as there are literal deities of creation) a strong disgust reaction to necromancy would immunize themselves against succumbing to those incentives, because acting on the incentives means that you become an enemy of the society at large.
(You can then counter with saying "they are no different from robots, because the rules are like this" except that robots don't typically require access to a dead body for creation. And eventually, you will run out of long-dead bodies, if necromancy is fully embraced. And it gets pretty grim from there. Regardless that debate is a bit off topic.)

So, to the point of the post: Do the other schools of magic exhibit similar perverse incentive structures that can potentially undermine societies and lead to their downfall?
(Note: I am just giving the best argument. Not necessarily my beliefs.)

I think this makes some assumptions I don't agree with.

1) Undead are worse than people, so if necromancy replaces too many people with undead, the nation is weaker.
2) Supply of dead bodies is low.
3) Demand for dead bodies is high.


1) Undead are worse than people, so if necromancy replaces too many people with undead, the nation is weaker.

The advantages of the living over the undead are twofold: they are generally better at breeding, and they are generally better at leveling.

Undead breeding is either nonexistent or is less breeding and more conversion - if you stick a vampire in with a human, two people went in, two people came out. One of them is more powerful now, but quantity and quality aren't the same thing. Vampires can cease to exist, and can't create new beings from nothing the way living creatures can, so living creatures are a necessity for long-term development. Undead leveling tends to either be stunted or nonexistent. Some undead can never improve (skeletons, zombies, wights, etc), while others can improve but it takes far more effort for them than it does for a non-undead humanoid (vampires, liches, etc).

However, if someone dies of old age, their breeding years are behind them, and they're as powerful as they were ever going to get in one lifetime. People who never improve get the Wight Euthanasia package, and get physically/mentally upgraded while their soul moves on to the afterlife. People who improved at least a little bit and aren't inclined towards magic can become necropolitans, effectively becoming immortal for basically no downside (outside the initial XP expenditure). People who have improved a great deal and are highly-capable mages can become liches. Maybe vampires if they prefer, but the reason for wight/necropolitan/lich is that their physical needs are basically nonexistent, while the vampire needs blood to survive. Now, instead of being a dead body sitting around doing nothing, they are up and about serving their country.

Even if you're of the opinion that a lich, or a necropolitan, or a wight is less useful than they were when they were alive, as long as they weren't killed prematurely, the nation hasn't been weakened. Or at least, it hasn't been weakened by the necromancy. It's been weakened by the loss of a highly-capable citizen, who was always going to be lost. The difference is whether that citizen is replaced with a useless unanimated corpse, or a useful animated one. Even if you believe it's less useful as undead than alive (which is debatable), it's more useful undead than dead.


2) Supply of dead bodies is low.

IRL, there are 8 billion people alive, and there have been 117 billion people alive throughout history. This isn't counting animal corpses, which the human race produces in large quantities as a byproduct of animal-based industries. Has it taken you a minute to read this post so far? Wow, you're a pretty fast reader. Also, in that same span of time, 600 cows died. Did it take you five minutes maybe? Well then the number is 3000 cows instead. That's just cows. Granted, our world has a higher population than most D&D worlds, but the same principles will generally hold true.

Every farm is going to have animals that used to be good at doing labor or having babies but are past their prime. They were more valuable as food in their youth when they were plumper and less worked over, but...waste not want not. To the butcher it goes. Every butcher will separate meat from bone and find they have all this stuff left over that isn't really edible, primarily most of the bones. Some cuts have the bones still in them, but there's still basically a full skeleton just sitting there being useless...waste not want not. The bones will either be sold to someone who wants to turn them into glue or gelatin or aphrodisiac or something else stupid, or more likely they'll be used to make stock. But in a world with necromancers...those cow bones could be turned back into a cow that is more or less as physically capable as that cow has ever been, and it'll be that capable until somebody kills it, without any need to feed it. This could increase the farmer's ability to make more food by far more than whatever food that beef stock would've provided. Why try to squeeze every calorie you can out of the bones when you can let magic give you your cow back after you sold off all its flesh?

And in D&D world, there are far better targets than cows. There's monster bones out there to be found. You'd be a fool to go digging in a dragon graveyard, of course, but there are beasts unlike anything our world has ever seen. And as long as it has a skeletal system, it's fair game. And because most creatures in the world are just one of many threats that the humanoid nations are desperately beating back, any attempt to thin their numbers via murder is generally seen as a positive thing. You've turned a raging unthinking enemy into an unwaveringly loyal ally. That's not making the nation weaker. No no, supply is not low. It's unbearably high.


3) Demand for dead bodies is high.

Every necromancer has a limit on how many undead they can control at one time. Undead that can control themselves are helpful to the nation, but as previously discussed necromancers aren't exactly incentivized to wight-ify people en masse before their time. Necromancers can control 4 HD per caster level of zombies/skeletons; even assuming they think a zombie slave is better than a wight employee (and slavery is at least arguably advantageous to the enslaver), there's only so many they can enthrall.

Awhile back, I used the DMG/ELH demographic rules to figure out approximately how many of each class/level combo there are in Toril. Link. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TkDMdY5Gm4f_x4UHcoK3RSLYPxCC0XkioyEBfa6f3ok/edit?usp=sharing) The only people capable of casting Animate Dead are clerics lvl 5+, some sorcerers lvl 8+, and some wizards lvl 7+. Assuming generalist or any specialist are equally likely, there's a roughly 1 in 9 chance that a wizard is a necromancer. There are 23 core domains, and clerics get two each. Assuming domains are assigned randomly, there is a 2/23 chance that a given cleric has the Death Domain. That's not to say that all death domain clerics will want to raise the dead, but it's pretty likely. That's also not to say that non-Death domain clerics will be completely uninterested in raising the dead (although that's pretty likely as well). Sorcerers don't really have a good way of estimating their odds. But the average of 1/9 and 2/23 is 41/414, which is right about 9.9%. To make the math easy, let's call it 10% across the board: 10% of casters have an interest in raising the dead. Rounding down, to be fair and balanced.

TL;DR, 10% rounding down on each of those class/level combos indicates there are a total of 8589 casters capable of the spell in the world, and the sum of all their caster levels is 79221, therefore they could have up to 316884 HD worth of zombies/skeletons under their command.

Let's put those numbers in the context of the real world. Toril is assuming a world population of about 100 million, but real world is 8 billion - 80 times as many people. So let's call it 25,350,720 HD worth of undead that would be controlled directly by necromancers of various stripes (assuming our world had the same ratio of necromancers to non-necromancers, and assuming their relative power was similarly distributed).

159000 people die every day. 1 HD each.
90000 pigs die every day. 3 HD each.
890000 cows die every day. 5 HD each (assuming bison stats).

159 days in, all the necromancers would have their control pool filled purely by people who were gonna die anyway. If you wanna stretch it out on the assumption that necromancers won't be conveniently around for every single death, let's say they're close enough to animate the body for 1 in 10 dead guys. 1590 days in, control pools are filled. Little over 4 years. It's a long haul, but that's assuming that all the necromancers went from "no control" to "all the control" without killing a single extra person. It's also assuming they don't want any skeletons/zombies made of anything stronger than a first level commoner. If the necromancers exclusively animate the skeletons of boars killed by the pork industry, it takes 93 days to fill their control pools. If they only get 1 pig out of 10, it takes 930 days (2.5 years). If the necromancers exclusively animate the skeletons of cows killed by the beef industry, it takes 6 days to fill their control pools. If they only get 1 cow out of 10, it takes 60 days (2 months).

If the necromancers decide to mix and match all three, it doesn't significantly change the time needed. Cows are 91% of the HD; we've gone from something like 5.69 days to 5.19 days. It's not a significant difference. If the necromancers lose the bid on 99 corpses out of 100 across all three, it takes them 519 days (1.42 years) to fill their control pools. There's some ways for individuals to expand their control pool a bit...but at most we're maybe doubling all these numbers. It's a small difference for a world that got necromancers yesterday, and it will be an even smaller change for a world that's had necromancers forever and also has better animation targets than commoners, pigs, and cows.

(Because my estimates make use of the ELH rules, which allows for much higher-level casters, these numbers will be lower if we assume just DMG demographics. A good deal lower.)

EDIT: Ultimately, I can acknowledge that the way the system is set up incentivizes people to do unethical things. That's a definite issue. But because the most direct way to benefit (gaining undead slaves) has a pretty hard limit on it (caster level x4), and only the caster can actually benefit, the incentive can only take you so far. You can't really sell your undead slave to somebody else - I mean you could, but it's more like they're paying you to contract your slave to them. You can't really transfer ownership so there's not really a way for it to spiral into an eternally-growing business model. There's a hard cap on how many undead a necromancer can control himself, and there's a feasible limit to how many necromancers there can be in the world and how powerful they are. And that number of necromancers is problematic, but eminently survivable, even for a country that got them all yesterday. It's not a great societal shakeup in a world that's never had them; in a world that's always had them, it's even less significant. The actual threat doesn't come from necromancers, it comes from undead intelligent enough to act against humanity and not intelligent enough to realize that doing so dooms them in the long-run. For example, there's a plot in a popular work of fiction where a vampire lord wants to kill the sun, and nobody points out how this would basically doom all life on the planet, eventually including vampires. Another popular work of fiction features a vampire lord who wants to genocide the whole human race and be done with them, and refuses to discuss the consequences this will have for all vampires because secretly he's kind of tired of being alive and wants all life to end alongside him.

Living plagues like vampires and wights that are working against society have to be stamped down or integrated properly. But necromancers? Pfft whatever. On a societal scale, they only really matter if they accidentally kick off one of the aforementioned living plagues. They'll be isolated serial killers at the absolute worst, and more likely just unethical businessmen. A dripping faucet in a bathtub full of blood.

[Beni-Kujaku]

D&D necromancy breaks the law of conservation of energy. As such, even the most basic undead is a perpetual motion machine. Ex. hooking a skeleton into a muscle-powered generator. This makes the incentive towards necromancy imminently logical, from an amoral perspective, because it can supply a civilization with infinite energy and, using slightly more intelligent and dexterous undead, infinite labor for functionally all tasks. Additionally, because D&D undead do not naturally decay, you will not, in fact, fun out of dead bodies, because the ones you already have just keep going and going.

The problem with this setup is nothing to do with necromancy, specifically - the exact same effect can be achieved using constructs or other options - the problem is that universes that permit perpetual motion machines are fundamentally broken.

It's not really perpetual motion in that it creates a conduit to the negative energy plane that channels negative energy into our world and uses the power of this flux to power the undead. Yes, it's functionally infinite and people in the D&D world will not run out of it before their civilization doesn't exist, but it's not perpetual motion in the same way a solar-powered machine isn't perpetual motion. The energy comes from somewhere, be it the negative energy plane for necromancy, the elemental planes for most of the evocation, or simply the Weave, powered by the faith of people and the energy of souls in the afterlife, themselves being created in the Material Plane by people simply living and having babies using the energy coming from the stars to grow plants and food. It's a complex chain of power, but it's not fundamentally broken, except if you consider that a world using watermills, windmills and where plants grow using photosynthesis is fundamentally broken.


More to the point, bad incentives:

Divination: That's the big one. If you know something won't work out, you probably won't do it. If there's widespread divination, people will stop experiencing new things, as they know they will fail in the beginning. But failing is the natural process for betterment and finding new ways of doing things. People will start only using the most easily available solutions for problems, since they know what it is. Where necromancy might lead to industrial revolution, divination will make the society stagnate around the middle ages.

