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EvilElitest
2008-02-21, 10:07 PM
I was reading some arguments, and it occurred to me, D&D is set in a fantasy middle age monster and magic sort of world. Ships are used, armies are marched ect. But would that even make sense via RAW? Can such a world exist? Or correction, would such a world exist by RAW, i mean could i work out rule wise
I got this idea from these quotes


A lot of the problems with save or die spells are based on the preconception that death is meaningful. It's not in RAW play. You should expect any given player to die at least once every 5 encounters at level 20. And they should be back in the fight within 48 hours. A TPK should be expected to occur once every 20 fights or so. And again, with proper player planning they should be back up within a week. If you play with death being meaningful then the save or die spells become unbalanced.

But my biggest complaint about 3.5 has to do with the magic system being tacked on to the settings. When coming up with the vanilla setting (Greyhawk) WotC should have chucked all preconceptions and looked at what a world with magic as it is in 3.5 would look like. Teleportation Circles change everything. And WotC hasn't even come up with a reasonable explanation for why magic has no real impact on the basic world structure.

Or take the XP system. When someone can become a demigod capable of taking out entire armies single handedly inside of 2 years by just killing things you have to wonder why these people are rare. Your average solider veteran should be level 15-20. At 1 training bout against an equally skilled fighter every day the veteran should level every 5 wins or so. With a bit of luck you should go from new recruit to level 20 inside a year.




[QUOTE]Seriously. I have no real problem with the D&D RAW and I play Shadowrun or WoD when I want more gritty games. D&D's problem is that it tries to be far to many things and doesn't have a rule set conducive to its primary archtype.

A midevil world with magic and dragons, or a regular old fantasy world are impossible in RAW D&D. It just can't be done while maintaining any suspension of disbelief. If you took the D&D rule set and made a setting based on it that can/could be a very fun and interesting system. But as D&D stands now the published settings make no sense at all.

Massed armies of low level warriors should not exist at all. There are a lot of better, cheaper, and more effective ways to either defend a location or attack a location.

Teleportation Circles should make navies non existent. They should also make trade caravans non existent.

Rutee
2008-02-21, 10:27 PM
Tippy's version of High Level Magic Everywhere isn't really possible either, outside a dystopia, and posits that NPCs use the same CR and encounter rules. Further, it ignores the fact that those rules are explicitly for life or death scenarios. The simple fact is, you have to sacrifice what, 10 minions to get /one/ level 2 soldier, if you have them fight each other. 11 level 1 minions are more effective, bottom line.

I think you'd be looking at 7th or 8th level casters as the realistic maximum of people you can reliably call on. Not that they're the highest, but that they're the highest who exist in enough numbers to really, REALLY change the world. And I'm not entirely sure what all would flow from this, but they're low level enough to appreciate a mortal economy (Especially things like gold).

Zincorium
2008-02-21, 10:30 PM
I was reading some arguments, and it occurred to me, D&D is set in a fantasy middle age monster and magic sort of world. Ships are used, armies are marched ect. But would that even make sense via RAW? Can such a world exist? Or correction, would such a world exist by RAW, i mean could i work out rule wise



It makes sense if a very limited number of people and creatures have access to any sort of powerful magic. That is the default assumption in most settings, including Eberron (not everyone is supposed to have a flying ship).

Second, RAW is meaningless in this case.

The rules as written are only used on this board as a common ground for discussion. Few play exactly according to the RAW and I can't remember anyone having a real problem with that.

Nebo_
2008-02-21, 10:39 PM
Trying to make your world and RAW make sense is an exercise in futility. It's ridiculous to think that people in you world will base their decisions on an abstraction. The new default setting is designed specifically so that it makes sense for adventurers to be wandering about killing ****. That ruins the suspension of disbelief for me so I'll be avoiding the generic setting.

TempusCCK
2008-02-21, 10:43 PM
Tippy's version of High Level Magic Everywhere isn't really possible either, outside a dystopia, and posits that NPCs use the same CR and encounter rules. Further, it ignores the fact that those rules are explicitly for life or death scenarios. The simple fact is, you have to sacrifice what, 10 minions to get /one/ level 2 soldier, if you have them fight each other. 11 level 1 minions are more effective, bottom line.

