"Why is my setting not the tippyverse?"

[nrg89]

I'm awful at the movies. Whenever I watch something I think is "meh" I start nitpicking and ruin everything for everyone. When I'm really entertained however I can consciously suspend my disbelief.

But everytime I write on my world and I introduce some form of magic my inner engineer asks me "couldn't you use it that way too?" and I have accidentaly supplied my civilization with something to power an industrial revolution.

Just take teleportation. If you can change an object's potential energy with no work, just a flick of the wrist, you can drop it on a wheel and convert it into kinetic energy. Now that the idea is in my idea I feel like I have to invent a reason for my teleporters to not know about it, or else it's going to drive me nuts. What if my players point it out?

I usually respond in one of three ways; I severely limit the power to something that's far more lame, repeat "rule of cool" to myself and force myself to not think about it or I remove the thing completely.

I have hated on Forgotten Realms a lot in this forum so I'll keep it brief; I don't think it's handled well there. They have so much magic accessible to artisans and peasants they should be producing ridiculous amounts of surplus and be a consumer society. They should have the luxury to take vacations, not have to work all the time to live off of subsistence farming. That's an example of a setting I just can't get over, but people love it. People play it all the time and they do it because it's fantastical. I want my setting to be fantastical and something I won't be annoyed over all the time, anyone with similar problems?

[Garimeth]

I have a similar problem, and my players are also mostly very rationalistic think it through types.

To me it basically boils down to having the magic have "laws" associated with it. I actually have mathematical equations for my magic system - and I'm not an engineer or anything, just some dude in the military. Additionally if you have controlled access to the energy/power (only certain people can do it, even less of them are capable of great feats, and even though there is a recovery period) and or ban certain things that can be easily abused.

For example, I don't allow anything other than infrequent, line of sight, short distance teleportation. And you're thinking about teleportation, but that's limited use. Imagine something that endlessly produces a liquid, smoke, or fire. All are common tropes, and all could be used as a type of power for some kind of turbine or mill or something.

The other big thing, is to remember that in your setting the NPCs and PCs do not have access to some of what we would consider even very basic math and science. Do they have a concept of gravity? Do they know pi? Do they understand 0 or imaginary numbers? Do they understand algebra? Do they know the laws of thermal dynamics, etc?

Sometimes the best answer is just that nobody has thought of it YET, but then enforce the PCs not bringing in their real world knowledge.

[Dienekes]

It's not because you say it isn't.

Now admittedly you picked a pretty amazing thing as your example there. Teleportation is right up with instantaneous clean water and food as something that would change a world so thoroughly it would be hard to figure out how it would actually look.

If you don't want your world to be tippy verse and be logical about it you have to severely limit magic. Let's say only 1 person in a billion can teleport anything. Or teleportation requires someone to construct two teleportation gates fill them with runes and sacrifice 100 virgins to get it to work only to move between those two gates then the magic can have a much lower effect on the world.

That's really it. Make meaningful limitations so magic doesn't grow out of control. Just look at the modern world, our tech may as well be magic. And as soon as it pops up in locations the culture, society, politics inevitably change in ways that was difficult to predict. And we dont even have teleportation. But just the quick travel and spread of ideas we do have has changed our world irreversibly.

[Kami2awa]

Well there's a few ways to go with this.

[Max_Killjoy]

I do the same things. I gripe about bad worldbuilding and failure to follow through with all the obvious implications of something we see on screen or on the page. I try to work out all these effects and have them inform my worldbuilding decisions.

[VoxRationis]

Possibilities:

• Not just anyone can become a magic-user;
• There's some sort of high moral, opportunity, or resource cost involved with magic that restricts its use;
• Societal issues (such as wizards not working well together owing to mutual distrust) prevent use of magic to its full potential;
• It's possible, but it hasn't happened yet;
• It has happened, but the infrastructure broke down for one reason or another (lack of repair, civil war, magical disruption event) and no one has fixed it yet;
• There's actually a punitive limit on magic in the world, just not at a level where it affects individual PCs; if the PCs tried implementing magic on a large scale, they'd find it quickly runs out.

[awa]

a way I like to describe this to players

Lets say were playing a James bond rpg that has rules for cars, how fast they go how much damage they can take, how maneuverable they are and so on. Just because it doesn't say they run out of gas or need maintenance doesn't mean its a perpetual motion device of infinite energy. You want to drive away from the bad guy and have a high speed chase that's fine. You want to put your car in a poorly ventilated room hook it to a generator and power a city your going to find some problems real fast.