Transmutation: Waaaaay too many things. If people can change anything into anything else, there's no need to look for quality products, it gives a mentality of "doesn't matter, we can fix it whenever" which impedes the ability to think about the future, and pushes people to mostly use things that were broken multiple times and repaired as many times. No need to buy a new one if the previous one isn't broken, right? Even if each time the previous one is repaired, its quality is a bit worse, until you get used to live with low-quality, purely-functional things. Some would say it's good, and I'm not sure I disagree, but I don't think a "it's fine" widespread mentality is good for society.

Evocation: I dunno, feelings of power I guess? Hunting with evocation is easy and allows for mass hunting and fishing, which could damage the ecosystem?

Abjuration: Don't think there's anything possibly bad with this one. I mean, there's always the idea that if people think themselves invincible, they have more chance to start fights with each other, but considering the very relative level of invincibility we're talking about and the high-level monsters out there, I don't think it's a problem.

[Mechalich]

Every necromancer has a limit on how many undead they can control at one time. Undead that can control themselves are helpful to the nation, but as previously discussed necromancers aren't exactly incentivized to wight-ify people en masse before their time. Necromancers can control 4 HD per caster level of zombies/skeletons; even assuming they think a zombie slave is better than a wight employee (and slavery is at least arguably advantageous to the enslaver), there's only so many they can enthrall.

Well...animate dead can be inscribed on a scroll, so I believe anyone with the ability to make a DC 25 Use Magic Device check can control up to 20 HD of Undead. And while Use Magic Device isn't exactly a common skill ordinarily, any society transitioning to a necropunk economy would prioritize its development along with pumping out Clerics, Wizards, and Adepts (animate dead is on their spell list) of the appropriate specialization.

And 20 HD of undead goes a long way. A single skeleton, assuming it matches task efficiency with a human laborer, can do roughly the work of 2.5 people at that task because it can work 24/7. That means each controller can do the work of 50 people. Even knocking that down to 40 because of supply, lighting, and other inefficiencies, that's immense. Assuming undead can perform most common labor tasks, and that those tasks account for the overwhelming amount of labor time in a pre-industrial context, the amount of labor needed to be done by living individuals is liable to drop by a full order of magnitude.

However, the upper limit on how many undead a society needs is the point of labor saturation, which, because skeletons are more efficient at labor than living beings, is going to be less than the total extant population. So even if undead control is limited, society is liable to be able to fulfill its undead labor needs by having each person agree to reanimate one dead relative. Now, if, going forward, that society decides 'no one ever dies' and instead there's an ever-growing population of wights, necropolitans, and liches, that's going to create some supply issues, but that's due to suddenly very rapid exponential growth taking hold (which is likely to be dealt with by a corresponding plunge in the birth rate), not anything intrinsic to the necropunk approach.


It's not really perpetual motion in that it creates a conduit to the negative energy plane that channels negative energy into our world and uses the power of this flux to power the undead. Yes, it's functionally infinite and people in the D&D world will not run out of it before their civilization doesn't exist, but it's not perpetual motion in the same way a solar-powered machine isn't perpetual motion. The energy comes from somewhere, be it the negative energy plane for necromancy, the elemental planes for most of the evocation, or simply the Weave, powered by the faith of people and the energy of souls in the afterlife, themselves being created in the Material Plane by people simply living and having babies using the energy coming from the stars to grow plants and food. It's a complex chain of power, but it's not fundamentally broken, except if you consider that a world using watermills, windmills and where plants grow using photosynthesis is fundamentally broken.

Well, okay, yes, at a very high level, the D&D multiverse is non-entropic, granted. The planes have infinite energy that cannot run out and therefore the universe just keeps going and going forever. I would still call it a useful shorthand to refer to undead as perpetual motion machines within the context of the human scale. For example, a skeleton set to turn a crank will keep on doing that endlessly without the need for any visible inputs and it will not break down. That's why I made the comparison, because it's possible to take a machine, slap a skeleton(s) in the place where the power source would be, and then run it forever.

And doing this sort of things breaks D&D worlds because those worlds, and the game rules themselves, are not intended to function in post-scarcity systems.

[Satinavian]

And 20 HD of undead goes a long way. A single skeleton, assuming it matches task efficiency with a human laborer, can do roughly the work of 2.5 people at that task because it can work 24/7. That means each controller can do the work of 50 people. Even knocking that down to 40 because of supply, lighting, and other inefficiencies, that's immense. Assuming undead can perform most common labor tasks, and that those tasks account for the overwhelming amount of labor time in a pre-industrial context, the amount of labor needed to be done by living individuals is liable to drop by a full order of magnitude.
I would say that mindless undead are a bit too stupid to replace most human laborers. They have their uses, but those uses are limited to the most basic, repititive tasks and those where nothing matters beside endurance and brute force.

[AvatarVecna]

I would say that mindless undead are a bit too stupid to replace most human laborers. They have their uses, but those uses are limited to the most basic, repititive tasks and those where nothing matters beside endurance and brute force.

Loading and unloading stuff from wagons is a pretty common position that doesn't require an enormous amount of brainpower. Unintelligent Undead under the command of a manager, doing the often-monotonous but irreplaceably-vital job of maintaining supply lines, is a good use of them.

But in general yeah, you can't replace most labor with unintelligent skeletons mindlessly taking orders. Wights are better for it physically and mentally, and just have some personality wrinkles that need to get ironed out. Alternatively, if society is being reworked into necropunk, you could also cheese the XP system getting basically anybody to at least lvl 3 and up to lvl 7, and then giving them the Necropolitan treatment, which is about the best undead option available in the game for our purposes.

[Mechalich]

I would say that mindless undead are a bit too stupid to replace most human laborers. They have their uses, but those uses are limited to the most basic, repititive tasks and those where nothing matters beside endurance and brute force.

The thing is, in the pre-industrial world that's a huge number of tasks, including many of the labor bottlenecks. Admittedly it requires breaking apart certain tasks into parts and creating a sort of proto-assembly line setup, but that's not an issue.

For example, take the production of linen. It requires, planting, weeding, harvesting, and drying the flax. Then retting, breaking, and hackling the dried flax to isolate the fibers. Spinning it into yarn. And, finally, weaving it into fabric. I'd trust skeletons with basically every step other than weeding and weaving (though they would require equipment produced by others, and probably someone to sort the fibers at points in the middle steps). However, based on estimates of labor time involved in fabric production even allowing skeletons to perform spinning alone would replace something like 80% of the total time needed for fabric production.

[Quertus]

Suboptimal.

That is the word which describes so much of this. And of course suboptimal societies will be disadvantaged compared to more optimized societies. And, sure, sufficiently suboptimal societies might just implode.

If your society doesn’t take advantage of Necromancy, it is suboptimal. If it lacks proper laws and enforcement of those laws, it is suboptimal. If it grossly underutilizes Necromancy, it is suboptimal.

And almost everything described here is based on highly suboptimal principles.

So what does an optimized society look like, based on the existence of Necromancy?

Let’s start with the Undead (because there’s so much more to Necromancy). In fact, let’s just start with the simplest of Undead, the mindless Skeletons and Zombies.

These creatures can be created with Animate Dead, a spell available without shenanigans starting at 5th level (so it’s available even in an e6 setting). But it’s expensive, costing… AFB… 25-50 gp per HD? So your society is going to be limited by funds as to how many Undead they can Animate.

This will, at least in most “starting” societies, make Undead feel like / be viewed as more of an investment. Like Education. So societies that prioritize and are geared for investment in the future will tend towards Undead. However, Undead are only one of many possible investments, and depending on the nation and the “world physics”, they may not be the best investment for a fledgling nation to make.

Enter free Undead. Between Tainted Sorcerer, Eschew / Ignore Materials, metamagics, and even meta-free Undead via things like Undead Leadership, one can still “invest” in free Undead, and some of these options can be used even in an e6 setting.

This, of course, carries an opportunity cost: if you took any of those options, you didn’t take something else (usually a feat) instead. So still not 100% “free”, but can be “free with purchase”, if you were taking those options for some other reason already.

And, iirc, one of those options (the metamagic) might create uncontrolled Undead? Not sure. But if so, there’s an additional cost / requirement of someone to control said Undead.

So any society could invest in Undead. What does the return on that investment look like? There’s some debate about that, which translates to “depends on world physics”; i.e., in this case, what qualifies as labor the mindless Undead can handle. Regardless, for a society just starting out, just introducing undead, it is undeniable that there are some tasks that can be performed by mindless Undead.

I’ll leave it to others to math out how much wood they think an Undead woodchuck could Chuck, and how quickly an undead-utilizing society pulls ahead of their Necrophobic neighbors per Zombie laborer or skeletal cow pulling a plow 24/7 they have, but I suspect the end results will be obvious: the more Undead, the better quality of life the living citizens can expect.

So what are some of the other features of an optimized society?

Undead army

Others have touched on this. Yes, Undead have benefits in an army: they don’t have morale, they don’t need supplies, and they’re unaffected by things like disease and infection. Sure. But that’s still a suboptimal use of the Undead, as they also are tireless, and can see in the dark. So, while a normal army can only march 8 hours a day (less once their supplies run out and they need to start foraging for food), an undead army can march at speed 24/7. AFB, but can skeletons run, or only double-move? Is a Skelton army 6x or 12x faster than their living counterparts in ground covered per day? Regardless, that’s huge. And let’s not forget, they don’t breathe, so they can march underwater, or through other rare hazards that might stop living beings.

Now, on the down side, they don’t heal between battles, or even heal “incidental” injuries acquired on the march. And they’re mindless, so at the very least you’ll need some intelligent Undead to lead them - which is a vulnerability in any world where such lieutenants are “fair game” in a fight.

So it’s not strictly an advantage, but dang what an advantage it is - especially a) in worlds where the average soldier is a Commoner 1 conscript; b) if you have reached your control limit -> replacing the fallen is simply done from the stockpiles of inanimate bones waiting to be animated, as opposed to decades of child rearing to replace the living; c) when you realize that’s the army you have in addition to your living army; d) when you realize your living army could be so much better trained than your neighbors due to your increased quality of life / decreased dependence on Commoner 1 for your labor needs (more on that below).

Control Pool

So, a lot has been made about the limits of the control pool. There’s a lot to expand this, from General of Undeath to Rebuke Undead to… some item (a rod maybe?) that lets even muggles command Undead. Oh, and the Command Undead spell. Which, given that it doesn’t care about HD, is a huge boost - especially to the army.

But here’s the thing: when released from the control pool, mindless Undead will just keep doing the last thing they were ordered to do. Which means that mindless Undead assigned to a repetitive task don’t need to take up any control pool. In an optimized Undead society, your mindless Undead turning a hand crank (to operate a mill, or spin threads, or even generate electricity if your world physics and metagaming go that route) don’t count against the limit of how many Undead you can control.

Which means all menial tasks are covered, for free. Raising your standard of living that much higher.

(Also, in case it somehow isn’t obvious, Rebuke and Command Undead can be used to change which repetitive task a mindless Undead is working on, should the need arise.)

Privatized Undead is the root of all evil

Afaict, a lot of these problems come from the assumption that individual citizens “own” the Undead. If, instead, the entire mindless Undead labor force is owned by the government, you remove a lot of the perverse incentives. Instead, you have government jobs, like “Undead Task Coordinator”, and creation of Undead either by government employees, or simply outsourced to the lowest bidder.