I think you'd be looking at 7th or 8th level casters as the realistic maximum of people you can reliably call on. Not that they're the highest, but that they're the highest who exist in enough numbers to really, REALLY change the world. And I'm not entirely sure what all would flow from this, but they're low level enough to appreciate a mortal economy (Especially things like gold).


Actually, by RAW, this is null. Defeat an encounter doesn't necessarily imply killing your opponent. You would logically get EXP for beating an equal leveled foe in a practice match using padded swords and dealing non-letahl damage until he's knocked out. Then you bring out the first level Cleric, he casts a few of his spells, guys good as new. As long as it's CR appropriate, this, if defined as an "encounter" will yield EXP.

The Extinguisher
2008-02-21, 10:49 PM
The problem is, this kind of thinking is strictly meta. Level spamming like that wouldn't be something that comes up in a soliders training, because they don't know these things.

Adventurers are powerful because that's what they do. Not because they're high levels in PC classes.

Rutee
2008-02-21, 10:51 PM
Actually, by RAW, this is null. Defeat an encounter doesn't necessarily imply killing your opponent. You would logically get EXP for beating an equal leveled foe in a practice match using padded swords and dealing non-letahl damage until he's knocked out. Then you bring out the first level Cleric, he casts a few of his spells, guys good as new. As long as it's CR appropriate, this, if defined as an "encounter" will yield EXP.
Actually, there's nothing in here that explicitly states that a nonlethal encounter MUST grant exp.

And technically speaking, if you change the equipment on an NPC, he's no longer a listed encounter; Lethal weapons or bust, by RAW.

Either way, yes, Nebo_ is correct. RAW just isn't meant to establish a working world. It can help you mechanize what you do, but it isn't meant to BUILD a world.

TempusCCK
2008-02-21, 11:04 PM
Really, where's ruling for that?

Sneaking past an encounter is specifically stated as an EXP reward situation, and that's not involved with weapons at all.

Really, anything that the DM states is an encounter is an encounter. Lethal or non lethal.

Or...

Two groups of adventurers are trying to capture the leader of the other group for interrogation, somehow they get put into a room where it's 1 on 1 and they're both Fighters. They deal non-lethal damage to each other to see who's going to capture who.

This is a non-EXP encounter for the dude who wins?

I mean, the actions are more or less the same, but the circumstances are different. I'm positive that by RAW, this would be an EXP granting encounter, but, because there's different intentions, there's different amounts of knowledge gained from whacking each other with the sides of your weapons?

Yakk
2008-02-21, 11:10 PM
1> To get XP, the encounter has to be dangerous. Safe challenges are practice, not an encounter.

2> NPCs don't have the CR guarantee. They can't expect to get 3 to 4 CR appropriate encounters that produce WBL rewards.

3> People don't know how to earn XP in a D&D world. Most of the elder, powerful beings, for example, don't have class levels.

#1 with #2 leads to high casualty rates.

#1 with #3 means that people don't know that endangering their safety is the way to get more power. They don't know the threshold that is efficient.

And once you hit the mid-low levels, you cannot gain XP by fighting small numbers of level 1 warrior types. In order to get there, you need to kill/defeat a large number of such level 1 warrior types.

Suppose you need to defeat 13 equal level characters in order to advance.

So to make a level 2 character, you need to kill ~3 level 1 characters.

To make a level 3 character, you need to kill ~3 level 2 characters.

To make a level 20 character, you need 3^19, or a little over 1 billion level 1 warriors, slain to get the raw fodder to level up "reasonably safely".

That's a lot of violence. It would make WW2, the bloodiest war in the history of our world, look like a small gang war.

Suppose 30,000 creatures die in violence every year, and the "combat" lifespan of the violent folk is ~40 years.

Then that hits ~1 million deaths per lifespan, or about one level 13 character alive at a given time from that level of violence.

(with a world population of 5 million combat-capable humanoids, that's a 0.6% annual death-by-violence rate. Over a 70 year natural lifespan, that's a 1/3 chance that someone will be killed by violence. In comparison, in our culture, the rate is more like 0.5% death by violence.)

