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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    MindFlayer

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    Default Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

    I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

    The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

    I know that people like to bring up two points in rebuttal:
    1. Feudal tradition (people identify with certain rulers in certain regions)

    For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).

    In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.

    Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.

    2. Lack of stability/continuity issues

    For theocracies, those clerics of major gods have an inherent hierarchy (and other spellcasters of the same faith) to tap onto. I understand that there are limitations (e.g good gods may not want their clerics to slaughter innocents to take over a city), but even if they are unable to take over a city-state, won't it make sense to found/create a city where the church is the major power (after all one of the main objectives of the clerics is to bring more believers for their god)?

    For magocracies, admittedly it is more difficult to ensure a steady supply of mages, but there are always training schools (and also a lot of ways for mages to prolong their lives and solidify their rule).

    I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.
    Last edited by Lkctgo; 2020-06-01 at 03:48 AM.
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  2. - Top - End - #2
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    This is a massively setting-dependent question; it's not going to be the same answer between 3.5e, Pathfinder, 4e, 5e, Exalted, Shadow of the Demon Lord, etc., even before you get into the existing settings in each of those rulesets. That said, if we're looking at a sort of general question of "why don't mages run the world," here are some potential options:
    1. They can't. It's hard to be a wizard. Studying to become a wizard (or arcanist, or whatever) is rigorous enough that by the time you finish your magic schooling, a mundane counterpart has had twenty years in politics. Any use of magic to try to usurp their position would be detected by whatever mages they have on retainer.
    2. They don't want to. Who cares about ruling some measly humans when you can reshape reality itself? Trying to control extant humans is a major risk when you can always just create your own humans if you want to.
    3. Infighting/tall poppy syndrome. Mages keep out of politics. A mage who tries to interfere in politics immediately draws the attention of senior mages: why are you trying to interfere in mundane matters? Don't you know that we milk them for mundane resources without overtly interfering in their lives? Suddenly a horde of archmages descend upon you because you're risking their steady stream of various resources.
    4. The law of averages. Someone will notice you casting a spell (e.g. an adept making their spellcraft check) or you influencing someone (e.g. another politician making a sense motive check).
    At the end of the day, it's going to boil down to the setting you're in. Some settings inherently apply restrictions to their mages while some let them roam free. Even within a single ruleset, you're going to come down to rule application and optimization: a low-op 3.5 mage and a high-op 3.5 mage are living entirely different lives.

    With this thread in the general roleplaying forum, I'm not sure what else I can say. Both mechanics and setting have such a major influence on your question that it's hard to narrow it down further unless you specify the range in which we're working.
    Last edited by Elysiume; 2020-06-01 at 04:49 AM.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Wizards are highly intelligent.
    Altruistic wizards can trivialy figure out that ruling is not a good solution because it makes the people rely on them too much.
    Likewise, non-altruistic wizards can trivialy figure out that no amount of peasants, servants and land would bring them anything of value, save for the egomaniacs who enjoy having power over the masses.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Most mages have better things to do. At least in fluff learning magic takes a really, really long time, much less acquiring 20th level-equivalent powers and such. Learning decent governance is itself a lifelong task that most can't accomplish (and no, being smart and magic will not automatically make you a good leader, any more than Superman would make a good mayor of Metropolis). Given enough time and magical life-extension, sure a powerful Wizard or group of such could take over, and perhaps even govern well, but how much interest and ability would they have to actually maintain their gains? Most would rather continue their studies, not form a wizardly bureaucracy. Whatever resources and power they could gain from controlling a kingdom they could probably just conjure up themselves. You've got Thay, but that's an outlier and hardly an example of somewhere people would want to live, for this kind of reason. The major reason why a Wizard would entertain the idea of running a government would be ego, which tends not to make for a stable society and usually puts you in the sights of adventuring parties. The only other one I can think of would be altruism, which is rare (making it hard to actually get enough mages together to make it work), can easily go wrong, and can be done better by just helping people directly. If you were interested in using your magic to help people, you can just do that.

    As for theocracies, It's somewhat of a fair point, since in real world medieval societies the church had quite a bit of pull. The problem is that in DnD, the clerics are very much beholden to their gods, and the gods will often have the same issue that Wizards do. Why would they care about their clerics being in charge of the kingdom? Most of the ones who would want that (ie, self-centered and belligerent) are not the type that would take kindly to other gods' worshipers. And that will make other gods and adventurers (including high level casters) oppose them, likely preventing them from gaining a meaningful foothold.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Magic takes study and dedication. Anyone who would want to take over the world that way would fail out of Wizard school - they're clearly not bright enough (too much abnegation, too little erudite) to be a Wizard if they think that controlling muggle institutions directly is any form of real power.

    Clerics and Wisdom get you to much the same place.

    Ruling over others - and doing it well - is generally a *downgrade* for the self-focused. That is, why would I want to manage idiot junior programmers, when that cuts into how much time I get to spend writing better code than most of them ever will? Heck, why would I want to manage *the janitors* or *the mail room* when I could be writing code instead?

    So, when you can envision the senior programmer managing the "muggles" of the company, you'll have your models for what a Magocracy looks like. So, a flying country that crashes often; every time it does, the citizens have to close all their windows, turn the country off and back on, then try opening their windows again.

    Not saying it can't happen, but… there's reasons why it might not be the normal model for successful countries.
    Last edited by Quertus; 2020-06-01 at 11:14 AM.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Short answer, it depends.

    Medium answer: define a magocracy, define the religion behind the theocracy.

    Long answer: government is about more than the person at the top. It's about administration, and even if the person at the top wields mystical or religious might it doesn't mean the people who do the actual running of the country do. Which means that a mystical or religious ruler has to stay on the good side of their civil service (or lesser lords, if we're using a fuedal system), or keep their civil service small enough that they can use their mystic powers to control them. But once you've used your magic to control the civil service you can't really use it for other things. Therefore actual magocracies tend to either be small or to have significant numbers of magic-users ('magocracy by default'). Mages who do forge their own realms are encouraged to keep them small enough to get only what they actually need and to remain on their populace's good side unless the taxes stop coming in, or else brutally repress their populace and run the risk of mass emigration over the course of the next few generations.