Magic can work the same way casting a spell a dozen time? no problem, that's like driving the car around, you want to cast it 100,000 times something's going to give maybe you die to mana fumes, maybe you just use up all the ambient energy and now spells don't work, maybe you attract "things" man was not meant to see and they come do unspeakable things.

D&d magic is so abusable in part because its so simple the real world has all sorts of things like friction, overheating, side effects and just plain running out of fuel that the game ignores because describing all the nich interaction would take entire physic books for each spell.

[Max_Killjoy]

a way I like to describe this to players

Lets say were playing a James bond rpg that has rules for cars, how fast they go how much damage they can take, how maneuverable they are and so on. Just because it doesn't say they run out of gas or need maintenance doesn't mean its a perpetual motion device of infinite energy. You want to drive away from the bad guy and have a high speed chase that's fine. You want to put your car in a poorly ventilated room hook it to a generator and power a city your going to find some problems real fast.

Magic can work the same way casting a spell a dozen time? no problem, that's like driving the car around, you want to cast it 100,000 times something's going to give maybe you die to mana fumes, maybe you just use up all the ambient energy and now spells don't work, maybe you attract "things" man was not meant to see and they come do unspeakable things.

D&d magic is so abusable in part because its so simple the real world has all sorts of things like friction, overheating, side effects and just plain running out of fuel that the game ignores because describing all the nich interaction would take entire physic books for each spell.

As mentioned in another thread, D&D magic in general utterly lacks "in setting" flavor or explanation, it's just hollow game rules.

[Tiktakkat]

The key to controlling this is remembering the effect of 20/20 Hindsight.

Sure, to US such uses are blatantly obvious.
To the people employing them?

If every mechanical advancement was that blatantly obvious, the Romans would have been Steampunk, the Middle Ages in an Industrial Revolution, and the Renaissance our first Singularity.
At worst.
They weren't.

So clearly there must be some reason they couldn't leap ahead "that" easily.


The second, almost as important, controlling factor is The Underpants Gnome Factor.
Step 1: Use Magic
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Tippyverse

Everyone can tell how using magic works, and how the Tippyverse works.
But how many can actually explain how all those spellchuckers survive 1st level and manage to hit 20th level so as to be able to do all those awesome things?
How many can actually explain how after those spellchuckers get to 20th level they eagerly embrace sharing their magic so everyone else can be as powerful as they are, and thus provide an imminent threat to them?

That Step 2 is a killer.

Meanwhile, what are all the anti-social people doing?
Just chilling while the do-gooders bring about a world of peace, harmony, and ice-cream dropping unicorns?
I don't think so!
They have the same resources available to start their own tyrannical utopia, or at least throw a magical monkey wrench into the attempts to create the puppies and kittens alternative.
How many spells are there to mess up portals?
How long will one of those awesome portal networks survive when a few of them start transporting to the Negative Energy Plane via the Far Realms?
Yeah, I thought so.


As a thought experiment, the Tippyverse is easy.
As another thought experiment, the Tippyverse is even easier to destroy.
Maybe that's why so many campaigns, particularly Forgotten Realms, features so many magical cataclysms destroying civilization and world empires time and again.
Hmmm . . .

[awa]

As mentioned in another thread, D&D magic in general utterly lacks "in setting" flavor or explanation, it's just hollow game rules.

I'm honestly not Shure how this relates to my comment. My comment was about an easy way a dm could shut down industrialized magic if he chose to prevent a tippyverse in a logical way.

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm honestly not Shure how this relates to my comment. My comment was about an easy way a dm could shut down industrialized magic if he chose to prevent a tippyverse in a logical way.

It relates because having no explanation of how the magic actually works (within the world/reality in which the game takes place), we're left with no way to analyze those "mechanisms" and impose the limits that would naturally result from how it works.

[Necroticplague]

Basically, it's genre tradition. A lot of fantasy, especially of the dnd type branch of heroic fantasy, have been heavily taking themes from Lords of the Rings for years now. Unfortunately, not all of the themes are actually positive things, intentionally or not. One of the more unfortunate themes in LotR was that it's writer was a regressive luddite. Thus, for any good characters, use of magic was restricted by either explicit or presumed pacts, tying their hands to use magic to change the world. In addition, there was a time/place when magic was much more commonplace, but they ended up wiping themselves our for one reason or another (thus, why ancient artifacts are so good, they're from that time). The modern fantasy tends to have results (low magic use, little exploitation of magic as a resource) without including the factors that make it so in the books, or considering the implications of it.