So, a steady state of one level 13 character for every 5 million combat capable folk.

Chronos
2008-02-21, 11:11 PM
Actually, by RAW, this is null. Defeat an encounter doesn't necessarily imply killing your opponent. You would logically get EXP for beating an equal leveled foe in a practice match using padded swords and dealing non-letahl damage until he's knocked out.You miss the point. I can get experience if I don't intend any lasting harm on my opponent, but I can't get any experience if my opponent doesn't intend any lasting harm on me. There has to be some risk of serious consequences involved, in order to earn experience. Most often, the risk is death, but it could also be risk of getting imprisoned, or risk of getting fired from your job or kicked out of school, or the like. But just risk of not winning the regiment trophy for Best Sparrer isn't enough.


The problem is, this kind of thinking is strictly meta. Level spamming like that wouldn't be something that comes up in a soliders training, because they don't know these things.Well, sparring would realistically be part of a soldier's training, and maybe that's part of what turns a commoner into a warrior or a warrior into a fighter, but it's not really covered under the rules.

Rutee
2008-02-21, 11:12 PM
I mean, the actions are more or less the same, but the circumstances are different. I'm positive that by RAW, this would be an EXP granting encounter, but, because there's different intentions, there's different amounts of knowledge gained from whacking each other with the sides of your weapons?
Actually, we both misread. You were more correct when you said "If the DM says it's an encounter, ti's an encounter." The DMG discusses the rules for CR, and EL, and all sorts of things, but it dosen't specify what an encounter is. It carries on under the assumption that an encounter is a fight, of course, but again, there is no explicit statement, nor is it stated that every fight is an encounter.

So there's no reason to assume the peons will level up in sparring matches, by RAW.

Edit: Oh, and there's no reason to assume people will level up fighting monsters either, going by strict RAW, with no DM intervention. There's no reason to believe people will level up /ever/ without a DM call at some point.

tyckspoon
2008-02-22, 12:19 AM
Trying to make your world and RAW make sense is an exercise in futility. It's ridiculous to think that people in you world will base their decisions on an abstraction. The new default setting is designed specifically so that it makes sense for adventurers to be wandering about killing ****. That ruins the suspension of disbelief for me so I'll be avoiding the generic setting.

This strikes me as kind of odd. You prefer a world where adventurers are wandering about killing stuff and it *doesn't* make sense for them to be doing so?

theMycon
2008-02-22, 01:48 AM
1> To get XP, the encounter has to be dangerous. Safe challenges are practice, not an encounter.
I disagree- people can (and, in our world, usually do) become better by practice. Sparring martial artists rarely try to kill eachother, but they still become better.



Suppose 30,000 creatures die in violence every year, and the "combat" lifespan of the violent folk is ~40 years.

Then that hits ~1 million deaths per lifespan, or about one level 13 character alive at a given time from that level of violence.

...

So, a steady state of one level 13 character for every 5 million combat capable folk.
One does not necessarily follow from another. Even if I agreed that XP-worthy combat required fatalities, there are monsters in this world. If they still wanted to be perfectly safe, a group too large/experienced to face any real threat could go hunting.

Behold_the_Void
2008-02-22, 02:11 AM
The standard Greyhawk setting is fairly low-level. There are some really high level characters, but they aren't terribly concerned with the realm of mortal politics, and as I recall the Lord of Greyhawk is a 14th level rogue and is considered one of the most powerful NPC characters in the world. Magic isn't as common as so many people seem to think it is in these settings - that level of power is attainable, but not common.

Most people gain experience slowly over time. They use their abilities to do stuff, and slowly go up levels without becoming hugely powerful. Adventurers are a different case entirely, but there's a high fatality rate among adventurers so most of them tend not to survive to reach the higher echelons of power. Those that do? Extremely rare and generally with better things to do than use their magic to make things easier by expending the personal resources that they probably REALLY need so all the big nasties they've undoubtedly pissed off on their journey to power can't kill them. High level characters have been adventuring for awhile. It's inconceivable for them to not have a lot of powerful enemies by the time they're hitting even level 10.