    That's not to say that mages will never be a political power. It doesn't matter whether it's a guild, a school, noble families, or just lone mages in towers, they will engage with politics in order to get what they want. Which in many cases leads to organised groups of mages being given special permissions to get them to stay out of politics.

    That's even before getting into the court mage, one of their duties is almost certainly to uncover and remove magical influences from the court. Yes, they probably have a great amount of power from their position and access to the leader's ear (assuming just one court mage), but they can't stop enemies from controlling the leader if they're also using their magic to control the civil service.

    The most logical form for a magocracy is a feudal system, where houses of wizards horde magic and form the highest rank of the nobility, with lower ranks having no or heavily restricted education in the mystical arts, and a monarch drawn from one of these noble houses. In D&D you might even give each house a focus on one or two schools of magic.

    As for theocracies, it's mainly because not all religions want political power, and there's potentially even a religion with a vested interest in stopping other religions from gaining political power (probably a CG god of freedom). That's not to say that religions won't hold power, in fact realistically religions will hold a lot of power just from being a large part of people's lives, and individual towns might even work as a theocracy, but it's unlikely that a church will take on the task of administrating an entire realm when they can just attempt to convert the people who run stuff into followers.

    TL;DR: actually ruling is a hassle, and ruling a large realm via magic takes up a lot of resources. Plus the churches probably already have a lot of influence, do they really want more.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Originally Posted by Cazero
    …save for the egomaniacs who enjoy having power over the masses.
    There’s a nontrivial number of these people out in the world. In fact they’re all around us, but most of them lack the skill and discipline to effectively do what they want.

    If studying magic is an option, then driving egomania could certainly be a motivation to pursue the arcane arts. Anyone intelligent enough to excel in the study of magic should be able to channel that drive and operate effectively in a sociomagical environment.

  9. - Top - End - #9
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    In 3e at least, there are too few of them and they're far too busy interfering with each other.

    There's also the fact that magical gear and architecture that can substantially mitigate what such characters can do that easily outlives their creators.

    Further still, there's the -dramatic- overstatement of the caster/non-caster divide. It is there but it's a -long- way from insurmountable, even before you consider the far from perfect in-game knowledge of the rules of the game that such characters would have as they progress.

    As for theocracies, they're fairly common and often defacto rather than explicit. That's not in the sense of actual cleric spellcasters running the show but in the sense of the church being the center of power and social organization. That's no different from reality in the late 17th century. Even extraordinarily powerful clerics are still part of their gods' churches and defer to the leaders of the church, who are often -not- casters because there's no need for the gods to invest their divine power in administrators. That's what holy texts and the odd prophet are for. Those who've been invested with the gods' divine power have had that investment made so they can take on preturnatural and supernatural threats that common soldiers simply can't and to advance the gods' interests through the direct application of mystical power.

    Back to that interference comment; chaotic gods and their clerics have a vested interest in making sure that those who have immense power don't get too big for their britches. Any powerful mage seeking to establish himself as a ruler, much less clerics of the churches of gods like Hextor and St Cuthbert, have to go through equally powerful clerics and mages that think no one with such powers should rule over the common folk.

    __________________________________________________ ____________________________

    Finally, there's the sheer practicality of it.

    Having the mind necessary to gather all that magical power says -nothing- about any inclination to actually manage a state and the people of it. While a top-class mystic theurge may have the perfect solutions for every imaginable problem in his perfect mind but he -must- rely on much less perfect beings to execute those likely quite complicated plans. He simply can't be everywhere at once and there are only so many hours and spell slots in a day.

    If he doesn't get every single order just so, it won't be executed properly. Worse, orders that have to go down the chain of command will almost invariably get twisted by the game of telephone that carries it to its final recipient. It -inevitably- hits the wall of civil bureaucracy, regardless of the civic structure, and there any perfection of the Caster-King/Chairman/President dies through a slow, brutal, bureaucratic murder. It'd be a full-time, never-ending job just to make sure your orders even reached who they're supposed to in-tact before you even consider dissidents.

    And you can't just erase the dissidents without making more of them and drawing out those who have the power and inclination to stop you if you're even a caster for whom that's an option to begin with. Your power won't last long if it comes from a good deity and you're just disappearing folks without following the divinely approved methods. It'll go even faster if such a caster that's more powerful than you is part of your opposition.

    All the personal power of even a god can't keep the people from turning against you if even people of an appreciable portion of your political power are working in tandem and parallel against you. A sorcerer king can be deposed by experts (the NPC class) if they can outmaneuver him in the courts of nobility and public opinion. Bringing his head to the block may be out of reach but making rulership impossible certainly is not.

    TL;DR: no matter how well suited to the job you may be, people will always get in the way and at the end of the day you're just one spell-slinger and you haven't dedicated your whole life to being a politician.
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    Ettin in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Others have brought up some very good points (particularly those roughly along the lines of 'time spent ruling is time not spent wizarding'). I'm going to focus on a specific foundational piece of the premise I disagree with. Here:

    Quote Originally Posted by Lkctgo View Post
    Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.
    Setting aside that the initial clause doesn't independently support the concluding clause, I don't think it is true in the first place. Spellcasters are inherently overpowered, compared to the non-spellcasting classes, at doing what players generally want their characters to do (in particular, solving adventure-level challenges that the DM might bring to bear against the party as an obstacle to success).