Regardless, an optimized society eventually reaches saturation, where every task that can be accomplished by mindless Undead is being performed by mindless Undead (regardless of what that list looks like, per individual world physics). And that society will have huge advantages over less advanced societies wrt the wealth, lifestyle, education, and power of its average citizens.

And that’s even before adding in Sentient Undead, like Necropolitans, where (for example) the nation’s best craftsman can now not only triple their output, but continue crafting for the nation forever. EDIT: Oh, it's only triple the output if the world physics and the nation's society doesn't include things like squishy organic beings needing time off for holidays and vacations and the like - with those in play, the Necropolitans could be 4-6 times more effective after their conversion. And don't forget, the mindless undead get a similar multiplier to their effectiveness, so they're really quite cost effective, even for those suboptimal societies that actually pay gold for their mindless Undead.

Obviously, an optimized society completely out-performs a highly suboptimal one.

Perhaps in a later post I’ll explore suboptimal vs optimal approaches to other magics.

[HunterOfJello]

Enchantment: I mean, 1984 has already been talked to death about. (Should probably add divination here too in that case.) Enchantment can easily be argued as the ultimate violation of a person - to infect their mind and soul. To effectively destroy the person, and replace them with a skinsuit that acts and thinks in ways that the original person would hate the new one, to the core, for.
A society that has no problem with enchantment is quickly consumed by enchantment, around a demagogue who was able to train up their powers to the point that they control everyone.
Less of an issue than naturally charismatic creatures, on account of the truly altering ones are much higher level, and people do have ways of dealing with charismatic people are are abusive to their power... Or, maybe we don't, looking at the world around us... At least not on the scale of modern society.



Enchantment is the most evil school of magic. (At least, it would be considered so.) Charm Person at level 1 is already a heinous, unforgivable crime which demands the death penalty.
Necromancy doesn't begin to compare until it gets to much higher levels and that's primarily because it can create plagues (normal or undead) and other extreme catastrophes.

Almost every human right sits on a foundation which assumes freedom of thought: liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, right to work and education, etc.

Wizards couldn't be trusted at all in society unless they were all forced to specialize and prove that they chose enchantment as one of their banned schools. Scrolls with the spell would be highly illegal, and any person proven to be able to cast Charm Person would need to be deputized by the government or forced to forget or unlearn the spell somehow.

[SangoProduction]

Vecna: Point 1: The mindless and loyal ones certainly are worse than normal people, as they cannot think and come up with new ideas - which is how society advances and becomes stronger. Higher level or complex undead (or Necropolitan, which is simply insanely good in all ways) are certainly superior to the living, as written, save for being unable to breed.
Raising the already-dead is fine in principle, and is undoubtedly the primary means by which undead labor is achieved. The problem arises when it's not easy to tell that the last out of 50 of the zombies was much more fresh than the rest. Especially when they are far from prying eyes, in the strip mines or fields.

Point 2: Undead beasts are the least likely to cause such deprave declines, due to a very clear delineation between what is and is not an acceptable undead. At least until the upper class have way too much time on their hands and start wondering what the fundamental difference is between an undead beast and undead human. The vast majority will say, "They are beasts. They aren't human." But just like vegans, some tiny portion will go "well, they're just corpses one way or the other."

Point 3: Fun math, but ultimately irrelevant as the math doesn't scale linearly backwards (or forwards). But point taken: It is hypothetically feasible to amass an undead army without resorting to uncouth methods. I never said it couldn't.

Point e: Fair point.

-
Ben-Kukau. Nice. I like it. Some definite risks to be handled.
-
Quertus, if you honestly believe that those working in government (especially in roles monopolized by those people) are free from self-interest, I've got a bridge to sell you.
But yes, undead can be very valuable, especially the higher level ones that actually have autonomy and control above Animate Dead's rules. That's the point.
-
HunterOfJello. I am inclined to agree, honestly.
Maybe not to such the degree for simple Charm Person, as it is comparable to actual charisma, but yeah.

[Quertus]

Enchantment is the most evil school of magic. (At least, it would be considered so.)

Necromancy doesn't begin to compare

Hard to disagree with that.


Charm Person at level 1 is already a heinous, unforgivable crime which demands the death penalty.

Really? Suppose I could guarantee that, if we met, you'd consider me your best friend. OK, so what? What do you let your best friends do that would be so horrible if I could do it, too? On the flip side, if I had to choose (in a not-false dichotomy, these are my only choices), why wouldn't I choose "you as new best friend" instead of "you getting the death penalty"? I mean, I may have trust issues IRL, but even I don't see why treating someone as my new best friend is worthy of the death penalty.

While I agree that Enchantment is the most evil school, I lack your hatred of Charm effects. What am I missing here, that you feel that being someone's friend is so terrible?

-----

So, this seems a good time to talk about optimized societies and Enchantment.

Charm

Charm Person makes you treat someone like they're your best friend. As I've already covered in other threads, the optimized response to this is to have an ingrained "no favoritism" policy. Sorry, childhood friend, but the price is the price - I can't go any lower for you.

Now, there's a lot of things to say about favoritism. "Nepotism" is generally given a bad name, after all. But the thing is, "nepotism" is about favoring family - a society that insulated itself against Enchantment could absolutely have a "blood is thicker than water", familial favoritism attitude, instead of simply a "no favoritism" policy. So, kind of like the pantheons in Scion, optimizing for the existence of Charm Person is a matter of choosing the pillars your society is based on, and explicitly choosing that because "friendship is magic", this means that friendship isn't one of your society's pillars is one form of societal optimization.

Now, here we get into world physics (as there is no defined game effect for choosing to de-emphasize the value of "friendship" on a society, outside the ancient art of Roleplaying), and the question of whether evaluating real-world pillars falls under "politics" instead of "science". So I'll simply say without judgement that a society where you expect nurses will steal drugs for their friends, or where guards will let their friends into secure areas may be different from a society where you expect such won't happen. A society where "police" / judges / magistrates can be expected to arrest their friends and sentence them for their crimes may be different than one where you expect such won't happen.

Would an optimized society use Charm effects?

Actually, I think that the answer could be "yes'.

For example, people who already hate each other could be Charmed to view each other favorably during litigation or arbitration, to try to produce a "fair" result. Or people who already hate each other could be Charmed to not cause problems at important social gatherings (no attacking each other at the royal ball, or on public TV).

And, while it wouldn't exactly be nice, I could maybe see some nations attempting to instill national pride or love of the leader or even love of a religion through some kind of mass Charm effect. On the plus side, that means that their armies have the lowest morale ever, as, once they leave the effect, they hate their nation / leader / religion. In that regard, it actually seems safer than Charisma.

Mind-Affecting

Before we go any further, now might be a good time to point out that numerous beings, including Undead and Constructs, are immune to [mind-affecting]. So, outside one specific Bard-based build, Undead are unaffected, making templates like Necropolitan and Bone that much more appealing to insulate society (or just one's self) against Enchantment. Similarly, outside one Rod, constructs are immune, making... um... "robocop" / Tippyverse seem safe(ish)?

Anyway, just putting it out there, that certain optimized societies are already optimized to insulate themselves somewhat against Enchantment, raising the value of their techniques even further.

Dominate

OK, Charm effects are pretty harmless, at most just making a member of an optimized society not hate someone until after they're gone. Is the world with a little less hate really such a bad thing? Of course, it guarantees you hate them after they're gone, even if you wouldn't have otherwise, so, on the flip side, is a world with a little more hate really such a bad thing?

But Dominate isn't something you can just "culture" your way out of - people are going to do things they normally wouldn't do under a Dominate effect. However, Dominate effects are noticeable via Sense Motive.

So, back to those pillars of society, if you create a society with a strong Family and/or Community pillar, it makes it much more likely that there will be people looking out for you, noticing when you seem "off", and intervening, or bringing it to someone's attention. Sort of like how a cashier will get their manager before allowing your grandmother to wire $3,000 to someone she's never met, an optimized society will have wetware safeguards against Domination - or at least to detect and investigate such occurrences.

Would an optimized society use Dominate effects?

Eh, probably as part of / as opposed to "torture for information" efforts (also, afaik, there are no mechanics for torturing someone for information, so by default this "works better" than torture). And maybe on monsters, to add capabilities to the nation not easily obtained by the (presumably humanoid) citizens. But it's risky, so only maybe.

Mindrape

Whew. Mindrape is "best spell ever", and my second-favorite spell after Animate Dead. Even I have to admit, there's not much a society can do to protect itself against pod people.

That said, if someone is throwing 9th level spells against Tom the Butcher, something's really odd, and your society has probably either won or lost already, depending on whether or not that was an efficient use of that spell slot.

In short, if you have to protect your average citizens from Mindrape, something is very, very wrong.

Would an optimized society use Mindrape?

Absolutely.

After all, Mindrape has some non-evil uses, that just substitute for a therapist or whatever.

But it might also be used by the government (in place of the death penalty) on people who abuse Enchantment (or Necromancy, or Charisma, or any other horrifically-abusable ability). "Waste not, want not", after all - isn't it better to turn a high-level criminal into a high-level productive citizen, rather than kill them? It's certainly more optimal.

-----

So, that's a few of the optimization routs a society could take, given the presence of Enchantment. Whereas things like favoritism, "not my problem", and squeamishness about the Death of Personality are traits of suboptimal societies in an Enchantment context.

EDIT:
Quertus, if you honestly believe that those working in government (especially in roles monopolized by those people) are free from self-interest, I've got a bridge to sell you.
But yes, undead can be very valuable, especially the higher level ones that actually have autonomy and control above Animate Dead's rules. That's the point.

The point was that the self-interest of the government does not produce the same perverse incentives as the self-interest of privatized Undead. Feel free to point out any perverse incentives specific to government-regulated Undead, and we'll see how many are suboptimal, caused by people being idiots, vs how many are actually incentivized by the presence of Necromancy for an optimal society.

Also, as should be obvious from this post, I'm talking about what is optimal, which includes social engineering of the base society, choosing what values they are taught. So be careful that your chosen forms of corruption and perverse incentives are universal, and not easily solved (like most things) with the application of Mindrape.

[SangoProduction]

People are people. And social engineering does not work. There is no way to "optimize" a society, in the way you suggest, unless you totally replace all the people with completely mind controlled thralls.

But anyway, here's some examples of self interest, all wrapped up into one word: corruption. Not even metaphorical, or metaphysical, or magical. Just plain old government corruption. The inspector gets paid money to look the other way. The politician knows who butters their bread. The judge making a false imprisonment on grounds of making interest groups happy. The police chief's family being threatened and effectively held hostage if any mafia members were to face charges. That sort of down-to-earth, typical corruption. (Granted, that last one is a certainly less evil, but ultimately is them putting their personal and familial goals above the role that they ostensibly serve.)

People don't stop being people just because they work in government. Indeed, those looking for power are the ones who trend towards government, because it holds the largest concentration of power. Do the people who strive for power tend to be more or less corrupt than an average, self-content person?

[Zanos]

Again, you're making this wild assumption that because corruption exists, the entire system has failed. That just isn't the case. The vast majority of people who work in government just do their job and are never really presented with an opportunity to do something corrupt, are too dim-witted to take advantage of a situation, are "true believers" in the system, or are sufficiently coerced by a checks and balance system that they don't indulge in actions that will result in short-term personal advancement at great risk. You can absolutely create a bureaucracy that leverages peoples self-interest against them to make it very likely they will behave how you want them to.