TLDR: LotR writtten by a luddite, copycats rip it off without changing that factor.

[SethoMarkus]

It relates because having no explanation of how the magic actually works (within the world/reality in which the game takes place), we're left with no way to analyze those "mechanisms" and impose the limits that would naturally result from how it works.

I may be mistaken, but I think that was actually Awa's point? Magic, as presented, allows you to create the fluff for your setting, creating mechanics with limitations to prevent abuse. It really sounds like you both have the same thought about it, you just are approaching it from opposite sides...

[Max_Killjoy]

I may be mistaken, but I think that was actually Awa's point? Magic, as presented, allows you to create the fluff for your setting, creating mechanics with limitations to prevent abuse. It really sounds like you both have the same thought about it, you just are approaching it from opposite sides...

I wasn't disagreeing with Awa -- I was following up with an expansion on the posted comment.

[LaserFace]

I think Forgotten Realms is supposed to be something of a silly setting you're not supposed to examine closely. Like, the sort of place that exists for people who wanna grab a beer and say "Let's do cool fantasy junk". I don't really like running games in FR but I don't hate it, I think it has a place.

If you want to avoid a Tippyverse, it's not hard. And, I think OP has a sense of how to do it. You don't let everyone know teleportation, or you find ways to complicate its use or otherwise limit exploitation. You can have any flavor of fantasy with any amount of magic you want, with any kind of explanations you want. You can have any kinds of restrictions at play that you can imagine. The world could be filled with turmoil and people killing each other and nobody has the time to do crazy wizard junk. Basically, just make a setting that prohibits the development of a utopia and...you don't have the utopia problem.

[Acanous]

I think Forgotten Realms is supposed to be something of a silly setting you're not supposed to examine closely. Like, the sort of place that exists for people who wanna grab a beer and say "Let's do cool fantasy junk". I don't really like running games in FR but I don't hate it, I think it has a place.

FR is srs bsns.
There's a hell of a lot of lore for everything, and pretty much all of it goes into hard fantasy. Dragonlance is the silly setting.

[LaserFace]

FR is srs bsns.
There's a hell of a lot of lore for everything, and pretty much all of it goes into hard fantasy. Dragonlance is the silly setting.

My mistake. I actually know nothing about any official setting lore apart from that which shows up in core rulebooks and crpgs.

[nrg89]

The problem of just handwaving is that if you do it too much, or with too glaring problems, you break verisimilitude. If all the pieces for a utopia is there, and you say "it's not a utopia, because..." all the time your players might not be that invested in what's going on because they don't feel like the world is real.

[Shinizak]

Why not make it a tippyverse in the making? Have mages discovering and testing new abilities and powers. Make experimental armors, magic farms, etc all be a part of this world, have a quest about a mage or 2 inventing something or helping a mage work on their phd Thesis.

[awa]

Lead pipes sound like a good idea to but long term wide spread use will give you some serious problems. If you just make it clear right from the get go that the stuff written down in the books is a simplified version of reality and the real world is more complex in ways that are hard to detect and not necessarily immediately obvious you can solve a lot of problems.

Let’s go with an easy ones to prohibit magical utopia

Magic does not create

So that create food spell you just cast it took the energy for it out of the earth, and a lot of the energy was wasted into the ether. You want to create lunch for a band of travelers no problem the lands got energy to spare, you want to feed a nation well now you have a giant blight of dead land and all the nature spirits have gone insane and want to get the energy you stole by ripping it out of the villagers, and even if you can drive them off that blights going to keep growing the more you cast the spell until the whole world is dead and it stops working.

Wall of iron makes iron walls but it had to take that iron from somewhere. Cast it once in a while and it will just pull trace iron out of the ground cast it a lot and it will start degrading the quality of all the metal in the region, also not all iron is created equal and iron wall iron could be particularly brittle and difficult to work making inferior tools even when worked with magic.

Cure spell? Cast it occasionally everything fine the world has life energy to spare cast it too much and you start getting magic resistant plagues and spontaneous undead.

Move earth? Cast it occasionally no problem, cast it repeatedly and all that energy you’re drawing out of the earth will causes earth quakes or even release monsters sealed below

Teleport? It punches holes in reality, cast it a little no big deal the holes are small and they heal. But cast it a lot and it can causes rips, and thing from outside reality slither in which is bad.

