Never stood a chance …
Today while looking up a picture of a Tarrasque I found this entertaining and excellent post on how to kill a Tarrasque (hat tip to the blogger at cataloguing shadows). This Tarrasque-slaying thought experiment has some really excellent ideas about how to do it – my favourite is the plan to create simulacra of the Tarrasque and have it be killed by itself, but the scheme of equipping 50 first level fighters with +5 longbows, polymorphing them into Annis Hags (wtf?!) and then relying on natural 20s to kill the Tarrasque is pretty funny, as are the convoluted tricks required to get the Tarrasque to drown by swallowing 100 tons of iron and falling into a massive pool of water (created by the PC, of course).
This excursion into creative use of magic reminded me of my past discussions of post-scarcity fantasy, and how strange it is that the D&D universe is predicated on a mediaeval style of living, because such a style just would not exist in a world where magic was available. In the linked post, a single wizard can build a huge pool of water, move a river, and create 100 tons of iron; or he or she can give 50 men the power to fly and slay a monster that can eat villages; but somehow all this occurs in a world that hasn’t solved the challenge of disease, manual labour or rapid transportation. This just doesn’t make sense, does it? If the same effort of creative spell use were put to work on solving the world’s problems, they would be fixed almost overnight.
Consider the simulacrum trick in the Tarrasque-slaying guide. Very cunning. Now suppose that a single 28th-level mage exists in the world, and that mage wants to do good. That mage can cast simulacrum twice per day, so she does so – on herself. The two resulting simulacrum are 14th level, and can also cast simulacrum twice per day. They do so – on her, producing four more 14th level mages. These mages produce eight, and so on. Within a couple of weeks there will be a horde of 14th level wizards – all capable of casting, amongst other things, Permanency, Soften Earth, Move Earth and other major spells that can be used to significantly reshape environments. Enough of them working together could power a major power plant with Wall of Fire and Wall of Ice spells; there’s almost nothing they can’t achieve working together in this way. And these are permanent – so as soon as a single wizard reaches 28th level, anywhere in the world, your society can produce an almost infinite supply of 14th level wizards to solve any problem magic can be thrown at. Note how this also applies to reproducing high-level clerics: Heal is a 6th level spell, so as soon as a single Cleric reaches 22nd level, anywhere in the kingdom, all those 14th level wizards who have been created by simluacrum can be sent a lock of his hair or a nail clipping, and every town can be supplied with a simulacrum Cleric capable of healing any affliction affecting anyone in town. Even the XP problem is not hard to overcome: creating a single 14th level Simulacrum of the 28th level Wizard plus a single 11th level Simulacrum of the Cleric will cost each wizard a total of 4600 experience points, not enough to cause them to lose enough levels to lose the Simulacrum spell (for this they need to lose two levels); so each wizard can produce a new simulacrum before they lose their 13th level, and thus produces more wizards than the xp loss will penalize them for.
To give a sense of how powerful this effect is, there are currently 1,200,000 babies born in Japan (in a population of 120 million) every year. At pre-industrial levels of infant mortality, perhaps 10% of these will die. That’s 400 a day. It would take much less than one year to produce enough simulacrum clerics to prevent every baby in Japan from dying, i.e. after one year of generating simulacrum clerics, Japan’s infant mortality rate would be reduced to zero. In the process the world would have generated about 400 14th level wizards, capable of huge works of infrastructure construction. Each of those clerics can also heal disease, and any baby they failed to save can be brought back from the dead the next day using Raise Dead (in essence meaning that those 400 clerics can handle three fatal births every day, so are able to support a population of 360 million at Japanese birth rates).
This also means that as soon as any wizard anywhere on the planet reached 28th level, they would be able to create an army of 14th level wizards. Within a year, probably they could produce a couple of thousand without exceeding food supplies. Of course food supplies could be solved by creating simulacra of an 8th level Cleric at a rate of one per three wizards (and the cleric doesn’t have to be willing!). The 28th level Wizard would then be able to set up two teleportation circles and send the entire army anywhere in the world. Imagine that – you’re sitting on your throne, looking over your army of 10,000 soldiers, and then an army of 1000 wizards and 300 clerics pops out of thin air, dominates the first 1000 soldiers and sets them to slaughtering the next 1,000, then drops 1000 fireballs on the rest of your army. Then the wizard leader comes through, dominates you and takes over your kingdom. The wizards that die get replaced in a few days by the living ones, who simply cast simulacrum on the wizard leader. Rinse and repeat!