And yes, you can use legal policy the shape people's behavior. Sometimes you have to be a little smarter about it, but we make a bunch of things illegal or require a permit to reduce them. 100% prevention of undesirable behavior isn't necessary for something to be considered successful.

[Mechalich]

It's also important to differentiate between the failure points, including corruption, endemic to any system, versus those specifically created by a magical system.

For example, mindless undead do not create any specific corruption opportunities when deployed at scale, they're just a labor resource. By contrast, intelligent undead do create corruption opportunities, because they can be turned into essentially perfect slaves (this includes spellcasters via methods such as the Spectral template) and forced to work forever, something that would not normally be possible.

Necromancy is notable among the paths to dystopian wizard-kingship in D&D in that it utilizes an especially brutal form of minionomancy to project power.

[SangoProduction]

Again, you're making this wild assumption that because corruption exists, the entire system has failed. That just isn't the case. The vast majority of people who work in government just do their job and are never really presented with an opportunity to do something corrupt, are too dim-witted to take advantage of a situation, are "true believers" in the system, or are sufficiently coerced by a checks and balance system that they don't indulge in actions that will result in short-term personal advancement at great risk. You can absolutely create a bureaucracy that leverages peoples self-interest against them to make it very likely they will behave how you want them to.

And yes, you can use legal policy the shape people's behavior. Sometimes you have to be a little smarter about it, but we make a bunch of things illegal or require a permit to reduce them. 100% prevention of undesirable behavior isn't necessary for something to be considered successful.

OK, now you're literally making up arguments. I've never even claimed that. You are responding to a response for a request for proof that self interest exists specifically in the government (specific to necromancy, but that would be hypothetical, and thus would rely on hypotheticals, which is not seeming to be convincing).

And people's behavior can be influenced. They cannot be engineered.
At least not yet. Who knows. Perhaps with yet more powerful, personalized AI systems running the whole lot, such that every message is perfectly tailored specifically for each person, such that all advertising is so exactly what they would respond to, without hesitation or just straight up chips in the brain. All praise Neuralink.

But I think I am done with this thread, and I submit.

[icefractal]

I had some thoughts on an undead city a while ago, originating from the fact that Dungeons of Dredmor has a skill called "Necroeconomics" and it made me think of undead robber-barons. Haven't had a chance to use it in a campaign yet.


[Name] is a city-state, covering the whole of a small-ish island. In addition to the fairly built-up surface part, it extends deep underground, although past a few levels down the air stops being breathable and there's no lighting except for areas where color needs to be seen. Neither of which is a problem for the entirely undead residents there. Masterwork-quality goods are unusually common and cheap, because of the many ultra-skilled workers available, but surface-only crops or imports are more expensive than usual.

There's a living population (mostly at the surface), who are considered very important (being the only source of new undead) and are well protected, but also somewhat treated like children and have (in practice) no chance of any major leadership role. Undeath is considered the natural continuation of life, and not being reanimated as undead after dying is a great dishonor, which only the worst criminals are sentenced to.

In some ways, the entire "living" part of a citizen's life is an apprenticeship / audition process. You try to build up your skills and accomplishments to be sponsored for animation as a better type of undead (and/or better animating procedures, like Corpsecrafter, Spellstitching, etc). If you can't impress anyone, you might end up as a mindless skeleton - better than not being animated at all, but not what anyone wants for their necrolife. Living citizens have a robust social safety net, although using it accumulates debts they'll have to pay off once they're undead. Living citizens are also fairly strongly pressured to have children, and doing so is sometimes a requirement for being animated as a quality type of undead.

Once you're undead, your (un)life depends on your wealth. If you're rich, then you can enjoy an amazingly high standard of living (forever, since you're immortal) while protected by legions of ultra-veteran bodyguards and entertained by ultra-skilled performers. If you're adequately well-off, then it's still pretty good - you are immortal after all - but you'll face stagnation and very few opportunities for advancement. For example, most guilds have at least a dozen levels of seniority, and you can't even be considered for the higher ones until you've been producing masterwork-grade results for at least 100 years. And even if you enjoy your job, do you really want to work forever? But at least you never get sick, and even very slow advancement is something you've got the time for.

But if you're deep in debt? Well, undead don't need breaks, and so you don't get breaks. Undead don't need anything more to survive than a place to stand, and so anything more than that will cost you. And with the ruthless tactics many employers there use, you'll likely be in debt for centuries, if not forever.

Incidentally, not all undead types are welcome. Spawn-creating undead are a threat to both the city's continued survival (no more living citizens means no more undead citizens, and the fact that most of the world doesn't share their beliefs about undeath as a desirable state means that relying on immigrants for repopulation is dicey) and to the stability of the power structure. Most of them - shadows, wights, ghouls, etc - are only allowed to visit under strict guard, only allowed to become citizens if extremely trusted (and extremely valuable), and summarily destroyed if they try to sneak in or start creating spawn. Vampires are an exception, since they were among the founders of the city. They're only allowed to create spawn within defined quotas, and they're expected to self-police in this regard, having their own separate court system. This arrangement suits the elder vampires at the top of the hierarchy quite well, although the lower-ranking ones are rather less happy with it.

Not exactly a utopia but maybe not a dystopia either. It could go toward either end depending on how the knobs are tuned.

[Quertus]

People are people. And social engineering does not work. There is no way to "optimize" a society, in the way you suggest, unless you totally replace all the people with completely mind controlled thralls.

But anyway, here's some examples of self interest, all wrapped up into one word: corruption. Not even metaphorical, or metaphysical, or magical. Just plain old government corruption. The inspector gets paid money to look the other way. The politician knows who butters their bread. The judge making a false imprisonment on grounds of making interest groups happy. The police chief's family being threatened and effectively held hostage if any mafia members were to face charges. That sort of down-to-earth, typical corruption. (Granted, that last one is a certainly less evil, but ultimately is them putting their personal and familial goals above the role that they ostensibly serve.)

People don't stop being people just because they work in government. Indeed, those looking for power are the ones who trend towards government, because it holds the largest concentration of power. Do the people who strive for power tend to be more or less corrupt than an average, self-content person?

This seems like a good time to talk about the perverse incentives of the PS5.

If the PS5 released tomorrow, there’s no way supply could keep up with demand. People would be incentivized to murder one another to get ahold of a PS5, or even just to reduce the competition for this rare resource.

A Wizard capable of casting 9th level spells will be incentivized to take offense at their maid, and punish them by using Polymorph Any Object to turn them into a PS5.

Now let’s talk about the perverse incentives of air.

While the PS5 might be considered a luxury item, and therefore less valuable than a corpse, few can debate the value of Air to the living. And, like corpses, it’s something where supply is naturally bountiful, and, as a rule, greatly outpaces demand.

Yet, as anyone who’s interacted with children with siblings can likely attest, “he’s breathing my air” is clearly an offense worthy of the death penalty.

Now let’s talk about an optimized society and Divination.

“Are any government officials going to abuse their power within the next week, in a way that results in a class 1 offense?”

“Are any government officials going to abuse their power within the next week, in a way that results in a class 2 offense?”

“Will there be any Class 2 offenses involving Necromancy?”

“Will there be any Class 2 offenses involving Enchantment?”

“Will there be any Class 2 offenses involving Judges?”

“Will it be Judge Bob?”

Todo: Mindrape Judge Bob.

“Will there be any unlicensed Necromancy within the next week resulting in a class 1 offense?”

“Will it occur outside a city?”

“Will it occur in the city of Bonemore?”

Todo: send Inquisition Squad to Bonemore.

Now, this is still suboptimal in numerous ways, that even the evil overlord’s mandated 5-year-old advisor should catch, let alone lacking “12 spheres” levels of optimization. But it involves a society way more optimized than one where one would expect the government officials to be able to get away with violating the law. In this society, mafia members threatening family simply brings them to the attention of the Overlord and their Mindrape proclivities (who can also bring the dead back to life, and regenerate lost limbs, and Mindrape away any psychological effects of torture, and…).

Would government officials who lived in a society where they knew Justice were even that suboptimal level of efficient be inclined to break the rules, do you think?

——-

In short, citing common human failings just means that the perverse incentives are not introduced by the new object, and must be compared against the failings caused by other objects to see if they tend towards making society worse. With their ample supply, Dead bodies for Skeletons and Zombies would, if anything, reduce society’s corruption level. And having an optimized society reduces that even further.

[Quertus]

More of a world building question, really.

I've put forth, several times, that necromancy creates perverse incentives where a living person can be considered, at least by some, to be more valuable than a living person. (And to summarize) Thus, a society that has no problem with necromancy eventually weakens and subsumes itself -opening itself to conquest (either soft or hard) by other societies. Meanwhile, those who happened to evolve (or created with, as there are literal deities of creation) a strong disgust reaction to necromancy would immunize themselves against succumbing to those incentives, because acting on the incentives means that you become an enemy of the society at large.
(You can then counter with saying "they are no different from robots, because the rules are like this" except that robots don't typically require access to a dead body for creation. And eventually, you will run out of long-dead bodies, if necromancy is fully embraced. And it gets pretty grim from there. Regardless that debate is a bit off topic.)


“In the grand calculus of the multiverse, their sacrifice means far more than their deaths.”

So, assuming you meant “a person is more valuable as a dead body than as a living person”, you don’t need to have Necromancy for that to be true - there are plenty of individuals who are a net negative to society, whom the world would be better off if they were a corpse. And if you asked the world, given that most of us are a net detriment to the environment, the world would argue that the world would be better off if most if not all humans were corpses.

Now, yes, in the grand calculus of the world, Necromancy and Animate Dead increase the value of a dead body, thereby shifting the math of whether someone is “better off dead”.

But here’s the thing: isn’t the perverse incentive to harm society by keeping alive individuals who actively harm society? Wouldn’t The grand calculus of the world indicate that, all things being equal, society would be stronger if it killed off those who made things worse?

Well, it’s complicated. But D&D is kinda based on PCs going out and creating corpses of those who are a detriment to society. It just calls most of those future corpses “monsters”. And adventurers do so regardless of whether they Animate those corpses as undead or not. So evidence from the field suggests that not much changes with the addition of Necromancy.

As far as personal gain goes, why don’t people kill one another to get out of debts? It seems that a society that would weaken with the addition of Necromancy the way you claim would implode under concepts like “money” or “debt”.

Lastly, in the society I described, in see no selfish benefit to the government officials that would incentivize them to turn their citizens into mindless Undead in a suboptimal fashion, given the natural triumph of supply over demand, the increased value of well-educated living citizens, and the fact that they do not themselves directly benefit from the Undead they create.

Short answer, if societies aren’t already collapsing from killing off their less-valuable members, the addition of Necromancy won’t suddenly cause society to implode; in fact, societies that don’t utilize Necromancy’s benefits will be third world nations compared to their more opulent Necromancy-using neighbors, and will themselves be ripe for conquest.

That’s my world building response to this topic.

[AvatarVecna]

I see a very different perverse incentive that I think necromancy-friendly societies are more likely stumble upon by accident than other schools of magic.

We need to consider the knowledge necessary for wide-spread animation to even be a thing. We as people who can directly read the rules understand that a scroll of Animate Dead CL 5 gives you animation and control of 20 HD of creatures, but in-universe you need to at least be tangentially aware of CL and HD as concepts. The creation of the scrolls requires either artificers cheating to gain spell access, or casters capable of the spell, both of whom will need to provide the material component. As this is an extra cost above and beyond normal crafting, it becomes in the interest of the enterprising necromancer to try and cut costs, or at least figure out why they can't. Any investigation of HD among humanoids inevitably leads to a body of research surrounding XP and levels, which is a more direct method of improving people than undeadification. A commoner is arguably less useful than a commoner skeleton, but a commoner 1/Wizard 6 is infinitely more useful than that same skeleton (since the template deletes class HD).