Dervag
2008-02-22, 02:25 AM
To address the original post, I think the Dungeonomicon does a good job of addressing some of this (you can google it). The authors take as their starting premise that there are mind-blowingly powerful people in the world, and proceed to come up with a credible explanation of why that doesn't turn the world inside out.

To make a long story short, the basic point is that high level characters don't actually need the things low level people can offer. Gold isn't valuable to someone who can make gold by wishing for it, or by threatening a being with the power to grant wishes. Food isn't valuable to people who have a good friend who's on the Heroes' Feast diet plan.

Therefore, high level characters have much less direct influence in the world than you might expect. They have enough power to rule the world as gods, but there's no real point in it for them. The treasures they desire and the forms of wealth that are actually useful to them are only found in exotic locales and on the outer planes.


The problem is, this kind of thinking is strictly meta. Level spamming like that wouldn't be something that comes up in a soliders training, because they don't know these things.Hate to break this to you, but soldiers routinely do stuff like practice beating on each other with padded weapons. If they still fought with swords, you can bet boot camp would involve a fair amount of fighting instructors until you were tired and bloody, and probably fighting fellow recruits until they were tired and bloody.


I disagree- people can (and, in our world, usually do) become better by practice. Sparring martial artists rarely try to kill eachother, but they still become better.On the other hand, it takes way longer for this to happen than it does in D&D.

In D&D, a martial artist could easily become something like a wuxia character within about a year or so of starting training, even assuming they need a day to recover from every fight.


One does not necessarily follow from another. Even if I agreed that XP-worthy combat required fatalities, there are monsters in this world. If they still wanted to be perfectly safe, a group too large/experienced to face any real threat could go hunting.In which case the group has such a high CR that they earn very little XP from the encounter, and what XP they do get is divided up many ways.

theMycon
2008-02-22, 04:05 AM
On the other hand, it takes way longer for this to happen than it does in D&D.

In D&D, a martial artist could easily become something like a wuxia character within about a year or so of starting training, even assuming they need a day to recover from every fight.
This is a given. Probably shoulda said it myself...

However, his nitpick remains illegitimate, because even in the life of a caveman, gothic barbarian, or dark ages highwayman; with actual life-or-death struggles every day, they person doesn't improve much more than a professionally trained man who rarely threatens his life. He may train faster, but to those truly devoted folk who think training is there life, there isn't a significantly different upper bound.

Other than The Dungeonomicon*, the other great essay of realism to be mentioned is The Alexandrian's "D&D- Calibrating your expectations (http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/d&d-calibrating.html)" which explains how even history's greatest heroes had no need to be beyond 5th level- and that's a stretch, but a believable one. So even if the human body were capable of such advancement, there will probably never be a single level 13 human in the real world.



In which case the group has such a high CR that they earn very little XP from the encounter, and what XP they do get is divided up many ways.
A: This is a different problem than the one he posted- in a certain light, it might even be an advantage.
B: I should stress the difference between "any threat" and "any real threat"- in the former case, you're undeniably correct. In the latter, it's a matter of math. I'd consider an encounter 2CR beneath your party "no real threat" unless they're against a save-or-die monster**, especially given how wildly powerful most healing classes are (and in a world where there was a popular hobby/industry of "low-risk levelling", there would soon be 1 divine healer per 3 or 4 adventuring adults- supply & demand.) and how much multiple healers would reduce long-term risk.


*A fascinating read, by the way. There is only one internal contradiction I couldn't argue away in this work (mindflayers- first post Vs. theromodynamics bit), which attempts to organize all of DnD into a sane, coherent existence. The post on economy might actually have been my favorite part.

**Since you're responding to the "even if they're low-risk" catch all... they'd go out of their way to catalogue & avoid them. They're low risk. This begs the question "how would they catalogue new monsters without massive losses." Blah blah distant observers & captured monsters of known strength, blah blah organized retreats, etc... there's a long string of obvious Q's with a long string of obvious A's. We don't need to detail the whole industry here.

TempusCCK
2008-02-22, 08:35 AM
Actually, we both misread. You were more correct when you said "If the DM says it's an encounter, ti's an encounter." The DMG discusses the rules for CR, and EL, and all sorts of things, but it dosen't specify what an encounter is. It carries on under the assumption that an encounter is a fight, of course, but again, there is no explicit statement, nor is it stated that every fight is an encounter.