    When it comes to kingdom or even town/city-level challenges, most of the abilities that a spellcaster can bring to bear (particularly that other people with money and followers couldn't do) don't actually tend to solve them.
    Droughts, famines, or plagues?: Certainly druidic and clerical magic are quite nice stopgap measures, and a high level caster can feed dozens-to-perhaps-a-hundred per day or cure disease for maybe a dozen or so. However, once you are looking at the hundreds-to-thousands level of suffering people, it becomes a problem solved by either real governance/logistics (finding parts of the world with excess food, buying it, and bringing it to the people who need it; setting up disease treatment centers and isolation areas and such), or a full-PC-party adventure to, let's say, find the magical macguffin which will appease/rebuke the god of pestilence (where a spellcaster will probably out-contribute the sword-swinger, to be sure).
    Natural Disaster?: My group once envisioned a volcanic eruption threatening a town, and what the party could do about it. Outside of Wish* (which, honestly, the fighter ruler with a purchased ring of wishes is just as good with as the wizard who is burning XP to cast it), not much a caster has could do a bit of good. Even using 'port to demiplane with different timescale to re-memorize spells' trickery to get the right load out of spells isn't going to give you enough walls of stones to block a lava flow. Same with enough water/weather to cool the lava in its tracks. Once you start dealing with phenomena well above 'as big as a football field' sizes, D&D spells are pretty much inadequate (for good reason, since the game was designed around dungeon-level challenges).
    *and here I am assuming that your DM has quashed any, 'and now I have infinite cost-free wishes' shenanigans, because if they haven't, who rules is the least of the problems.
    Invading army?: At this one, a caster actually can do something, but again most effects they have are not scaled properly. Some cloudkills and fireballs and summoned monsters (preferably with DR 15/<not what normal soldier usually have available>) will do some serious damage to an army, but the army is still going to succeed or fail based on your side's fortifications and low-level troops and the like. The spellcaster was just a high-value asset (one that needs a safe place to rest and 're-fuel'). So it is like having an fighter/bomber pilot end up being president/prime minister/etc. -- certainly possible, but not an intuitive link.
    Insurrection/Rebellion/Coup?: Much like the natural disaster scenario, most of the spells which seem appropriate don't really work past a certain scale. Sure, a scrying wizard can spy on a cell of rebels plotting against them -- one location at a time, and only the ones the wizard already knows to be monitoring. This too is something that is more readily solved by having your own competent spy network, something any ruler can have. Sure, minion-mancy can help, but (like Wish, assuming the DM has nixed infinite loops or the like) the numbers favor the guy who can wrangled hundreds of citizens to their side, particularly since a conspiring rebel is much more likely to spill the beans to a regular pretty barmaid than to a demon or celestial or whatever (and yes, you can have the demon or celestial shape/appearance-change into one of those, but for that effort you could get dozens to hundreds of mundane ones).

    I could go on with more examples, and I'm sure there are specific spells which break this mold and actually do work on the kingdom-level, and I am excluding certain 3e rules exploits on the grounds that if they are allowed, who is ruling is the least of the worldcrafting issues. However, my point still stands -- D&D spellcasters, even the high-disparity ones that 3e has, aren't really very powerful once the problems scale up to the level of ruling kingdoms and solving kingdom-level problems.

    The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.
    So leaving aside the powerful issue, we have highly intelligent (we know, because we can see their character sheets and Int score) individuals who might not have as many blind allegiances as a theocracy. Okay, I can see the value of intelligent leadership (I certainly am in favor of a meritocracy). I guess that comes down to whether 'wizard intelligence' is the same as actual intelligencesmartness. I am a bit biased, in that I manage a team of programmers and lawyers (two groups that I feel are somewhat analogous to D&D wizards) and much of my job is wrangling them into actually solving the problem we have been asked to solve, not the one they want to solve. Likewise, in the literature, wizards (and yes I have drifted from spellcaster to wizard, since you mentioned magocracies) are regularly portrayed as perhaps book and knowledge smart, but not necessarily showing other characteristics of overall smartness. It's really not obvious to me that a group of wizards would the ones to make the best decisions.

    Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side.
    Sure, but Wizard+Leader >= Leader just means that Wizard isn't negative. It doesn't have to contribute at all.
    Last edited by Willie the Duck; 2020-06-01 at 10:42 AM.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Pretty much all my world building post-AD&D has the primary political structures being heavily magic user biased. The much maligned AD&D level limits plus spell casting, learning, and memorization rules were specifically there to support a human-centric quasi-feudal setting.

    The recent editions have magic users who inherit or aquire power without study or hard work. This is in addition to basically removing upper limits on magical power growth. Just the need for, and power of, scrying & anti-scrying should mean that most magic users are in, or directly employed/controlled by, the ruling classes.

    Following on that, theocracies were common and quite viable for long periods of time. Even after direct theocratic rule stopped being common (actual weather control being something that didn't happel in rl) having clergy in positions of power & governence, plus the religous system being a major land owner, made for a sort of shadow theocracy in places/times.

    Tldr: Yeah, the easy access to magic power should result in magic using people being over represented in governance.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lkctgo View Post
    Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

    I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

    The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster. The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.

    I know that people like to bring up two points in rebuttal:
    1. Feudal tradition (people identify with certain rulers in certain regions)

    For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).

    In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.

    Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.

    2. Lack of stability/continuity issues

    For theocracies, those clerics of major gods have an inherent hierarchy (and other spellcasters of the same faith) to tap onto. I understand that there are limitations (e.g good gods may not want their clerics to slaughter innocents to take over a city), but even if they are unable to take over a city-state, won't it make sense to found/create a city where the church is the major power (after all one of the main objectives of the clerics is to bring more believers for their god)?

    For magocracies, admittedly it is more difficult to ensure a steady supply of mages, but there are always training schools (and also a lot of ways for mages to prolong their lives and solidify their rule).

    I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.
    The same reason militaries, scientists, economists or doctors aren't the dominant form of government in all periods; having two jobs makes you worse at doing one or the other. A mage has to spend their time doing magic, a politician has to spend their time trying to run bureaucracies and balance interest groups. Certainly magic based governments would crop up, but that makes them responsible for a whole lot of stuff that they may not want to do.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    On the Cleric Side: Godwar.

    Some schmuck with a slightly better horse and a slightly longer spear can claim all the land he wants in the name of his patron deity. But once cleric - people chosen by the god to be a beacon of their power in the world - start horsing around, your counterparts in the pantheon might want their own piece of the pie. Last time, Bad Things happened. So the gods agree to not have their spell-slinging devotees play priest-king, and to gain followers the old-fashioned way.

    Paladins can get a pass on Oaths - they may follow a god, but their personal crusades are on ideals - something broader in scope. This is why Tyranny/Conquest Paladins show up with invading armies.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Rules are for players, not for worldbuilding. If worldbuilding had to adhere to raw it would mean wizards learn magic by comitting waton ton of murder. Worlds are not mago/theocracies because it doesn't fit the theme they are going for

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Well to add in somethings I did not see above:

    *Power Levels: A Typical D&D world is full of people and creatures of power levels from 1 to 20. Even if a wizard was to get to 10th level, and then decide they would want to rule the world, HALF of the world would still be more powerful them them. There is a good chance someone will oppose the wizard, and a good chance they will be more powerful.