[boomwolf]

Well, in my setting, I worked it out that magic is based of the ever classic mana system, on an exponential consumption so a level 0 spell is 1 mana worth, but a 1 is 4, a 2 is already 9, 3 is 16, 4 is 25 all the way to 9th who take a staggering 100. the system is simply (L+1)^2 formula, with spell levels fiddled.
Except, mana is innately poisonous. it is reflected by how the high magic classes has lower saves and HP values, but fluffwise it means that the mere fact of having magic in your body-is bad for your health.

To add another complication, not everyone can learn any spell. people have innate talents, and most people simply can't get spells outside of their natural talents.
Sure, you might be a prodegy of fire magic, but you simply CANT gain any healing magic. its in your "DNA", and whatever natural affinity you are born with, its what you got (naturally, PCs choose their own affinities, but this still applies to the rest of the world)





The system is more complicated than that and includes quite a few homebrew materials (that I might organize and translate at some point), but the core principles are simple:
1-not anyone can access any magic he wants, only a limited pool of options.
2-magic comes at a cost, in my case its your physical health. mages are simple sickly.


There are other possible principles that can exist, the only thing that matters is that you need to find one or two good limits to using magic. they could be anything from a hard-set limitation on using it, to a cost attached, unreliability to whatever other "issue" fits your own world. once there is a good limit or two on wide magic usage, the issue usually balances itself out.

[nrg89]

Well, in my setting, I worked it out that magic is based of the ever classic mana system, on an exponential consumption so a level 0 spell is 1 mana worth, but a 1 is 4, a 2 is already 9, 3 is 16, 4 is 25 all the way to 9th who take a staggering 100. the system is simply (L+1)^2 formula, with spell levels fiddled.

That's a great idea! But, not to be that guy but that's quadratic growth, not exponential. An exponential function could be 2^L, then a level 0 spell costs 1 mana, level 1 spell 2, level 2 costs 4 and level 9 costs 512. In exponential functions it's the exponent that changes but the base stays the same.

[Darth Ultron]

I have hated on Forgotten Realms a lot in this forum so I'll keep it brief; I don't think it's handled well there. They have so much magic accessible to artisans and peasants they should be producing ridiculous amounts of surplus and be a consumer society. They should have the of having luxury to take vacations, not have to work all the time to live off of subsistence farming.

The Forgotten Realms is not a Tippyverse for a very good reason as it does not follow one of the most basic tippyverse rules of having distant silent gods. FR has very powerful, very active gods. And lots and lots of gods, and demi gods, and powerful mortals. And they all work towards the same goal of keeping the world not ''tip''.

Though, of course, this is only true of the fictional fluff story realms, and not the game rule books. The Realms game setting is just a back drop for players to be heroes, you won't find any logic or reason there....ever.

The story Realms also has the more ''1st edition/2nd edition'' style magic, so the magic is not like the lame 3/4/5 edition safe magic. Realms magic is strange, unknown, unknowable, dangerous, unfair and deadly. Some of this makes it in to ''rulebooks'', but mostly as fluff

With active gods, they can start right at the beginning: they can make sure no one grows up and acts like a ''silly optimizer trying to bend the rules and be super duper all powerful.'' Though education alone, they can stop a good 99% of them before they even start. The 1% they can just get rid of before they cause a problem. So the average person in the Realms wants real food and does not want to ''have a magic box that makes food so they can play video games all day''.

Magic in a real story type world is hard. Not everyone can do it and it takes years of work and study and sacrifice. Game wise, any player can just say ''my character is 18 and 40th level and has a 30 for all abilities and knows all the spells in the books'' in like one second. Also any bad player can look through all the books for loop holes, interpretations and exploits....but a character in the Realms can't do that.

[Thrudd]

What does your inner engineer say about why our own society has barely explored our own solar system? Why don't we have moon and mars bases and habitats, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing, like the authors in the 1960's imagined we would? The capability has long existed. Why are we still burning fossil fuels when we know how to use more abundant sources of energy?

There could be many reasons that the existence of magic hasn't evolved an industrial society. Maybe it's too hard to use for most people, inefficient, expensive, impractical. Maybe it's use is monopolized by a few people.
The existence of certain knowledge or technology does not automatically mean it will or can be applied to its greatest potential. In 200 hundred years, our society might see everyday exploitation of space resources. But if the game is taking place today, only a handful of people have ever been out of low earth orbit.