So there's no reason to assume the peons will level up in sparring matches, by RAW.

Edit: Oh, and there's no reason to assume people will level up fighting monsters either, going by strict RAW, with no DM intervention. There's no reason to believe people will level up /ever/ without a DM call at some point.

Yes, that's my point exactly. The DM defines an "encounter" and you get EXP from said "encounters" as long as it's CR appropriate, by RAW. On warrior doesn't need to kill a million low level warriors, instead he can defeat many many similar leveled warriors. How you orchastrate this is another question entirely and is not the point of my post, instead, I just wish to say that by RAW, it is entirely possible to have an army of 15th level Fighters.

Nebo_
2008-02-22, 09:36 AM
This strikes me as kind of odd. You prefer a world where adventurers are wandering about killing stuff and it *doesn't* make sense for them to be doing so?

You misunderstand me. I don't like a world where the main thought in the designer's head was how to make a world where PCs running around killing monsters. I prefer a world with verisimilitude, where the PCs are part of something bigger, and where wandering monsters aren't just an excuse for adventuring parties.

Rutee
2008-02-22, 04:41 PM
Yes, that's my point exactly. The DM defines an "encounter" and you get EXP from said "encounters" as long as it's CR appropriate, by RAW. On warrior doesn't need to kill a million low level warriors, instead he can defeat many many similar leveled warriors. How you orchastrate this is another question entirely and is not the point of my post, instead, I just wish to say that by RAW, it is entirely possible to have an army of 15th level Fighters.
By RAW, I can make someone level 20 for eating Pudding; RAW can't really stop a GM from doing anything they darn well please. By RAW, nobody actually levels up, and those rules are utterly extraneous, because there's no definition for an encounter.

Which I like immensely; Not defining encounters leaves it up to the GMs to do, and I'm sure they'd be far more interesting about it.



You misunderstand me. I don't like a world where the main thought in the designer's head was how to make a world where PCs running around killing monsters. I prefer a world with verisimilitude, where the PCs are part of something bigger, and where wandering monsters aren't just an excuse for adventuring parties.
Is now a bad time to note that DnD has always been a combat-based game, so it behooves Wizards to make a base setting that makes encourages combat?

Trog
2008-02-22, 05:18 PM
Short answer: Probably not

Long answer: It's a game. It has rules that work for the game but not real life. Since it's all about telling a story in the first place. Or killing things. Or whatever.

I mean, if you bring in the idea of evolution in a world with magic it would make sense that primordial creatures that could use magic innately would have a Darwinian advantage over those creatures that cannot (read: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, etc.) it is doubtful whether or not they (PC races) would even be able to exist in the world. They would have been weeded out through natural selection long ago. Of course then we could get into gods creating races but really I don't think we can go there on this forum.

The point is that everyone who has played DnD and has given this any amount of thought has come to the same conclusion:

The world probably wouldn't work like this if it were real.

From here we divide into 2 groups. Those that insist that this means the rules are flawed and need to be improved. Often at this point people are very good at pointing out the flaws in the system and really very horrible at offering solutions or new systems to replace them. And the second group: Those that realize that a system like that probably is never going to happen because the way the world works is much, much, MUCH more complex than what can be fit into a DMG.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-02-22, 07:15 PM
You misunderstand me. I don't like a world where the main thought in the designer's head was how to make a world where PCs running around killing monsters. I prefer a world with verisimilitude, where the PCs are part of something bigger, and where wandering monsters aren't just an excuse for adventuring parties.

This is one of those strokes/folks things, but I tend to feel that a world which is designed to support the intended playstyle of the game improves verisimilitude, rather than detracting from it.

Given that you have a game which includes the concept of "adventuring parties" who go around fighting monsters, it strikes me as much more sensible to create a world in which people do that sort of thing than one in which they don't.

Try to present me with a believable world, and I won't be able to believe in it. Present me with a world which fairly obviously makes no sense, and I can buy into it totally.