    *No Kid Gloves: A Typical D&D world is a Game World made to unfairly support and protect the PCs. Very few DMs would ever do anything "cheap or unfair" to a PC. For example attacking a sleeping character or stealing (or destroying )that character's spellbook or unique item. But if you are talking about a world with no PC, then all of those ways don't apply. A wizard will go to sleep, and be killed by a stealthy character or monster. The whole world will be on the "Real Life Simulation Old School Anyone Can Die" setting with no sympathy, do overs or take backs.

    *Homebrew; Many think of a D&D world as only "what is in the official book". But in a "real life simulation " world, no one looks at the Rule Book of Life and picks a specific feat, spell or magic item to use. In a Real Life Simulation Old School Anything Can be Brewed" setting.....anything can be 'Brewed and created. You can have a wizard all perfectly optimized to be invulnerable "by the silly book rules" and they can be obliterated in one round by another wizard casting Anti-Time Obliteration. And not a single "silly rule book" will EVER have magic that deals with anti-time(and few are even likely to even know thw concept). But even if they did have an anti-anti-time protection, there are endless ways to do things....

    *People are People: Er, sure, maybe Bob can take over the country or world. But then what? He then has to rule it....and that is not quite as easy as it sounds. Just take a sampling of DMs to see how well a fictional world might be run.

    *The Unknown: Again, going off think of a D&D world as only "what is in the official book". A "real life simulation " world will have many things unknown, even more so unknown to the "rule book folks". Like say magic affiliations that effect wizards (2E had them). Just take our poor emperor wizard who rules the empire, he teleports a lot and wakes up one day immaterial and unable to do anything he dies of a lack of food and water in a couple days.

    *End Goal: This is the philosophical one. A person can rule the world. Get a nice place to live and whatever they want. They can make the world whatever they want. But THEN what? You have everything and can do anything...but then what do you DO?

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    That depends.

    To some degree, I'd expect almost all wizards to be of generally upper class. To become a wizard takes time and money a commoner doesn't have.
    However, by the inverse, not all upper class are wizards, because it takes time to train as a wizard and until you get to high level [which is generally unlikely], you're not really any more powerful than a martial, or are in fact less so, so it's not worth it for the upper class to become wizards.

    Magic is valuable, but I think it would be more reasonable to see wizards as retainers on the noble's court than as the noble themselves. The noble sponsors the wizard's training for the wizard to work for them and do basic magical tasks.


    That said, sorcery is a path to a mageocracy if you want to build one. You can write the whole structure of inherited magical power and inherited political power together, and being a sorcerer doesn't take having a college degree. This is also a path just for magical noble families in general even if the rest of the world isn't a mageocracy.



    As for theocracies, well, real life states in the time were theocracies, so it doesn't take much justification to have them, since the church holds influence over the lives of the commoners even without clerics having magic. The Clerics themselves could or could not be lords themselves, though they'd certainly be nominated for tasks like leading crusades and "persuading" kings that have ideas about not being subservient to the church.
    And this is not because of the Cleric's personal power, but because of the power of the greater organization they too are a pawn of.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    In some editions of D&D, there's less imbalance between spellcasters and other characters.

    The settings you're surprised about might have been written under the assumptions of another edition.


    In 3.x D&D, the imbalance between high-level spellcasters and others is both significant and obvious. One setting written specifically for 3.5e D&D limited NPC levels to a range where spellcasting isn't such a stark imbalance.

    That's your answer for Eberron: NPCs aren't high enough level that the spellcasters can dominate. It's a deliberate design decision to make the setting work within the rules of the game.


    If Eberron wasn't the setting you were asking about, could you list the names of the ones you do want explained?


    For my homebrew settings, often times each city / nation / state has some kind of power source. Might be divine, might be arcane, might be a family of dragons, might be a vampire lord... everybody has an ace in their back pocket, a local power behind the throne. That's a trope which I use to justify some sword-and-sorcery trappings of my homebrew.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Spellcasters, particularly mages, are defined by personal power not bestowed power. Traditional rulers rely on alliances, charisma, oaths, and other instruments of fealty and obligation to advance the causes of their state and themselves.

    Spellcasters, particularly high level ones need no such things to get what they want. In other words they do not rely on other people (soldiers, tax collectors, bureaucrats, messengers, etc.) to enforce their will. As such the incentive to rule a nation is much less. While non-spellcasting classes can somewhat achieve this through the use of magic items, spellcasters are the ones that truly shine in this area.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    There are places where this did happen.

    Thay, in the Forgotten Realms, is a magocracy.
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Often, the answer is, "Adventurers." There is a fine tradition of Evil Mages trying to take over kingdoms/the world, and 4-6 heroic individuals banding together to thwart them.

    Why mages don't become institutional powers? Administration is a lot of hard work and keeps you busy; when will you have time to study? Maybe you don't need to; you're a sorcerer. Great! That means you can have a noble bloodline defined by magic for your mageocracy! But it's not perfect, and it still takes some practice (see how few skill points sorcerers get). And those with the magic bloodline are probably rare, so you might be able to breed your relations into every layer of your feudal structure eventually, but it's not guaranteed. So there will be non-mages.

    Plus, you don't have to be a wizard or a cleric or a sorcerer to benefit from magic. So the guy who's actually very skilled at administration and management who hires a wizard who just wants to be left alone but will do magic on reasonable demand for sufficient backing can give wands and magic weapons to the administrator's mundane forces.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lkctgo View Post
    I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.
    If you want story reasons you can make up anything you want. You'll hear lots of that, with more or less rules referencing depending on edition and setting differences. For example Eberron lacks high level casters, but doesn't have rules preventing them, it's just a narrative decision.

    If you want a rules based reason you'll probably run up against the problem that many editions just have rules for a few adventurers wandering around killing things. There will be a distinct lack or rules covering rulership, governence, taxation, populations, etc. Trying to extrapolate from the adventuring rules to governance and world building will generally fail or result in a setting wildly divergent from the normal assumptions (ref: Emperor Tippy) because the adventurer rules give some individuals massive world altering abilities with few or no drawbacks using an assumption that such abilities will be used only for dungeon crawling.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie the Duck View Post

    Natural Disaster?: My group once envisioned a volcanic eruption threatening a town, and what the party could do about it. Outside of Wish* (which, honestly, the fighter ruler with a purchased ring of wishes is just as good with as the wizard who is burning XP to cast it), not much a caster has could do a bit of good. Even using 'port to demiplane with different timescale to re-memorize spells' trickery to get the right load out of spells isn't going to give you enough walls of stones to block a lava flow. Same with enough water/weather to cool the lava in its tracks. Once you start dealing with phenomena well above 'as big as a football field' sizes, D&D spells are pretty much inadequate (for good reason, since the game was designed around dungeon-level challenges).
    My brother retired a character with at-will Wall of Stone that could probably manage

    We'll see if my senility will let me research "lava response", to determine time frame vs resources required.