By the time a society has had the chance to start pursuing necropunk with intent, they've stumbled across a mechanic that actually has the potential to make society crumble: murder translates directly into personal power, with the only limit being that your murder targets must be within a certain percentage of your own power in order to make you stronger. Even in a relatively peaceful society with no Humanoid murder, if this knowledge is commonplace its simple for even commoners to gain levels by setting up mousetraps, if one assumes they can gain XP at all (and high level commoners certainly exist). Rats and toads can get you to 7th lvl no problem. A society full of lvl 7s has more power available to it, but that can be as much of a detriment as a boon to societies. The strength of humanoids is found in cooperation, and having greater personal strength means less need for it, or so one might think.

And in a society that hasn't eliminated murder from existence (like the pre-crime Divination unit a previous poster hypothesized), making everybody lvl 7 means that murdering each other is another way to gain further power increases.

[SangoProduction]

I see a very different perverse incentive that I think necromancy-friendly societies are more likely stumble upon by accident than other schools of magic.

We need to consider the knowledge necessary for wide-spread animation to even be a thing. We as people who can directly read the rules understand that a scroll of Animate Dead CL 5 gives you animation and control of 20 HD of creatures, but in-universe you need to at least be tangentially aware of CL and HD as concepts. The creation of the scrolls requires either artificers cheating to gain spell access, or casters capable of the spell, both of whom will need to provide the material component. As this is an extra cost above and beyond normal crafting, it becomes in the interest of the enterprising necromancer to try and cut costs, or at least figure out why they can't. Any investigation of HD among humanoids inevitably leads to a body of research surrounding XP and levels, which is a more direct method of improving people than undeadification. A commoner is arguably less useful than a commoner skeleton, but a commoner 1/Wizard 6 is infinitely more useful than that same skeleton (since the template deletes class HD).

By the time a society has had the chance to start pursuing necropunk with intent, they've stumbled across a mechanic that actually has the potential to make society crumble: murder translates directly into personal power, with the only limit being that your murder targets must be within a certain percentage of your own power in order to make you stronger. Even in a relatively peaceful society with no Humanoid murder, if this knowledge is commonplace its simple for even commoners to gain levels by setting up mousetraps, if one assumes they can gain XP at all (and high level commoners certainly exist). Rats and toads can get you to 7th lvl no problem. A society full of lvl 7s has more power available to it, but that can be as much of a detriment as a boon to societies. The strength of humanoids is found in cooperation, and having greater personal strength means less need for it, or so one might think.

And in a society that hasn't eliminated murder from existence (like the pre-crime Divination unit a previous poster hypothesized), making everybody lvl 7 means that murdering each other is another way to gain further power increases.

Now... That's an interesting concept. lol.

[Quertus]

Quertus, if you honestly believe that those working in government (especially in roles monopolized by those people) are free from self-interest,


self interest exists specifically in the government (specific to necromancy,


People don't stop being people just because they work in government.

Perhaps, in an optimized society, people working in government jobs would be made free from self-interest, would "stop being people" of the corrupt, evil, society-destroying kind. Oh Mindrape, what can't you solve?

Although, personally, I prefer to nip the problem in the bud, fix the root problem, and use a species better than Humanity for the populous in the first place.


But yes, undead can be very valuable,

Which is why they are almost certainly a part of the most optimized societies. To exclude such valuable resources is suboptimal.


I see a very different perverse incentive that I think necromancy-friendly societies are more likely stumble upon by accident than other schools of magic.

We need to consider the knowledge necessary for wide-spread animation to even be a thing. We as people who can directly read the rules understand that a scroll of Animate Dead CL 5 gives you animation and control of 20 HD of creatures, but in-universe you need to at least be tangentially aware of CL and HD as concepts. The creation of the scrolls requires either artificers cheating to gain spell access, or casters capable of the spell, both of whom will need to provide the material component. As this is an extra cost above and beyond normal crafting, it becomes in the interest of the enterprising necromancer to try and cut costs, or at least figure out why they can't. Any investigation of HD among humanoids inevitably leads to a body of research surrounding XP and levels, which is a more direct method of improving people than undeadification.

I mean, forget all the complicated stuff, Animate Dead requires Onyx. How much Onyx is based on HD. Just someone casting the spell will quickly notice the concept of HD, and be able to put numbers to them.

But, really, the game kinda falls apart in so many ways if you expect that people are ignorant of these underlying concepts. When's the last time you saw someone attempt to cast Wish, or attempt to build a magical item, when they lacked the prerequisite XP?


murder translates directly into personal power,

Sigh. There's so many world-building angles here.

Did you build a world where there isn't a ratcatcher below level 7, or a hunter below level... 9, probably? If not, then you didn't build a world where this is true.

Heck, in such a world, every fisherman, pet owner, or guy with a flyswatter should be level 7 at a minimum.

Are the PCs somehow special, or can everyone earn XP this way?

And just because you can earn XP from murder doesn't mean you can't earn XP from other sources, like training or roleplaying.

But fine. Let's say you live in a world where murder translates into XP for everyone, and everyone knows it. What does an optimized society look like?

Well, first off, it's not "murder", it's "overcoming challenges", which includes murdering sentient or not-so-sentient beings. Thus the mouse traps and toad farms people are so fond of.

But it also includes things like overcoming traps. Including traps that deal no damage, as they have a CR rating, too. So, "running an obstacle course" would grant XP.

Thus, if it were found to let people learn how to Animate Dead faster, citizens of an optimized society would spend their time earning XP (smashing toads, running through obstacle courses, whatever) while the skeleton work force frees up time for said citizens to train by handling the menial tasks (to the extent they are able, based on world physics).

Once your entire society hits the "toad cap" of level 7, that's where things get tricky.

If the society has depended on murdering toads up to this point, it's easy to see how they might turn to bigger prey to level up, including each other. And, if your Overlord is an Arcane Spellcaster / Tainted Sorcerer with free True Resurrection, then there isn't a cost (at least not a direct cost) to society by allowing a certain number of such "licensed" murders per day, so you can probably level more people to provide more True Resurrections rather quickly - especially if you're using mana spell points rather than spell slots. I'll leave it to others if anyone cares to do the math on how quickly such a society can bootstrap more casters capable of free Resurrection, towards the eventual goal of "a society where everyone can cast 9th level spells".

However, you don't need to murder one another (or even the surrounding 3rd world nations that haven't implemented optimized Necromancy) in order to level past 7th. You can build advanced obstacle courses, with things like Teleportation Traps, or even Subdual Substitution spells, to provide higher CR nonlethal challenges for your citizens to overcome. Granted, that's a bit of an investment. Good thing our society is so wealthy, from all the extra levels our citizens have, and all the extra work our mindless undead are doing, let alone all the extra population of Necropolitan master craftsmen, or any other financial optimizations to our society we haven't covered yet.

But who needs all that? Instead, you can simply train your citizens (or another branch of Government Officials, whom I'll call the Educators) in Lucid Dreaming. The idea being to craft "architectural" challenges in dreams, including repeating spell traps, for the citizens to overcome and level while they sleep, for free.

So, there's another taste of what an optimized society might look like (depending on world physics). Although the potential Overlord might want to Miracle up some "better than humans" species to rule over, that don't need to be Mindraped out of all those annoying human failures, before attempting this at home. As optimized as it may sound, a human society where everyone can cast 9th level spells probably isn't a good thing in practice. :smallamused:

[Mechalich]

Now... That's an interesting concept. lol.

It's been around for a while. While D&D generally tries to gloss over the murder=power dynamic inherent in an XP-based universe (and to the extent that XP is an abstraction and not an actual feature of the world this is quite fair), many other universes have gone much more heavily into the concept. For example, this is a common concept in world-as-game scenarios whether isekai or dungeon-invasion style setups. Usually these are justified in that killing fellow humans is less efficient than killing clearly non-human monsters and/or carries some kind of notable penalty (because these scenarios are highly gamified, this is basically a series of anti-PVP measures), but there are distortions.

D&D, of course, has a huge first-mover problem, especially in 3.5. Because the power disparities are so massive - a single moderately optimized full-caster can take on basically any number of inferiors upon reaching level 17 - the first person to reach that point gets to more or less rewrite the world (or however large a chunk of the map they care about) according to their whims, and if they are smart, prevent anyone else from crossing that threshold (in the OOTS-like webcomic Our Little Adventure, the main villain faction explicitly maintains this practice, soul-trap-murdering anyone within their own ranks who hits level 17, which is a decent example).

[AvatarVecna]

I mean, forget all the complicated stuff, Animate Dead requires Onyx. How much Onyx is based on HD. Just someone casting the spell will quickly notice the concept of HD, and be able to put numbers to them.

But, really, the game kinda falls apart in so many ways if you expect that people are ignorant of these underlying concepts. When's the last time you saw someone attempt to cast Wish, or attempt to build a magical item, when they lacked the prerequisite XP?

Yeah, that's kinda exactly what I was talking about? The spell basically requires either the caster or the crafter to be at least tangentially aware of how caster level and HD affect the result of the spell. The result (this many undead created) is why they need to know CL, and the material component is why they need to know HD. Not knowing those things means they're essentially just grabbing a giant pile of rocks they've been told are important to the spell, casting the spell, and just kinda hoping it animates their target. Maybe that's how sorcerers cast Animate Dead, but not wizards, no sir, wizards would do a SCIENCE and figure out just how many rocks they need, which leads to wondering why some people are stronger than others, which leads to XP, which leads to murder-grinding your way to high-epic.


It's been around for a while. While D&D generally tries to gloss over the murder=power dynamic inherent in an XP-based universe (and to the extent that XP is an abstraction and not an actual feature of the world this is quite fair), many other universes have gone much more heavily into the concept. For example, this is a common concept in world-as-game scenarios whether isekai or dungeon-invasion style setups. Usually these are justified in that killing fellow humans is less efficient than killing clearly non-human monsters and/or carries some kind of notable penalty (because these scenarios are highly gamified, this is basically a series of anti-PVP measures), but there are distortions.

D&D, of course, has a huge first-mover problem, especially in 3.5. Because the power disparities are so massive - a single moderately optimized full-caster can take on basically any number of inferiors upon reaching level 17 - the first person to reach that point gets to more or less rewrite the world (or however large a chunk of the map they care about) according to their whims, and if they are smart, prevent anyone else from crossing that threshold (in the OOTS-like webcomic Our Little Adventure, the main villain faction explicitly maintains this practice, soul-trap-murdering anyone within their own ranks who hits level 17, which is a decent example).

Yeah, this is a pretty old problem. In certain video game genres the incentives an XP system creates have become so transparent that games get made commenting on their perversity. It's just commonly understood that if you're having trouble with an area in a JRPG kinda game, you go back to the previous zone and mindlessly kill weak enemies for a little while, until you're strong enough to blitz through the zone that gave you issues. This kind of grinding isn't fun, but it's safe. In certain ways, 3.5 actually handles this better than most video games that use the same concept, because in 3.5 you cant get XP from enemies that are too much weaker or stronger than you are.