LibraryOgre
2008-02-22, 07:30 PM
Read the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust. Raising from the dead is commonplace, if you've got the money (and the brain hasn't been damaged, or someone hasn't used a weapon which destroys the soul). Teleportation and mind-to-mind communication are common, but bulk transportation still takes place by land and sea, because they're impractical by teleportation. The world is ruled by multiple-thousand year old elves who have taken over a large portion of the continent, consider godhood to be a skill, and oppress the humans who live amongst them (and on their eastern borders) because it gives them something to do. Almost everyone has the capability to cast at least a few spells.

It's not run by D&D rules (I'd actually say Palladium is a pretty close match), but it's a good view at what an uber-high magic society would be like.

Nebo_
2008-02-22, 07:32 PM
When someone makes a world where the first objective is to explain the presence of adventurers, then something goes off in my head telling me to avoid it. I would prefer if the designers came up with an interesting world, with a bit of fluff that doesn't just explain why the heroes are there. So far I don't like the default setting, but WotC may yet surprise me.

Icewalker
2008-02-22, 07:57 PM
I fix a few of these issues in my own campaign world, although not that well.

First of all, there are lots of adventures. Most of them just tend to die. The PCs are just a group of adventurers who happen to be a bit more successful than others. There are epic-level people running around, but not many, and they are generally the champion of a country.

That is a second thing which i would like to bring up, which I think is one of the biggest flaws due to this: armies. One would assume that there are some high level people besides the PCs. Otherwise it is nonsensical. So, assumably, a powerful country could employ a few high level casters. A few high level casters could decimate a quite massive army with little difficulty, resulting in a terrible loss of life for the side with the army, and almost no/no gain. As such, one would assume that a country doesn't have a standing army because it is relatively pointless. There would be guards for towns and the like, and maybe town militias to defend it from worldly dangers.

But the military would most likely consist of a few groups of people, a few of which are the country's Champions. In my campaign world each country has a couple of Champions, which I think are all going to be 25th level. They defend the country, as well as dealing with the major threats that seem to pop up relatively often in dnd (Oh no, another psycho demon is trying to take over the world! Send out one of the champions!)

Yakk
2008-02-22, 11:24 PM
I disagree- people can (and, in our world, usually do) become better by practice. Sparring martial artists rarely try to kill eachother, but they still become better.

Sure, they'll get better at real world rates. Ie, the best of them will get to level 3 to 5 over 20 years of practice, not to level 20 in less than 2 years.

Veteran troops, not demigods.


One does not necessarily follow from another. Even if I agreed that XP-worthy combat required fatalities, there are monsters in this world. If they still wanted to be perfectly safe, a group too large/experienced to face any real threat could go hunting.

Going hunting is insanely dangerous. PCs have a "CR deal", where they face encounters that are just hard enough to boost their level without slaughtering them.

Know all of those CR 20 bad guys? They are out there, and if your level 5 non-PC group goes out into the wilderness, it could very well find them. Or it could find a nest of CR 1 bad guys and get no XP.

And as the characters in this universe don't understand how to gain XP, they don't understand "find targets that are just so much weaker than you to advance" is the key. The best you could hope for would be a cultural tendency towards something like that, but even that would be very vague.

.. and still result in massive fatality rates.

Remember, if it isn't the humans that are dieing, it is the humanoids, or the monsters. Humanoids require the same pyramid of slaughter. High level monsters, if common, mean that the low level small group of adventurers ... end up dead. If rare, it means that higher level groups have serious problems gaining levels.

The PCs have the GM on their side usually. It is an art to generate "just difficult enough" encounters without constant TPK or trivial fights: chance, when working on NPCs, won't be nearly as nice.


On warrior doesn't need to kill a million low level warriors, instead he can defeat many many similar leveled warriors. How you orchastrate this is another question entirely and is not the point of my post, instead, I just wish to say that by RAW, it is entirely possible to have an army of 15th level Fighters.

No, the warrior doesn't have to kill 1 million level 1 warriors. But the 3 level 19 warriors he killed to get to level 20 had to kill 3 level 18 each to get level 19, who each killed 3 level 17, who each killed 3 level 16...

The pyramid of XP is pretty nasty.