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie the Duck View Post
    So leaving aside the powerful issue, we have highly intelligent (we know, because we can see their character sheets and Int score) individuals who might not have as many blind allegiances as a theocracy. Okay, I can see the value of intelligent leadership (I certainly am in favor of a meritocracy). I guess that comes down to whether 'wizard intelligence' is the same as actual intelligencesmartness. I am a bit biased, in that I manage a team of programmers and lawyers (two groups that I feel are somewhat analogous to D&D wizards) and much of my job is wrangling them into actually solving the problem we have been asked to solve, not the one they want to solve. Likewise, in the literature, wizards (and yes I have drifted from spellcaster to wizard, since you mentioned magocracies) are regularly portrayed as perhaps book and knowledge smart, but not necessarily showing other characteristics of overall smartness. It's really not obvious to me that a group of wizards would the ones to make the best decisions.
    Lol. Agree that "intelligence" and "smartness" are not synonyms.

    Haven't really had trouble with techies (can't speak for lawyers) trying to solve the wrong problem, outside a) trying to spend too many resources / going outside budget, or b) trying to solve the problem that they were told to solve, rather than researching what the costumer actually needed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Man on Fire View Post
    Rules are for players, not for worldbuilding. If worldbuilding had to adhere to raw it would mean wizards learn magic by comitting waton ton of murder. Worlds are not mago/theocracies because it doesn't fit the theme they are going for
    There's also role-playing XP. But, I must admit, I do like the world-building in "murder-powered leveling".

    Quote Originally Posted by Zarrgon View Post
    *Power Levels: A Typical D&D world is full of people and creatures of power levels from 1 to 20. Even if a wizard was to get to 10th level, and then decide they would want to rule the world, HALF of the world would still be more powerful them them. There is a good chance someone will oppose the wizard, and a good chance they will be more powerful.
    I would love to see the world-building around a world - or even a single kingdom - where half the citizens were more powerful than a level 10 Wizard.

    Quote Originally Posted by Zarrgon View Post
    *People are People: Er, sure, maybe Bob can take over the country or world. But then what? He then has to rule it....and that is not quite as easy as it sounds. Just take a sampling of DMs to see how well a fictional world might be run.
    Preach it!

    Quote Originally Posted by Zarrgon View Post
    *End Goal: This is the philosophical one. A person can rule the world. Get a nice place to live and whatever they want. They can make the world whatever they want. But THEN what? You have everything and can do anything...but then what do you DO?
    Hmmm… conquer other worlds? That could make for a fun game.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Because unless you are the Crimson Permanent Assurance, there is not much adventure to be had in bureaucracy, accountancy and administration...
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    It is obvously rule/setting dpendent. But :

    - While a caster may be more powerful than a noncaster, a kingdom where the casters rule is not more powerful than a kingdom where casters don't rule but are still employed by the rulers and are cherished and sponsored.

    - A wizard might have a lot of tools that are useful for a coup. But not actually that many tools that are useful for gouverning or staying in power.

    - The really powerful caster can get pretty much everything he want anyway. And if there still is something that needs the power of the realm to get, he probably has a good chance getting it by simply asking the ruler for it. There is no need to claim a throne.

    - Clerics are bound by the rules of their goods. Politics is a messy buisness full of compromises. It is way easier to stay true and clean if someone else does it.

    - Rulers are often more interested in providing nice positions to their offspring, not to their competitors in the same field. So regardless who actually rules, their is an incentive to make rulership hereditary and not a class based meritocracy.


    Of course with casters so powerful there is a strong incentive for nobles to have their children become casters which can lead to a de-facto magocracy even if it is still actually hereditary feudal. Especcially if aside from the main heir the children need to find retainer posts at other courts it would be very common to train them as court wizards or court priests and then use connections.
    There is also an incentive to make church posts hereditary and bind them to political posts, but usually the gods don't want the less talented firstborn as the next high priest and put a stop on that.

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lkctgo View Post
    Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

    I've been puzzling myself with worldcrafting but I can't find a reasonable explanatio. Given that spellcasters are inherently overpowered (especially in the 3.5 setting), it seems that they should be ruling most (if not all) of the city states.

    The effectiveness of a magocracy is that there would be a council of highly intelligent, powerfully magical parties who could deal with any foreseeable threat or disaster.
    Government is a social structure that asserts control over a population to direct the flow of resources to achieve ends by pooling and allocating labor and resources in a way that individuals or informal groupings cannot. Different forms of government propose different structures of moving, pooling, and distributing resources; different philosophies of the use and government and the good order of society. Government also has to root itself in governed population--that is, it has to exploit a mix of practical and cultural elements in the people governed to compel their participation, and tweak that process of exploitation to keep people compliant even when circumstances are especially bad or good.

    RPG magic is application--means to achieve ends--but rarely is presented as having philosophical dimensions that create new concepts of governance: "magocracy" doesn't actually describe a philosophy of governance or an administrative structure. Theoretically in different settings there could be different ways of integrating "magic" as tools of an administrative state and the infrastructure; but the naked assertion of "magic dudes make government therefore magic government" is so free of details that it doesn't actually propose anything. The described case--magic users dispatched to be problem solvers--is civil service but with magic, not something novel.

    That said, what "magocracy" does describe is a hard hierarchical distinction...a gate between those that can have administrative power, and those that cannot. So...is the process of qualification to rule (magic) a meaningful test of the skills required to rule? Does training in magic use (of whatever type) create useful skillsets in economics, accountancy, communication, bureaucracy? In most settings I've ever encountered...no. So a magocracy immediately starts one down, in that the testing mechanism includes no skills necessary for directing and guiding large groups of people to achieve collective goals. This gating issue become even more worrisome if total magic power is a qualifier for higher position in governance, because then you've got a system where a key criterion of more administrative power is not succeeding as an administrator, but accumulating personal arcane power highly suited to (1) abusing one's position, (2) avoiding accountability because who has sufficient force to stop you.