It'd be a lot simpler if the game had explicit ways to gain XP that don't require murder. Like in really early D&D, rogues leveled based on how much money they got. That's a kinda neat concept, and could maybe be applied to money-making skills like craft or profession. Practicing your job gives you levels in Commoner or Expert or something (Humanoid HD?). Of course if you do that, you have to contend with how longer-lived races are going to spend a lot more time on their job, and thus get a lot more of this alternative-XP, and thus be a lot higher level. This is great for making those races larger-than-life the way they are in LotR (dwarves as a race of badasses, and elves as a race of almost demigods), but there's probably some game balance issues to be found in granting XP for making money. It'd honestly just make capitalism even more extreme. Imagine if making a billion dollars didn't just give you an obscene amount of financial and political power, but also gave you the ability to time travel and grant your own wishes. Nightmarish.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Did you build a world where there isn't a ratcatcher below level 7, or a hunter below level... 9, probably? If not, then you didn't build a world where this is true.

Heck, in such a world, every fisherman, pet owner, or guy with a flyswatter should be level 7 at a minimum.
Once your entire society hits the "toad cap" of level 7, that's where things get tricky.


Why is the toad cap level 7? The XP chart doesn't award XP for challenges 8 CR below one's level. A toad is CR 1/10. 8 CR above it is 1/10<1/8<1/6<1/4<1/3<1/2<1<2<3. The toad cap should be about lv 3, and the rat cap lv 4. Also, how many creatures would you have to kill to gain a level? A CR 1/10 creature awards 30 XP to a level 1 character. That's low. You'd need 34 to even go to level 1. How many fully evolved toad (that is, of Diminutive size, hence more than 4 inches big) does one commoner encounter per year? Is it even an encounter if the toad isn't agressive in the first place? It's even worse for a rat, which requires 27 of to go to level 2, has more initiative than you (a typical elvish commoner 1 with 12 Dex, 8 Con, and Skill Focus (Profession) to be able to make a living) do, and 14 AC.
You may have a knife, and be able to hit the rat 35% of the time, but the rat has +4 to hit, and hits you 70% of the time. Considering initiative, you have 16% chance to kill it before it can attack, plus about 8 more percent to kill it before it can hit you on subsequent rounds. On each round, it has 70% chance to deal 1 damage, and you have 35% chance to drop it dead. On average, rats deal 1.685 damage to an elven commoner before dying. The chances to deal at least 3 damage in the first three rounds of combat is 15%. The chances for an elf with 3 HP to survive until lv 2 fighting rats are 1%.
In the very best case scenario (half-orc commoner, 4 HP with Weapon Focus, 12 Str, +2 to hit, with a cheap armor giving +2 to AC), it still dishes out an average of 1.15 damage. The chances of getting actually killed by a rat become low (2.4%), but even then you have about 50% chance of getting killed before reaching level 2.

TL;DR: There's a reason all commoners don't go killing things. Things to kill are hard to find and dangerous, and they have to provide for their family so they don't want to die for nothing. Also, even if it was possible, they wouldn't reach high-level without actually going adventuring.

[AvatarVecna]

Why is the toad cap level 7? The XP chart doesn't award XP for challenges 8 CR below one's level. A toad is CR 1/10. 8 CR above it is 1/10<1/8<1/6<1/4<1/3<1/2<1<2<3. The toad cap should be about lv 3, and the rat cap lv 4.

You seem to have confused CR steps with CR? It's not "8 CR steps below one's level". It's "8 CR below one's level". In fact let's get some actual rules quotes in here, since you're (mis)quoting the XP chart.


Monsters Below CR 1
Some monsters are fractions of a Challenge Rating. For instance, a single orc is not a good challenge for even a 1st-level party, although two might be. You could think of an orc as approximately CR 1/2. For these cases, calculate XP as if the creature were CR 1, then divide the result by 2.

"Calculate XP as if the creature were CR 1, then divide the result".

Toad is CR 1/10th. We treat it as CR 1, which means a lvl 8 PC can gain XP from it. lvl 8 PC would normally gain 200 XP from killing a CR 1 creature, so killing a CR 1/10th creature only grants 20 XP. You can argue that it's silly, and tbh I'd agree with you, but you couldn't argue it's wrong. The text is pretty clear-cut.




Character
Level
CR 1


1st - 3rd
300


4th
300


5th
300


6th
300


7th
263


8th
200


9th
*



* The table doesn’t support XP for monsters that individually are eight Challenge Ratings lower than the character’s level, since an encounter with
multiple weak creatures is hard to measure. See Assigning Ad Hoc XP Awards, page 39.

So the thing about the toad cap being 7th lvl is because I'm a lazy person who didn't crack open the actual book when I did my maths. I used the encounter calculator on the SRD (https://www.d20srd.org/extras/d20encountercalculator/) to figure out at what point murdering toads no longer levels you up. According to the encounter calculator, which I trusted since it's on the SRD, lvl 6 characters can't get XP from CR <1 creatures. As it turns out, this is just some kind of mistake in how the encounter calculator is coded. The actual limit where murdering toads no longer gives you XP is when you finally level up to 9th. At which point you need to seek out tougher fights.


Also, how many creatures would you have to kill to gain a level? A CR 1/10 creature awards 30 XP to a level 1 character. That's low. You'd need 34 to even go to level 1. How many fully evolved toad (that is, of Diminutive size, hence more than 4 inches big) does one commoner encounter per year?

I think you're kind of missing the point by imagining that this is happening in a world completely different from what was being discussed? The problem is a path of scientific discoveries that's something like this:

1) Spells get more powerful based on "caster level" (or whatever the in-universe terminology would be).

2) "Caster level" is gained by "leveling up".

3) "Leveling up" is accomplished by "gaining XP".

4) "Gaining XP" is accomplished via murder.

5) What's the best way to maximize "XP" gain while minimizing risk of being murdered by the thing you're trying to murder?

That last one leads you to finding things that are more or less incapable of fighting back or escaping. Toads are slow, make no attacks, can't do anything basically, and yet still give XP by RAW. Turning low-level characters into mid-level characters the second they get old enough to be adults and gain XP is at least theoretically valuable to society, and since having people go out into the streets to murder each other for power is a potential problem, it's easier if the gaining of power is an officially-sanctioned thing steeped in societal responsibility and possibly with religious significance to make sure people don't just go on murder sprees willy nilly. The same principle behind government-funded drug habits: yeah it's maybe bad that the whole of society is fueled by murder, but we're minimizing the "society destroying" impact of that as best we can. Hence...toad farms.

(Toads were also chosen from the list of CR 1/10th creatures because the other option was bats, who can fly away and also don't breed anywhere near as fast as toads do. But if you wanted, it could be a bat farm, and the "coming of age" ritual in this society is trapping you in a small room with dozens of bats at a time and letting you murder them all until you eventually emerge as a lvl 7 badass of some kind.)

It's not about "how many big toads might your average commoner encounter in their lifetime by pure chance in a D&D world". It's "the government has set up facilities that breed and raise toads for the specific purpose of being murdered en masse to grand the citizenry enough XP to reach the mid-levels". If you're worried about the cost of raising and feeding so many toads, you can consider it a deal similar to a college loan. It takes 700 toads to level someone from 1st to 7th...I'm sorry, you've actually made a solid point. Let me rephrase. It takes 1369 toads to level someone from 1st to 9th (thank you for correcting this oversight and giving everyone in the society two extra levels to play with). A lvl 9 character is far better at creating value than a lvl 1 character, and can use that additional capability to make a better life for themselves while also paying back the government for breeding/feeding/raising the toads that made it possible.

In the threads where I initially suggested the toad farms, I also assumed there would be higher-level farms as well for the purposes of leveling people even further, but I didn't have any particular ideas for what should be in those farms. This is partially because basically nothing above CR 1/10th is a free fight, there's always risks, but a lot of it depends on having something that breeds quickly and raises to adulthood quickly; we have good numbers on toads and bats and rats, but there's very little information out there about how fast Grey Renders and Stirges breed and develop. That information almost certainly exists in-universe, but without us having it here, figuring out the ideal creature to farm as our CR 2+ is much more difficult. The hypothetical ideal would be a CR 16 creature that can get trivially defeated by a lvl 9 commoner. Issue is, CR 15 is like...lvl 16 commoner, or things more powerful than it. It might be possible to breed a CR 16 creature that can get its ass kicked by a peasant half its level, but that's much more complicated. More likely, the next level of the farm would be CR 5 creatures that could get destroyed by a modestly-equipped lvl 9 person, and that would get you to lvl 13 and you could start on the CR 9 farm, etc, etc.

[Quertus]

Our toad farms grant us power, but they have a cap. How can we push our citizens past that cap? How come butchers / farmers and hunters are always past the cap? Where can we find stronger things that our citizens can safely kill? What do we do with this surplus of dead bodies / surplus of Undead?

I somehow doubt these questions will remain unanswered for terribly long in a sufficiently optimized society.

Those who have graduated primary school (your toad-capped citizens) will be assigned to secondary school activities, like killing cattle sent to slaughter, or to clean up the nation’s surplus Undead. Slots in such premier / prestigious secondary schools might well be limited, reserved for the students with the most promising careers (Tier 1 casters, those planning to enter Mindraped government service, whatever), while other sources of secondary education might be slower (relying on outdated methods of “training”, perhaps in actual classrooms) or more dangerous (relying on combat against actual monsters capable of hurting people).

Come to think of it, as much flak as Hogwarts gets for its ludicrously unsafe and negligent practices, it does seem to be a school optimized to function regardless of the underlying world physics. Perhaps there’s a method to the founders’ madness after all.

Again, I personally favor traps over slaughter, but, in a world where everyone can earn XP at PC rates, the demographics for an optimized nation will look quite different from those given in the DMG, when there’s no excuse for an adult to not have double digit levels, and (at some point) the bulk of your citizens are sentient Undead like Necropolitans.

Speaking of such demographics, in a nation that emphasizes Necromancy (which… may or may not be the optimal move, but it is what’s gotten the most virtual ink), where labor is mostly handled by Undead, your class distribution will also be quite different. How different may vary by world physics (just how many have the “spark” to become Wizards or Clerics?), but society indicating a demand for certain skills will tend to increase the supply.


Imagine if making a billion dollars didn't just give you an obscene amount of financial and political power, but also gave you the ability to time travel and grant your own wishes. Nightmarish.

One man’s Utopia is another’s dystopia? :smallwink: I mean, “just practicing your craft earns you gold, which earns you XP, which makes you level” sounds pretty good to my ears.

[awa]

I mean by raw I think only pcs level from experience not Npc who are just whatever level the Dm wants them to be.

[AvatarVecna]

One man’s Utopia is another’s dystopia? :smallwink: I mean, “just practicing your craft earns you gold, which earns you XP, which makes you level” sounds pretty good to my ears.

Sure, if it's an abrupt change from the current world to the new one. Otherwise everyone's just born owing their soul to the company store first guy unscrupulous enough to get rich enough for 9ths. Sorry you don't get to level, you haven't actually earned anything, you're still paying off your debt. :smalltongue:


I mean by raw I think only pcs level from experience not Npc who are just whatever level the Dm wants them to be.

The RAW is that NPCs don't gain XP. But also like, they didn't spring from the forehead of Zeus fully-grown at lvl 17. They got there, somehow. Whatever in-universe explanation the DM gives for how they acquired the XP and the levels isn't pure RAW, but nonetheless they acquired it. We can't really speculate on how a society might optimize that method of power growth, since we don't know what it is or how it works, but the simplest explanation is a lot like what Beni suggested: it's not that the average person can't gain XP, it's that they just don't. Theoretically if some random commoner helped - like actually helped - slay the dragon, he deserves a chunk of the XP for it. But a commoner would have such a small chance of actually being helpful, and such a small chance of surviving the act of attempting to help, that of course he's not gonna do it.