[Necroticplague]

The Forgotten Realms is not a Tippyverse for a very good reason as it does not follow one of the most basic tippyverse rules of having distant silent gods. FR has very powerful, very active gods. And lots and lots of gods, and demi gods, and powerful mortals. And they all work towards the same goal of keeping the world not ''tip''.

Logically, wouldn't the efforts of those who benefit from magic not being used to it's fullest potential be vastly overshadowed by those who would benefit from such? I mean, most people benefit from everyone being in a good place.

Though education alone, they can stop a good 99% of them before they even start. The 1% they can just get rid of before they cause a problem. So the average person in the Realms wants real food and does not want to ''have a magic box that makes food so they can play video games all day''.

Er, what kind of education completely undoes rational thinking? It seems like it could be undone by even basic primers on economics, history, or military strategy. Seriously, you're talking about taking away one of the most basic limits on military function ("A military marches on it's belly"), and expecting people aren't jumping the gun to get it for their own military use?

[Max_Killjoy]

What does your inner engineer say about why our own society has barely explored our own solar system? Why don't we have moon and mars bases and habitats, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing, like the authors in the 1960's imagined we would? The capability has long existed. Why are we still burning fossil fuels when we know how to use more abundant sources of energy?

There could be many reasons that the existence of magic hasn't evolved an industrial society. Maybe it's too hard to use for most people, inefficient, expensive, impractical. Maybe it's use is monopolized by a few people.
The existence of certain knowledge or technology does not automatically mean it will or can be applied to its greatest potential. In 200 hundred years, our society might see everyday exploitation of space resources. But if the game is taking place today, only a handful of people have ever been out of low earth orbit.

More like the "capability" -- we made it to the moon by the skin of our teeth, and it was a miracle that the only deaths of the Apollo program were in a fire during a ground test.

[Thrudd]

More like the "capability" -- we made it to the moon by the skin of our teeth, and it was a miracle that the only deaths of the Apollo program were in a fire during a ground test.

And that was almost 50 years ago.

[ace rooster]

There is at least one spell that requires it's focus to be "hand made". From that you can infer that non magical labour does something that magic cannot. If I wanted low magic impact I would run that materials 'touched by magic' are near valueless as trade goods, and that consuming materials touched by magic causes a person to be touched by magic, and renders them unable to produce anything without it already being touched by magic for a while. Even tiny quantities will disrupt magical research and enchantment, while being easy to detect. The mages are aggressive in tracking down sources of contamination, and everyone knows it. Magic can be available, but the use of it in industry would exclude people and those around them from the general economy.

To attempt to use magic more widely would shut down the current uses, so there is no military advantage to being more magic focused. Those outside of the magical industries would avoid it strongly out of self interest.

Ignoring the problems with the Tippyverse, (Why he thinks unlimited range mass transit would make people live in close proximity is beyond me) The silent gods thing is very important. Active gods make a very good explanation for heroic magic use, particularly if they regard magic as belonging to them. A person can be amused and impressed to watch a mouse steal a grain of corn and fight off the cat to get it, but far less amused if their granary gets infested.

[Darth Ultron]

Logically, wouldn't the efforts of those who benefit from magic not being used to it's fullest potential be vastly overshadowed by those who would benefit from such? I mean, most people benefit from everyone being in a good place.

No, but it's really a matter of perspective. Some people think natural made things are better some people like artificial stuff.

Er, what kind of education completely undoes rational thinking? It seems like it could be undone by even basic primers on economics, history, or military strategy. Seriously, you're talking about taking away one of the most basic limits on military function ("A military marches on it's belly"), and expecting people aren't jumping the gun to get it for their own military use?

It does not undo rational thinking, it's undoing ''idiot reddit/4chain/internet loser'' type of thinking. The ''basics'' are what whoever is in power says they are.

It is a lot like: a person could do a crime to get what they want...but most are taught that is wrong and they choose not to do it.

And it's the same with ''dumb magic exploits'', a wizard just does not say ''I make boom magic trap thingys and feed the world''. They could...but they don't want too.

[Illven]

And it's the same with ''dumb magic exploits'', a wizard just does not say ''I make boom magic trap thingys and feed the world''. They could...but they don't want too.

... Yes. Because no one's ever become a scientist to help people.