    Furthermore, if you've got magic users enclosed together making plans without consultation with non-magic-users, chances are very good you're going to get the arcanist equivalent of groupthink: making decisions from a fixed perspective of "solve with magic" while ignorant or disregarding non-magical solutions that would work better because the infrastructure could be maintained without magic.

    But if we set that aside, the idea of smart wizards ruling through problem-solving parties has a scalability problem: how many casters, circulating over how much space, casting how many spells per day for how many people? If the backbone of your resource pool and allocation process is magic, then you are dependent on spellcaster labor, meaning that each caster is incredibly valuable but also a point of failure, and the more powerful the caster the more disruptive their absence would be.

    That last bit gets especially wonky if magic is anything less than perfectly repeatable by different individuals. What's described is a magic civil service, which means...these are jobs where workers have to put in man-hours of labor necessary to keep things operating at a satisfactory status quo, and in turn every day there's going to be human resources problems. Bureaucracies are good because horizontally there's redundancy, and vertically there's quality control: every single day the work can be done over and over, consistently. If magic is beautiful personal snowflakes sent out into the world, you have a crisis when putting-out-fire arcane specialist is too sick to work. If a crucial construction project hinges on caster and his replacement is weaker or less of a master of the specific task, that's a civil engineering disaster seeded.

    The personal power level, individual-directed learning of spells, and "artistic" aspects of magic mean that death, and thus filling job positions, would be a huge issue in a magic infrastructure system. If magic is all natural talent and you lose a talented member of a corps doing essential work, you've got no replacement because it's just luck. If magic is the product of deep study and years of mastery, then a death at the top--well, what system is in place to make sure there's a replacement of equal ability with the same skillset?

    So...on top of all that is the larger economics implications of a caster system. If your problem-solving infrastructure is based on casters it's implicitly based on caster tools. If a spell has a consumed material component you have to have a procurement process that acquires and distribute it at a rate commensurate with it expenditure. Even if the materials can be magicked up...that's more magic labor that has to operate a continuous rate of production day after day. Either way, that maintenance production rate becomes a point of failure for the system because there's limited magic-man-hours.

    I guess in a 3.5 world there are a bunch of ways to get Tippy because there's a bunch of magic items that just become perpetual motion machine equivalents, but even those tend to play fast and loose with the fancy-ass materials required to make the widgets because they can just buy stuff with gold forever and RPG worlds have fantasy economies in which there's no relative value and scarcity is fixed enough for things to be pricey but supply can never be so scarce it's systemically unavailable.

    And all of that is without getting into the question of consent of the governed. Magic lends itself to applications that permit individual abuse of power, and in a lot of settings the focus upon individual accomplishment and obsessive research begets hubris. If legitimate authority, and in particular use of force, is gated behind magic use, then at some point there's going develop a body of law regulating use of magic by the state versus constituents of the state, of the state simply voids their consent through coercion individually or collectively.

    The effectiveness of a theocracy is that it would also be able to deal with disasters, but it has an inherent hierarchy and "blind" allegiance that may not be found in magocracies.
    An inherent hierarchy and blind allegiance if the rulers can maintain a completely compliant ideologically-homogeneous population. RPG fantasy settings aren't just polytheistic, the structure of the afterlife and the material benefits of belief are close to identical doing apples to apples comparisons. This is to make player choices weigh the same, but it has the side-effect of taking the wind out of compelling belief: spiritual self-determination is written into the metaphysics undergirding the cosmos. Bluntly--theocracies lean heavier on coercion than secular societies because they are trying to compel total assimilation of their worldview, not just performative compliance. And the biggest stick a theocracy has is that noncompliance is not just death, but eternal suffering.

    If the followers of Corn God set up a rump state and start boiling alive the followers of Walnut God...well in most metaphysics that mean Walnut God's followers are doomed to suffer forever and Corn God's followers can feel relieved that they're not because IA IA COB ANESTI. But in RPG metaphysics there's no one true afterlife, and the various gods hoover up belief but don't poach one another's exclusive markets...it's like a oligopoly where each participants competes in new markets but agrees to not directly intervene in the other's controlled market regions.

    This metaphysical back stage combined with the layers and layers of cosmic intrigues also means that theocracy isn't really incentivized as way of getting what any one god, or their church, wants. Controlling dirt and labor through an administrative state to control people is adding extra unnecessary steps.

    Many gods belong to pantheons with common goals that can be advanced without complete milieu control over a region, and within the multi-pantheon system there are often deities so pathologically destructive that collaboration is necessary to keep them from advancing objectives far more alarming than regional franchise. Furthermore there are existential threats that do not operate inside of soul-market format--demons, extraplanar things, Lovecraftian things, yadda yadda--that require a different pattern of resource allocation and delegation of responsibility.

    For those people who speak of feudal tradition (Lord xxx has always ruled and people won't follow a new leader), they forget that feudal times did not have near demi-gods who could charm/dominate you (even with sheer force of will), and were inherently multiple times more intelligent/wiser/charismatic than you are. Feudalism only seems to work if the ruler is able to control everyone under themselves (a risky if not foolish proposition against a level 20 wizard).
    The real, real reason that a setting aren't map full of magic civil servants fixing everything to the tune of a magic autocrat is...it shrinks the space that players can play in.

    So mostly I've talked in fluff terms, but I'd like to switch to mechanics-and-design-level ones for a moment: I realize that RAW high INT is glossed in-game to high general intelligence and the small number of skills and the class skill sets mean that casters ended up "smart"...but it's bad character writing. If casters are stat blocks and spell lists and there's no narrative line about why they have their power or what it means, then it technically "works" if you assume high-powered casters are boilerplate economic rational actors with the same manpower needs and the exact same lack of concern for mind-controlling. If they're characters actually living in a world and they know what they know because they learned stuff and they talk how they talk because of their personality, then their "intelligence" is not just a fixed score on a character sheet and it makes more sense that don't a priori Know Stuff So Good They're Better Than The People What Know Stuff.

    Wizards as advisors to kings and manipulators of kings is a common and effective trope, but a setting where it just recurs over and over because it "makes sense" is not creative or fun. But if fluff terms--what does God a demigod want with a starship a feudal kingdom?