Of course, the real path to power is to just gather a ton of people in one location. Get 25001 or more adults in rough proximity to each other, and call it your community, and some of them will spontaneously be converted into high-level full casters. Also no matter how broke y'all were before you become a community, y'all now have about 125 million in ready cash, and somehow have anything costing less than 100k available for sale.

[Captain Cap]

Sure, if it's an abrupt change from the current world to the new one. Otherwise everyone's just born owing their soul to the company store first guy unscrupulous enough to get rich enough for 9ths. Sorry you don't get to level, you haven't actually earned anything, you're still paying off your debt. :smalltongue:
What are you talking about? Arcane power is gonna trickle down, just wait.

[Remuko]

What are you talking about? Arcane power is gonna trickle down, just wait.

Now I'm just picturing a Vampire lord addressing his peasantry on the benefits of "Trickle-down Necronomics"

[Gnaeus]

Again, you're making this wild assumption that because corruption exists, the entire system has failed. That just isn't the case. The vast majority of people who work in government just do their job and are never really presented with an opportunity to do something corrupt, are too dim-witted to take advantage of a situation, are "true believers" in the system, or are sufficiently coerced by a checks and balance system that they don't indulge in actions that will result in short-term personal advancement at great risk. You can absolutely create a bureaucracy that leverages peoples self-interest against them to make it very likely they will behave how you want them to.


In a western democracy that is usually true. In many, perhaps the majority, of states, corruption is the grease that makes the wheels of government work. And while this is, obviously, suboptimal, it is pretty clearly not suboptimal enough to make most corrupt states fail.


Suboptimal.

That is the word which describes so much of this. And of course suboptimal societies will be disadvantaged compared to more optimized societies. And, sure, sufficiently suboptimal societies might just implode.

If your society doesn’t take advantage of Necromancy, it is suboptimal. If it lacks proper laws and enforcement of those laws, it is suboptimal. If it grossly underutilizes Necromancy, it is suboptimal.

And almost everything described here is based on highly suboptimal principles.

So what does an optimized society look like, based on the existence of Necromancy?

Let’s start with the Undead (because there’s so much more to Necromancy). In fact, let’s just start with the simplest of Undead, the mindless Skeletons and Zombies.

These creatures can be created with Animate Dead, a spell available without shenanigans starting at 5th level (so it’s available even in an e6 setting). But it’s expensive, costing… AFB… 25-50 gp per HD? So your society is going to be limited by funds as to how many Undead they can Animate.

This will, at least in most “starting” societies, make Undead feel like / be viewed as more of an investment. Like Education. So societies that prioritize and are geared for investment in the future will tend towards Undead. However, Undead are only one of many possible investments, and depending on the nation and the “world physics”, they may not be the best investment for a fledgling nation to make.

Enter free Undead. Between Tainted Sorcerer, Eschew / Ignore Materials, metamagics, and even meta-free Undead via things like Undead Leadership, one can still “invest” in free Undead, and some of these options can be used even in an e6 setting.

This, of course, carries an opportunity cost: if you took any of those options, you didn’t take something else (usually a feat) instead. So still not 100% “free”, but can be “free with purchase”, if you were taking those options for some other reason already.

And, iirc, one of those options (the metamagic) might create uncontrolled Undead? Not sure. But if so, there’s an additional cost / requirement of someone to control said Undead.

So any society could invest in Undead. What does the return on that investment look like? There’s some debate about that, which translates to “depends on world physics”; i.e., in this case, what qualifies as labor the mindless Undead can handle. Regardless, for a society just starting out, just introducing undead, it is undeniable that there are some tasks that can be performed by mindless Undead.

Undead army

Others have touched on this. Yes, Undead have benefits in an army: they don’t have morale, they don’t need supplies, and they’re unaffected by things like disease and infection. Sure. But that’s still a suboptimal use of the Undead, as they also are tireless, and can see in the dark. So, while a normal army can only march 8 hours a day (less once their supplies run out and they need to start foraging for food), an undead army can march at speed 24/7. AFB, but can skeletons run, or only double-move? Is a Skelton army 6x or 12x faster than their living counterparts in ground covered per day? Regardless, that’s huge. And let’s not forget, they don’t breathe, so they can march underwater, or through other rare hazards that might stop living beings.

Now, on the down side, they don’t heal between battles, or even heal “incidental” injuries acquired on the march. And they’re mindless, so at the very least you’ll need some intelligent Undead to lead them - which is a vulnerability in any world where such lieutenants are “fair game” in a fight.

So it’s not strictly an advantage, but dang what an advantage it is - especially a) in worlds where the average soldier is a Commoner 1 conscript; b) if you have reached your control limit -> replacing the fallen is simply done from the stockpiles of inanimate bones waiting to be animated, as opposed to decades of child rearing to replace the living; c) when you realize that’s the army you have in addition to your living army; d) when you realize your living army could be so much better trained than your neighbors due to your increased quality of life / decreased dependence on Commoner 1 for your labor needs (more on that below).

I think its worth noting here that you are scraping the barrel if you are using humans for most of these tasks. A skeletal elephant, for example, costs 11x as much as a human skeleton in control or onyx, but is better in combat than 11 human skeletons, a weight allowance of like 96x as much, etc. An ogre skeleton is better than 4 human skeletons for most tasks that skeletons can do. An optimized necro-punk society will hunt out all the large and larger creatures long before they start preying on the homeless.

[noob]

It seems most people forgets about create deathless which makes creatures that are directly of a high grade independent from the quality of the body: you could be directly making deathless soldiers from chickens and the worst consequence from overuse of create deathless is intelligent creatures with good intents roaming, it is hardly an issue in most societies.

[icefractal]

Ah, the old "XP farming" thing. I tend to ignore it for thought-experiment purposes because it overshadows most other things and doesn't give very interesting results, but it's actually a lot worse than toads.

If you're going with the assumption that battles always give XP, then this also applies to nonlethal battles. So forget the toads, just have "morning sparring hour" for your populace, with healers on hand so they can recover from KO quickly, and watch their XP skyrocket. There's no level limit to this (and it's a lot faster), since you've got a whole bunch of potential opponents at roughly the same level, all the way up to 20th or beyond.

And if a friendly sparring match doesn't count, then killing a toad who can't even fight back sure AF shouldn't count either. Nor should even 'real' fights (like rats) if a healer is standing by and thus negating any risk of death. So if these kind of "controlled" fights work at all, then they work with no limit up to whatever the maximum level is.

[Quertus]

Now I'm just picturing a Vampire lord addressing his peasantry on the benefits of "Trickle-down Necronomics"

Ah, how nostalgic. Imagine a society where, a million years from now, there were still people around who fully appreciated that comment.


I think its worth noting here that you are scraping the barrel if you are using humans for most of these tasks. A skeletal elephant, for example, costs 11x as much as a human skeleton in control or onyx, but is better in combat than 11 human skeletons, a weight allowance of like 96x as much, etc. An ogre skeleton is better than 4 human skeletons for most tasks that skeletons can do. An optimized necro-punk society will hunt out all the large and larger creatures long before they start preying on the homeless.

Indeed.

This looks like a good time to discuss more of the basics of managing one's Undead workforce, using these 3 creatures as examples.


Any tasks that require hands, the Skeletal Elephant is out of luck. Only the Ogre and Human skeletons are suitable to the task.
For indoors work, for work in small or existing spaces, of the 3, the Human Skeleton is the only real option.
"Fledgling" Necromancers can animate the Human or Ogre skeletons, but cannot animate the Elephant skeleton.
Rebuke Undead can be used to control or retask the Human Skeleton starting at level 2. The Ogre Skeleton requires a level 8 Cleric, whereas the Elephant Skeleton requires an epic Level 22 Cleric to Command them.
Command Undead can be used to automatically control (or retask) any 1 of the Skeletons, at the cost of 1 spell slot each.
In the army, I think (too lazy to look it up) the Elephant and Ogre have a greater base speed than the Human, and thus are able to leverage their speed advantage even further.
In the army, from a purely statistical perspective, the Elephant Skeleton is worth far more than the 11x control pool it costs, or the 1x Command Undead it costs, relative to the Human Skeleton, with the Ogre generally being somewhere between those two relative values.
In the army, which species has a greater psychological impact on enemy morwill vary by culture and "world physics".
For transporting goods, the Ogre or Elephant Skeletons are vastly superior per unit of Control Pool or Command Undead slot needed to instruct them than the human skeleton.
For manual labor, the relative effectiveness will vary based on World Physics; ie, do they use the "craft" skill to make thread? Do they use the craft skill, profession skill, strength, or weight allowance to turn a crank? To plow a field?
The smaller the skeleton, the easier it is to store for future use when unneeded.
The smaller the skeleton, the easier it is to transport it to the altar for Animation (only suboptimal societies allow their Undead to be animated by anyone other than a professional Corpsecrafter located at a proper altar).

[Gnaeus]

This looks like a good time to discuss more of the basics of managing one's Undead workforce, using these 3 creatures as examples.


Any tasks that require hands, the Skeletal Elephant is out of luck. Only the Ogre and Human skeletons are suitable to the task.
For indoors work, for work in small or existing spaces, of the 3, the Human Skeleton is the only real option.
"Fledgling" Necromancers can animate the Human or Ogre skeletons, but cannot animate the Elephant skeleton.
Rebuke Undead can be used to control or retask the Human Skeleton starting at level 2. The Ogre Skeleton requires a level 8 Cleric, whereas the Elephant Skeleton requires an epic Level 22 Cleric to Command them.
Command Undead can be used to automatically control (or retask) any 1 of the Skeletons, at the cost of 1 spell slot each.
In the army, I think (too lazy to look it up) the Elephant and Ogre have a greater base speed than the Human, and thus are able to leverage their speed advantage even further.
In the army, from a purely statistical perspective, the Elephant Skeleton is worth far more than the 11x control pool it costs, or the 1x Command Undead it costs, relative to the Human Skeleton, with the Ogre generally being somewhere between those two relative values.
In the army, which species has a greater psychological impact on enemy morwill vary by culture and "world physics".
For transporting goods, the Ogre or Elephant Skeletons are vastly superior per unit of Control Pool or Command Undead slot needed to instruct them than the human skeleton.
For manual labor, the relative effectiveness will vary based on World Physics; ie, do they use the "craft" skill to make thread? Do they use the craft skill, profession skill, strength, or weight allowance to turn a crank? To plow a field?
The smaller the skeleton, the easier it is to store for future use when unneeded.
The smaller the skeleton, the easier it is to transport it to the altar for Animation (only suboptimal societies allow their Undead to be animated by anyone other than a professional Corpsecrafter located at a proper altar).


Really, you are looking at comparative advantage issues. The undead will have the biggest comparative advantage on things humans are bad at (like working long hours in extreme climate conditions, underwater, or in areas where disease is a factor) or things involving dex or extreme strength or weight capacity. Humans will have the biggest comparative advantage at things that require multiple steps, and any skill using Int or Cha. Assuming your society isn't eliminating ALL the humans, humans will be effectively forced into the jobs they can do better than (or comparatively less worse than) undead. The degree of comparative advantage the humans would need would likely be regulated by the supply of onyx or of people who can do free undead creation.