Of course, these kinds of silly scenarios are a consequence of the impossibility of magic, which essentially breaches the laws of conservation of energy. But it’s a sign of the paucity of thought in the fantasy world that these powers are seen in isolation from the society in which they’re embedded, and very little thought goes into the moral and social consequences of living in a world where basic problems of human existence can be solved with a word. There’s a strange contradiction here: as gamers we want to play characters in a world of high magic, of lightning bolts and fire balls and healing; but we want this setting to be somehow mediaeval, despite the fact that almost every problem of mediaeval life would have been eradicated. It’s as if the setting is fundamentally contradictory to the mechanism of that setting. Perhaps this is why so many fantasy settings are predicated on huge inequality, out of touch elites and ignorant, cowering peasants: not just because this is the environment we envisage magic developing in, but because the only way magic can be prevented from turning our gaming world into a conflict-free utopia is if the general population are prevented from ever experiencing its benefits by heirarchies of oppression.
And I think it’s a sign of the conservative and stunted nature of the genre that after 40 years of D&D, this contradiction hasn’t been resolved. I wonder if it ever will?
Compromise and Conceit 
June 5, 2014 at 1:07 am
Excellent post, and thanks for the shout-out. 😉
I always assumed (and this may just be something I invented in my head) that high level mages are scarce in most D&D worlds. The fact that there is always one in your party is more a consequence of story telling then world design. The main characters of most stories tend to be gifted so as GM I allow some indulgences with player power.
I was also under the assumption that after level twenty you were approaching God like power and in some cases actually ascended.So if a mythic level mage Were to exist they would ascend and mold the world as a deity and not with there own two hands.
I do, however, completely agree with you. The world of D&D, drawn from the core books alone, would not stay medieval for very long. It would be too easy to progress if there was even a small degree of cooperation on the part of the magic community. Coincidentally, my current book takes place in a post-industrial fantasy world. I’ve been told (strangely enough by a friend and not my agent) that it belongs in a genre called urban fantasy. I was admittedly annoyed that there was already an established genre but it’s cool to see people taking these theories and shaping stories around them. Who knows, there might be a book or even an RPG out there that fits your theorized fantasy world.
Sorry for the long response. It’s been a while since I’ve gamed heavily and I was excited to read some good game theory! Keep up the good work.
-Matt
June 5, 2014 at 1:06 pm
Did I post this last time you were wondering about similar post-scarcity settings: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?222007-The-Definitive-Guide-to-the-Tippyverse-By-Emperor-Tippy
The Tippyverse assumes that the existence of portal and creation magic leads to mega cities ruled by wizards. These cities don’t need any inputs from the countryside (because they can create food) so everything outside a city becomes an uncivilised frontier with runs of the superseded pre-portal civilisation (sort of like the settings D&D uses all over the place).
More generally, a counterargument would be:
1. Lots of D&D settings have historical fallen civilisations (lost golden ages, etc). These wouldn’t be hard to reach from your post-scarity setting – all it takes is single 20th level mage ganking the 28th level mage then wishing their corpse and all tissue samples out of existence. Once that happens no more 14th level simulacrums can be created and your system will quickly collapse.
2. Exalted has a similar lost golden age (a couple of them actually). In one discussion, a writer pointed out that while the current inhabitants of the world may sometimes get ideas about how good another golden age would be, it wouldn’t take long for their friends to take them outside, point at a nearby ruin and say “It didn’t work last time. Why would this one be better?” Thus persuaded the ambitious person would return to being content with just vast quantities of hookers and blow for themselves instead of a better world for everyone.
June 5, 2014 at 2:05 pm
Lawrence Watt-Evans writes fantasy that makes some sort of sense of this kind of thing. I try to come up with a coherent framework in my own games, because it makes it easier to work out what will happen when the players get creative (as they regularly do), but then you have to drop or modify a lot of the classic D&D stuff.
June 5, 2014 at 11:14 pm
Oh, I don’t find it so hard to believe that with all that magic there could still hunger and pestilence and so forth.
Like, could we imagine a world where we could fly to the moon, cast fireball spells that can destroy a whole city, use something called ‘electricity’ to put a neverending lantern in every home, and so on, and yet have large swathes of that world’s population living in poverty and hunger, without access to education and health care, and so on? Can anyone think of such a place?