    RPG magic in mechanical execution is concrete--it is built to tool-like perform operations for PCs--but the description of magic communicates that it is about expansion of esoteric knowledge that alters one's perception of the world. High level casters are transformed, psychologically and sometimes physically, in ways that eject them from material concerns. They are madmen, obsessives, hermits, saints drawn to an extreme of experience that authors don't communicate because it's really hard to whole-cloth make up esoterica and not get lost in the details. A high level caster isn't just an accumulation of personal power, they're the end point of biography of learning crazy stuff about the cosmos to become that powerful, in a world full of gods and monsters and power systems that stretch outward into a multiplanar afterlife that's connected to a multiverse full of immortal scheming critters who have a creased copy of your business card in their spare wallet.

    In any case, even if the mage is not the "official" ruler, they should be able to charm/dominate enough of the courtiers (or even guards) to effect control over the kingdom (and become de facto monarch). I understand that nobles might have items that protect them from spells/mind-affecting effects, but it's impossible (money-wise) to do that for their entire household and servants.
    See, this doesn't actually work as smart as it seems to on the surface.

    It's not a good assumption that nobody but the magic user would consider the possibility that magical coercion is available as a tool and nobody puts "maybe magical coercion" on the table when they speculate about the new and interesting choice made by people in power. I mean, this is a general problem with how mind control magic and society would interact: we have multiple words to describe degrees of harm caused by forcing people to do stuff by controlling them with threats, manipulation, and physical harm...in a world where magic that altered or controlled minds existed, there would be an equivalent extensive lexicon for magically taking away someone's consent and violating their mental autonomy. So if there's someone moving around who explicitly has the skillset to force people to act again their nature and someone starts acting against their nature, people are not going to respond with confusion.

    And since the premise references mechanical game aspects like specific spells and rolls, the failure point is when someone rolls a successful save or rolls a 20 on a skill check. Your power as Mind Eating Wizard King hinges depends on controlling a key set of individuals with broad powers capable of giving orders without being questioned, so you can't just get rid of them if there's an off day or somebody notices the something's off. I mean, what's the fallback plan when Operation Erotic Lobotomy begins to fray at the edges? I mean, with all that casting you can certainly defend yourself against direct attack, but after two or three instances (day after day for YEARS) of someone saying (1) "I think someone cast a spell on me to mess with my head" (2) "I have an entirely different opinion on the same subject than I did a few hours ago" there's going to be a credibility crisis that diminishes first the authority of Mind Control Squad and then the entire government system because either there's contagious case of Goon Brain or a wizard did it.

    The other thing is...can you imagine how tedious this method of control would be? You'd have to spend tons of time developing scripts for your Brain Goons and cross-checking them to make sure there weren't any contradictions of errors. And spend time just feeding them their lines. And doing QA testing on their audiences to see if the stuff you were making them say was actually translating into the stuff you wanted done and not, say diverted into a moral panic about kippers and irrational large subsidies to quince farming. Like, to get high level enough to brain-squeeze enough people you probably had stab out a ghost's eyeballs and feed them like grapes to a dragon that's 50% spare golem parts by weight while contemplating the deeper mystic meaning of the chewing noises, and now you're basically a comptroller who runs an improv school in their spare time.

    And in additional to the creep factor it's also really inefficient compared to, say, using clout and rhetoric and maybe a bit of threat because you're an atomic bomb in a shiny robe and a codpiece that emits faint sobbing noises.

    Even if one says that people only follow charismatic rulers, or that people do not just follow the strongest man, spellcasters with strong charisma would easily fulfil the criterion. Their sheer force of will (such as through persuasion checks/diplomacy checks) would already convert large numbers to their side. In any case, won't supremely intelligent/wise leaders be able to govern more effectively than a ruler whose only claim to the throne rests on their lineage? It's hard to see why people won't support the spellcaster who can create food/water in the event of a drought, as opposed to an aristocrat NPC king.
    Are people specifically inclined to give enormous power to randos on a strictly transactional basis, or are they more comfortable with power systems that include deep cultural roots and a shared social contract?

    Now answer that question with the added proviso of "...hand over power to a person with enormous supernatural power that includes the ability to destroy everything and also casters have a habit of going crazy with power and doing shady stuff, and because of the setting tropes wizads abusing power are a knowable thing that people worry about."

    And, I repeat myself, this idea that casters are "supremely intelligent" in a way that translates into all the abilities to both win and retain total political power is...nakedly bad writing if it happens more than once. It also an argument that leans heavy into mechanics...technically being able to do something...superceding characterization and a setting's need for spicy unusual phenomena for PCs to interact with.

    I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.
    By the time you've learned the largest, most complex spells that exist you've fought insanely powerful entities that worked for more powerful entities, and the latter now hate you and would enjoy seeing your projects fail. And you're so intelligent/wise/enlightened that you realize that temporal power seems small, and you're frightened of what would happen if you re-connected with the vulnerable normal people whose lives are governed by temporal power.

    You've had your home village torched by an archdevil or a loved one tormented in impossible cruel ways. Maybe you've come out of that with a general love of people such that you don't want to use your power to force them to do things...and it would be so easy to do. Maybe you've come out of that with a total indifference to people because you're getting beyond old, slouching towards immortality, and it's just become routine people live and die in rhythms that are pretty to watch from afar but no longer relatable.

    Maybe you've seen or learned things that have shifted your gaze away from everything; the new research that going to save everybody from something they don't even know is a threat; a way to replicate a moment of sensation experienced in a distant moment in an impossible faraway land; aeciding to use your power to batter at a rule that others think is a law and you demand be a suggestion.

    Or maybe they all just wake up in the morning, look in the bathroom mirror and think, "Man, I could be that guy who has to get up at 5am every morning and mind control a bunch of cabbage-and-madeira reeking, flatulent dukes to make sure they don't raise the tariff on frozen orange juice, just like he's done for the last decade."
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2020-06-02 at 04:03 AM.