And at some point, I'd expect people would retire. I mean, who wants to keep fighting fights in which you have a decent chance of dieing and never coming back?

Worira
2008-02-22, 11:57 PM
Getting up to level 10 or so by hunting animals wouldn't be that hard. An elephant is CR 7, and could be taken down relatively easily by a horse-riding archer or two.

Jack Zander
2008-02-23, 01:32 AM
I've often times let my players enter a training room or the like to whack other adventuring parties around to see who's better or to simply train. I just award 1/10 exp because they are not in any danger. Also, they don't earn gold so they generally don't like to gain exp then go fight stronger things when their WBL is screwed up too much.

Rutee
2008-02-23, 01:33 AM
Getting up to level 10 or so by hunting animals wouldn't be that hard. An elephant is CR 7, and could be taken down relatively easily by a horse-riding archer or two.

1. WBL
2. Not a RAW concern, but uh, I think you may find it slightly difficult to hunt Elephants for very long, what with their VERY LONG mating seasons and whatnot.. you'd hunt them dry.

Dervag
2008-02-23, 02:03 AM
*A fascinating read, by the way. There is only one internal contradiction I couldn't argue away in this work (mindflayers- first post Vs. theromodynamics bit), which attempts to organize all of DnD into a sane, coherent existence. The post on economy might actually have been my favorite part.I'm curious to know what you think the contradiction is, because I can't for the life of me remember the relevant information and it would take way too long to dig it up.


I mean, if you bring in the idea of evolution in a world with magic it would make sense that primordial creatures that could use magic innately would have a Darwinian advantage over those creatures that cannot (read: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, etc.) it is doubtful whether or not they (PC races) would even be able to exist in the world. They would have been weeded out through natural selection long ago. Of course then we could get into gods creating races but really I don't think we can go there on this forum.Actually, since it's D&D canon that there are intelligent species created by deities in D&D, I think we can, at least on a theoretical level.

Remember, most of the intrinsically magical races have evolutionary handicaps or specialized niches. For instance, magical woodland fairies can easily outcompete humans (or protohumans) in the forest, but they aren't competitive anywhere else in the world. For that matter, magical woodland fairies aren't even competing with humans for the same resources (woodland fairies couldn't care less whether or not the hairy-eared cavemen catch an occasional sick deer). So there's no reason for them not to survive in the same environment.

A lot of the 'magical' races are small in number, and many of them like to have slaves. Since enslaving other members of 'magical' races is hard work, it's easier for them to enslave members of the just-evolved-from-monkeys species like humans. Which gives humans a protected niche in which they can develop into a species capable of fleeing or turning on its former masters.

Also, some of the most powerful 'magical' races did not actually originate on this world, but are instead outside forces. As such, it's entirely possible that they found cavemen in the world already present on their arrival, and just decided to make the best of it by killing any directly inconvenient cavemen and ignoring the rest.


The point is that everyone who has played DnD and has given this any amount of thought has come to the same conclusion:

The world probably wouldn't work like this if it were real.

From here we divide into 2 groups. Those that insist that this means the rules are flawed and need to be improved. Often at this point people are very good at pointing out the flaws in the system and really very horrible at offering solutions or new systems to replace them. And the second group: Those that realize that a system like that probably is never going to happen because the way the world works is much, much, MUCH more complex than what can be fit into a DMG.Yeah. I think I'm in group 2, except that I really do try to make some kind of sense out of the rules.


First of all, there are lots of adventures. Most of them just tend to die. The PCs are just a group of adventurers who happen to be a bit more successful than others. There are epic-level people running around, but not many, and they are generally the champion of a country.I like your thinking, and it parallels the excellent thinking in the Dungeonomicon, but there's one catch.

If anything, you've made your national champions too powerful. I mean, what does a nation of normal people have to offer an epic-level character? Why don't they move to a place like Sigil? Except for people who get off on being able to boss swarms of other people around, there just isn't much point in being the champion of people who can't give you anything you couldn't make or obtain for yourself with less work than it takes to maintain their favor.

However, I think you're absolutely right that nations should be ruled by high-level people, just not as high leveled as you suggest. And a nation that isn't ruled by high level people soon will be. The sequence of events goes like this. At some point the knight in shining armor slays the dragon, who is the biggest and baddest monster around. Well, what next? Traditionally, he marries the princess. Why?