And you are right, there will also be niches for skeletons of the small/tiny variety. Skeletal monkey chimney sweeps for example.



For manual labor, the relative effectiveness will vary based on World Physics; ie, do they use the "craft" skill to make thread? Do they use the craft skill, profession skill, strength, or weight allowance to turn a crank? To plow a field?
[/LIST]

Thats a good point, and likely to need DM adjudication. I don't think I would allow a skeleton as a Farmer, making skill checks. I think your optimal strategies would be to have a human farmer, with a giant check bonus because he has an ogre skeleton as essentially a piece of farm equipment, like a tractor, capable of pulling plows, removing large rocks, tree stumps, and otherwise carrying/breaking things. Or, alternately, have a single necro making farm checks on a large plantation style farm with a bonus from a dozen skeletons who are doing simple repeated tasks under direction (crawl down that row. pull every plant that looks like this. squish every bug that looks like this). There are probably a dozen or more factors that would weigh into who has the comparative advantage on farming tasks alone. The real, huge + to undead there would be that farming, especially medieval farming, requires a ton of labor for very brief periods of the year, so you could break the skeletons out of mothball one month a year. Or better, have some non seasonal task, like road or fortification construction, that they do 11 months a year, and then send the necros out to the villages for harvest.

And of course, this requires a society that has enough necromancers to be necropunk but not enough tippyverse things like fabricate or resetting create food traps to remove the need for farmers or other jobs completely.

[Mechalich]

And of course, this requires a society that has enough necromancers to be necropunk but not enough tippyverse things like fabricate or resetting create food traps to remove the need for farmers or other jobs completely.

The first-mover explanation comes into play here. Whoever achieves mastery of absolute magical power first gets to decide what form the post-scarcity magitech utopia/dystopia takes in any given D&D world (note that, under normal circumstances this is a dragon, which gets weird fast). Necropunk is what you get if a necromancer or cleric of death wins the race.

[Quertus]

So, if I drop the wording of "perverse incentives", and instead ask, "what would a moron, a complete idiot who makes lemmings look sane, do with these powers?", I might be able to give an answer more of the form the OP anticipated.

So, if you gave a complete moron D&D Necromancy, they might murder people for extra undead. Sure. They're clearly bad at math, and couldn't possibly qualify for Wizard, but they might get in as a Sorcerer or Cleric or some such.

But our hypothetical moron Necromancer might also do even worse things, like start a wightpocalypse. Or forget the importance of living beings in creating new undead.

So what would morons do with other schools?

Evocation

Problems with abuse of Evocation will quite literally spread like wildfire, as they are, well, fires.

Also, nations will likely enter arms races to make the biggest battlefield explosions, eventually creating weapons capable of wiping entire cities or even entire nations off the map. Or - why stop there? Why not the entire world? Just, with an element the nation in question (dragons, fire elves, whatever) are resistant or immune to. Never mind that perhaps their food supply isn't so immune. Because morons.

Abjuration

Surely Abjuration is immune to abuse by morons, right? Not so! Fear of Enchantment could lead to a desire to grant AoE Mind Blank protection to the citizenry. Thereby rendering them immune to divinations. Like the ones warning that their nation will sink into the sea. Thus fell Atlantis, silently, into the depths, because nobody thought to question the wisdom of being unable to see their future.

Illusion

Thanos said it best: "Reality is often disappointing. Now, reality can be whatever I want." Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science; sufficiently advanced illusions are indistinguishable from reality. What's the point of reality, when illusions are far less disappointing?

In the case of undead, who have no real needs... I think I can see the argument being especially convincing.

Enchantment

Everyone is my friend - everyone I care to interact with, that is. Friend groups are small and close-knit, and they don't readily grow. Friends constantly keep in touch with one another, travel is done as a group or not at all, and communities quickly become highly xenophobic. Skills at actually making friends, or at "being a good friend" become extinct.

As Enchantment is the most evil of the schools, this is unsurprisingly simply the worst.

Transmutation

Transhumanity. Utopia or Dystopia? Also, everything Illusion could do, just with more "reality" to the lies - at least until the baby is born. But we can Transmute those problems, too.

The society becomes increasingly alien, unable to interact successfully with or even comprehend those who do not attend to their configuration. And, of course, over time, view those static beings as wrong.

Conjuration

Even ignoring the concept of a slave revolt, I'm told constantly enslaving sentient beings will do bad things to a society's concept of the value of personhood or something. I doubt this would fall apart faster than any other slave nation, though - unless those crazy powerful enslaved sentient beings do happen to revolt, of course.

Divination

A society truly addicted to Divination might well suffer Cthulhu-worthy levels of horror at encountering anything their Divinations didn't predict. A single person with Mind Blank appearing in a town could cause mass hysteria the likes of which only occurs on Black Friday when the must-have Christmas gift sells out. As could an unskilled Diviner asking the wrong questions, leading to the people encountering the unexpected, and suffering mental breakdowns from being unprepared.

-----

Anyway, there's my attempts to view the schools through the eyes of a totally maximally suboptimal duncewaffle, asking, "just how stupid could people be?". Hope that helps with building a world on (or over) the edge.

[Vahnavoi]

Most of these miss some oft-neglected basic rules. Starting ages being a chief example.

Shortly: most full casters take 2d6 years to achieve level 1. Most non-casters take 1dX. Meaning, if you take the basic rules and try to extrapolate from the very beginning, XP-farming tricks lead to non-casters dominating the world before full casters get out of school.

The notable exceptions to this are sorcerers and bards, neither of which are intelligence-based, and the former which is meant to gain their powers through inheritance.

So, the most likely first movers, magical or not, aren't going to be highly sophisticated society planners, especially not once you consider more than half of them are not going to be Lawful and more than half are not going to be Good. The early landscape for high level dominance is going to predominantly feature petty tyranny of superpowered egoists using magical powers to fullfill their base desires. A Chaotic Evil Sorcerer in their ivory tower may know how to use Enchantment to wrap the plebs around their little finger, but they have neither insight nor incentive to leverage that into an over-arching societal change.

Or, put differently: if you want to find perverse incentives of magic, imagine phenomenal cosmic power in the hands of a midwit schoolyard bully instead of a technocratic utopist.

[Mechalich]

Most of these miss some oft-neglected basic rules. Starting ages being a chief example.

Shortly: most full casters take 2d6 years to achieve level 1. Most non-casters take 1dX. Meaning, if you take the basic rules and try to extrapolate from the very beginning, XP-farming tricks lead to non-casters dominating the world before full casters get out of school.

The notable exceptions to this are sorcerers and bards, neither of which are intelligence-based, and the former which is meant to gain their powers through inheritance.

So, the most likely first movers, magical or not, aren't going to be highly sophisticated society planners, especially not once you consider more than half of them are not going to be Lawful and more than half are not going to be Good. The early landscape for high level dominance is going to predominantly feature petty tyranny of superpowered egoists using magical powers to fullfill their base desires. A Chaotic Evil Sorcerer in their ivory tower may know how to use Enchantment to wrap the plebs around their little finger, but they have neither insight nor incentive to leverage that into an over-arching societal change.

Or, put differently: if you want to find perverse incentives of magic, imagine phenomenal cosmic power in the hands of a midwit schoolyard bully instead of a technocratic utopist.

The initial landscape of a D&D style world is presumably a broadly paleolithic scenario where the first generation of beings wakes up after the act of divine creation finishes (Dragonlance and FR both begin this way). The paleolithic is decidedly unfriendly to humanoids. There's no gear worth squat, no magical gear at all, and several classes don't even exist yet because various prerequisites like writing haven't been invented yet. In this context, a handful of years of difference in training time doesn't matter, because no one in the quick-access classes is going to be able to level up (or likely even survive) fast enough to take advantage.

The most likely first movers are going to be Druids and, in Pathfinder, Witches (though Clerics of certain gods with high significance to hunter-gatherer bands like the god of hunting or weather may also find ready access). Global theocracy behind whichever faith gets lucky and rockets up to the point where they can utilize travel magic quickly - a deity who gives the travel domain is a good candidate - and is able to project power across the nascent humanoid bands and increase their numbers by utilizing magic-based food production approaches will win out, exterminate all the humanoids they don't like (and in sort order the monsters) and convert the planet into whatever sort of idealized form that god desires. If the Druids win the race, it's possible that society never advances beyond hunter-gatherer bands and the world remains in a largely paleolithic wilderness state, with monsters everywhere (Druids of course exterminate aberrations and undead, but all the other stuff is left to its own desires).

[Vahnavoi]

In this context, a handful of years of difference in training time doesn't matter, because no one in the quick-access classes is going to be able to level up (or likely even survive) fast enough to take advantage.

See, you can't hold on to that and accept fast-XP tricks at the same time. The theoretical time it takes to go from 1st to 20th level is less than a year. Most characters will die, yes, but anyone who does survive has potential to snowball that advantage. Even if you posit nobody of the early birds gets past 9th level (reachable by grinding weaker opponents), 1st level wizards, clerics and druids will have different prospects coming into a world with 9th level sorcerers, rogues and barbarians running around, than if they started on equal footing.

Rest of what you say, I have no gripes with. I don't find druids the likeliest first mover, but I find them the likeliest balancing factor because, well, that is literally what the druidic circle is described as being for by default.

[Quertus]

Let us not forget the perverse incentives available to other, mundane duncewaffles, though.

Swords

Really, this is sharp edges in general.

Those nations that develop sharp edges will be incentivized to resolve their disputes with their neighbors by slicing them open, giving rise to the phrase “paint the town red”, referring to what the citizens do when introduced to blades.

Some nations will arise with citizens who happened to evolve (or created with, as there are literal deities of creation) a strong disgust reaction to sharp edges, and they would immunize themselves against succumbing to those incentives, because acting on the incentives and creating edged weaponry means that you become an enemy of the society at large.

Money

As we know, money is the root of all evil.

Societies that develop currency will encourage hoarding behaviors, teach their citizens to value things with no innate value, no ability to aid their survival. It will also reduce the Unity of the society, dividing people into different categories by wealth.

Most problems stem from money. It’s the gateway problem.

Fire

As we already learned from Evocation, fire can spread like wildfire, destroying crops, homes, industry, and even people.

Those who use fire will be at a disadvantage compared to nations that Eschew such dangerous techniques, and insulate themselves (perhaps quite literally) with water and rock, and dine upon raw meat and veggies.

Language

The pen is mightier than the sword. Your words cut deeper than a knife.

Words are clearly even more dangerous than sharp objects. Duncewaffles who invent language will insult and harm one another, causing a reduction is self esteem and self worth, resulting in depression, therapy bills, and suicide. Nations that invent language mwon’t need to worry about being taken over by their more stable, language-adverse neighbors, they’ll simply implode in a genocidal mass suicide, and their language-adverse neighbors can simply inherit their untouched infrastructure and industry… if they dare.

——-

All in all, I think it’s petty clear that a sufficiently foolish duncewaffle population can find disadvantage in any advancement. That shouldn’t stop the rest of us from using such things to our advantage, however.

[Vahnavoi]

It is isn't given "rest of us" would ever be in a position to take advantage. Also, dynamic systems experience highs and lows, with atypical highs often followed by collapse. All those mundane things you mentioned? They have their genuine perverse incentives, no sarcasm or exaggeration required, with genuine argument to be made that short-term success they've allowed will culminate in self-destruction of technological society and human societies stabilizing at a lower level. It's not clear intelligence has long term survival value, as one academic put it. Especially not what you think is intelligent or "optimal".