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    Chimera

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
    My brother retired a character with at-will Wall of Stone that could probably manage
    Unless said character can also address any of the other potential things that happen to the kingdom -- despite having permanently devoted slotting one out of (one? It's been a long time since I've played high-level 3e) at-will spells to Wall of Stone -- I think this supports my point rather than detracts from it. If the solution to each individual problem is 'but there is a specific, permanent, and exclusive build that could,' then we're suggesting that a generalist wizard couldn't. And since you can't actually play Schrodinger's Wizard, well then I think the kingdom shouldn't be looking to a wizard dictator to hands-on solve their problems.

    We'll see if my senility will let me research "lava response", to determine time frame vs resources required.
    Let's keep it super simple -- create a wall tall and wide enough to block a lava flow (ignoring that the lava might melt/break/push over said wall, seep under it, off-gas toxic fumes which kill the town anyways, etc.); or enough water to chill that much lava back to a solid state (assumption, created water starts at the avg surface temp of the ocean: 17 C, and all the energy required to bring it to boiling and then phase change is pulled from the lava).

    Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
    - Clerics are bound by the rules of their goods.
    Well now there's a right skewering of organized religion if ever I saw one.

    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    And all of that is without getting into the question of consent of the governed. Magic lends itself to applications that permit individual abuse of power, and in a lot of settings the focus upon individual accomplishment and obsessive research begets hubris. If legitimate authority, and in particular use of force, is gated behind magic use, then at some point there's going develop a body of law regulating use of magic by the state versus constituents of the state, of the state simply voids their consent through coercion individually or collectively.
    ...

    It's not a good assumption that nobody but the magic user would consider the possibility that magical coercion is available as a tool and nobody puts "maybe magical coercion" on the table when they speculate about the new and interesting choice made by people in power. I mean, this is a general problem with how mind control magic and society would interact: we have multiple words to describe degrees of harm caused by forcing people to do stuff by controlling them with threats, manipulation, and physical harm...in a world where magic that altered or controlled minds existed, there would be an equivalent extensive lexicon for magically taking away someone's consent and violating their mental autonomy. So if there's someone moving around who explicitly has the skillset to force people to act again their nature and someone starts acting against their nature, people are not going to respond with confusion.
    This, combined, raises a good point -- At some point, if you are ruling through coercion/manipulation/magical-autonomy-violation, why not cut out the middle man and lob around a few Fell Locate City bombs and get yourself a perfectly compliant workforce that does not need to take bathroom breaks, allows you to export any crops grown, and can march in your army to conquer other lands. That conveniently answers the question of why doesn't said wizard ruler show up in games, because they do -- necromancer-kings with nations of the dead, hell*-bent on conquering the world, are a staple of fantasy literature.
    *Or wherever, campaign-dependent.
    Last edited by Willie the Duck; 2020-06-02 at 08:14 AM.

  27. - Top - End - #27
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Nifft's Avatar

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Willie the Duck View Post
    Well now there's a right skewering of organized religion if ever I saw one.
    IIRC there are domains for Artifice and Trade, so it could be turned into a pun which actually works.

  28. - Top - End - #28
    Dwarf in the Playground
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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    Quote Originally Posted by Lkctgo View Post
    Why isn't the whole world made up of Magocracies/Theocracies?

    ...
    I just can't seem to think of a valid, in-game reason that these societies aren't the dominant form of government in D&D.
    There are several even in the context of official D&D content. For example an anti-magic political party in Thay probably won't last too long :)
    And there was the Theocracy of the Pale which used divine powers to make arcane magic heavily regulated or even outright illegal. And there's a lot more...
    Last edited by Rerednaw; 2020-06-02 at 01:31 PM.

  29. - Top - End - #29
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    PairO'Dice Lost's Avatar

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    The Forgotten Realms is a setting whose history is full of powerful mageocracies (and theocracies and psiocracies). All of them were head and shoulders above even current mageocracies like Thay, Rashemen, or Halruaa in terms of quality of life, physical and social mobility, safety from monsters, and so forth, making good and full use of Toril's unusually high magic levels and putting the comparatively more primitive modern Faerûnian civilizations to shame. However....

    Imaskar? Their attempt to keep their slaves' gods out of Realmspace failed and they got themselves smote for their hubris.

    Netheril? Their most powerful archwizard got delusions of grandeur, tried to become the god of magic, and caused the entire civilization to literally fall when his plan backfired.

    Jhaamdath? They pissed off Nikerymath (an elven mageocracy) who used Elven High Magic to sink their entire empire with a single tidal wave.

    Narfell and Raumathar? They mutually annihilated each other in a full-on magewar that ended when one side summoned an avatar of the god of fire to burn both sides to a crisp.

    Talfir? They managed to wipe themselves out so thoroughly with their shadow magic that no one even knows how exactly they did it!

    And that's just the more powerful half of the human mageocracies; there are a bunch of elven and Creator Race mageocracies that imploded too. And mageocracies in other settings have suffered similar fates: Suel and Baklun in Greyhawk nuked each other with the Invoked Devastation and Rain of Colorless Fire, Istar in Dragonlance got themselves meteor'd off the face of Krynn for the Kingpriest's hubris, the Sorcerer-Kings in Dark Sun wiped out previous rhulisti mageocracies so they could play mageocrats themselves and are due to be wiped out in turn if the Dragon ever escapes his prison, and so on and so forth.

    The point is, it seems like societies becoming mageocracies is indeed the natural course of events in D&D settings...but mageocracies getting too big for their britches and offing themselves also seems to be the natural course of events, hence why you might not see many (or any) mageocracies at any given point in time because the setting might currently be in the "up-and-coming proto-mageocracy" or "recovering post-magical-apocalypse" stage of the cycle.
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  30. - Top - End - #30
    Barbarian in the Playground
     
    WolfInSheepsClothing

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    Default Re: Can anybody give a reasonable explanation?

    I guess this depends on how many mages there are?

    I mean, for all the blathering about governance and politics and so forth, feudalism was based on a caste of mounted men who were militarily dominant each getting their own little bit of land, and then showing up to the killing party when needed.

    Sure, they had rights judge and levy and so forth, but their function as a knight or leader of armed forces was what made a lord - his liege didn’t pick him based on his renowned agricultural knowledge.

    So if mages are plentiful, and D&D “if you’re not magical, you’re a third rate turd” rules, then you could very easily have the mage replace the knight - and subsequently lords - in a feudal system. It’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t.

    If mages are rare, they aren’t sufficient basis to expansive military power, and thus until being god like are still constrained by the rule of the muggle masses.

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