Because the king knows that this knight has just killed a dragon that he and his entire army couldn't hope to stop. Presumably, a man who can do that could probably turn his whole kingdom inside out without breaking a sweat. Even if he couldn't kill the army single-handedly, he's so tough and popular that he could probably rally his own army and conquer the kingdom if he really wanted to.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So the king marries off his daughter to the knight because he's trying to coopt the guy who can kill dragons with a sharp stick into his family, which hopefully gives the knight some incentive not to conquer the kingdom.

Note that you can reverse the gender roles here and it all still works, although it sounds a little strange even to many modern ears when you do so. The basic problem is that the adventurer has just proven that they are more powerful than the entire kingdom combined, and that therefore they could rule the kingdom if they really wanted to.

So any kingdom that isn't ruled by a powerful character ends up ruled by one as soon as they run into a dragon too powerful for the existing low level government to defeat. Because whatever hero arises to slay the dragon is probably going to end up running the place, either de facto by being absorbed into the old government or de jure by conquering the old government.


That is a second thing which i would like to bring up, which I think is one of the biggest flaws due to this: armies. One would assume that there are some high level people besides the PCs. Otherwise it is nonsensical. So, assumably, a powerful country could employ a few high level casters. A few high level casters could decimate a quite massive army with little difficulty, resulting in a terrible loss of life for the side with the army, and almost no/no gain. As such, one would assume that a country doesn't have a standing army because it is relatively pointless. There would be guards for towns and the like, and maybe town militias to defend it from worldly dangers.

But the military would most likely consist of a few groups of people, a few of which are the country's Champions. In my campaign world each country has a couple of Champions, which I think are all going to be 25th level. They defend the country, as well as dealing with the major threats that seem to pop up relatively often in dnd (Oh no, another psycho demon is trying to take over the world! Send out one of the champions!)Here's the catch. High level types need enforcers to make sure everybody pays their taxes on time, because the only thing they can do to make a peasant village obey is threaten to blow it up. And they can only blow up so many villages before the loss of tax income from the destruction exceeds the original loss due to tax evasion.

Armies serve as those enforcers. Also, they serve as a tripwire- bands of marauding orcs and gnolls hit the army and bounce, which means that the hero ruling the country doesn't need to get off his front porch and fight them himself. Powerful necromancers, demons, and such will demolish whatever army units oppose them, which tells the heroes roughly where the bad guys are and what they're capable of.

They serve the same role on the offensive, too. A powerful necromancer, being a mighty wizard, doesn't really need an army of undead to destroy the castles and subject the peasants to a reign of terror. However, by sending in his skeleton legions, he gets plenty of information on where knots of local resistance might inconvenience him unless they are quickly destroyed.

theMycon
2008-02-23, 05:16 AM
I'm curious to know what you think the contradiction is, because I can't for the life of me remember the relevant information and it would take way too long to dig it up.
The author states (for the same reason- their view on the rates of other races) that illithid would both "be genocided at the first possible opportunity" and "are the perfect neighbors".

Dan_Hemmens
2008-02-23, 06:02 AM
When someone makes a world where the first objective is to explain the presence of adventurers, then something goes off in my head telling me to avoid it. I would prefer if the designers came up with an interesting world, with a bit of fluff that doesn't just explain why the heroes are there. So far I don't like the default setting, but WotC may yet surprise me.

That's fair enough, the same thing goes off in my head when people create a world which is supposed to be stable and functional, yet apparently has a bunch of do-gooders roaming around saving it from destruction.

Similarly, if you take all the crap that's supposed to exist in D&D it makes much *more* sense - to me - for the world to be basically hostile with "points of light" than for it to be basically civilized with pockets of darkness. Particularly since "points of light" is roughly what the real world was like for most of its history.

Dan_Hemmens
2008-02-23, 06:03 AM
Going hunting is insanely dangerous. PCs have a "CR deal", where they face encounters that are just hard enough to boost their level without slaughtering them.

Score another one for "NPCs and PCs functionally follow different rules".