But to bring the discussion back to gaming and world building, I guess the difference between our Earth and the kind of fantasy worlds described in the blog post is resources. Earth has limited resources, magic implies unlimited resources.
So if you really wanted to build a world where powerful magic exists yet it’s all medieval, make magic a limited resource. Like some kind of global mana pool, where casting a spells like simulcrum too often would suck the pool dry.
This forces powerful magicians to spend their precious mana resources on things like weapons rather than feeding the masses… oh wait, am I talking about Earth again?
June 6, 2014 at 8:51 am
furikakekid’s point about limited resources is a good one, but can be expanded further.
For a simulacrum based utopia to arise it’d require not just that the 28th level wizard think the marginal cost of each additional simulacrum being low enough to bother doing, it’d also require that the 28th level mage assess the opportunity cost of helping others as being sufficiently low.
Looking at this in a PC context it’d mean the the player needs to no only think they can easily setup the utopia, it’d mean they need to want a utopia more than they want level 29. And we all know that any player who gets as far as level 28 in going to want more.
June 7, 2014 at 9:17 pm
Furikakekid’s point is a good one, but I think there are big differences between the mechanisms of inequality in our world and in the real world of d20 – differences i also explore in the post-colonial elements of Compromise and COnceit. Basically in the real world the deployment of major technological innovations depends on huge amounts of capital, organization and effort. This is why the Chinese still don’t have a bluewater navy, 70 years after they were decolonized by the Japanese. No single scientist can develop nuclear power and sell it to a deserving dictatorship, and in order to get access to semtex(?) the IRA had to suck up to Ghadaffi for 20 years. This is the essence of dialectic materialism – the conflict between workers and capital – in that capitalists can deny workers access to the means of production, and it’s impossible for individual workers to reproduce the productive capacity of the capitalists.
In a magical world (or at least in the d20 world) this isn’t the case, because the technology that changes the world is largely independent of capital (especially if you take the Natural Caster feat) and anyone with the talent (i.e. a sorcerer) can get the power to produce multiple copies of themselves through hard work and high natural stats. Sure there are some worlds envisioned where wizards are constrained by orders, and anyone who is outside an order is hunted down and persecuted, but d20 and D&D are not like that – the libertarian ideal of the master and his apprentice are commonly accepted (along with the existence of orders). So it’s reasonable to suppose that some well-talented freeborn kid will grow to be a 28th level mage.
Also, as furikakekid mentions, magic implies unlimited resources. There is no reason for people to horde their resources if their resources are unlimited. Though on the flip side, the need to control access to unlimited resources could explain the fondness of fantasy writers for heirarchical, monarchist settings – although the main historical purpose of these settings was to horde extremely limited physical resources, which makes their presence in magical worlds even less explicable.
As for Paul’s point about the opportunity cost of helping others … the marginal cost of producing a simulacrum is low (2800 xp, plus some money if you don’t have the Natural Caster feat), but the benefits are huge. This is because, when a PC’s challenge rating is calculated it is calculated independent of summoned monsters and familiars, just as in the case of monsters. e.g. Demons don’t have their challenge rating adjusted just because they summon three more demons[1]. So a wizard can create 1000 simulacra and send them to kill every dragon on teh planet, and get the full experience for all of them. Or, better still, find a way to get an entire clan of dragons to attack himself, then spring his 1000 wizard surprise. The clan of dragons have a higher CR for being a group, and he gets double experience for solo combat. Perverse? I didn’t write the rules.
In this world, any wizard who does not use this tactic immediately – and exterminate all other wizards who reach 26th level – is risking another wizard discovering the same tactic and pulling it on him. And then he gets to go on and create a utopia by default – the lust for xp means that these 1000 wizards will be sent across the earth, destroying every threat and delivering full xp to the master as they do so. Then the opportunity cost of building a utopia is simply trivial, and the loss of not doing so – constant peasant uprisings near your palace – must be greater. So it seems logical to make a perfect world. this is the natural consequence of infinite resources (and something Banks explores a lot in the Culture novels). With infinite resources, expending a finite amount on solving a problem in the ordinary world is by definition a trivial cost, and if not solving this problem has any negative consequences you just wouldn’t waste time on the question. This world doesn’t experience peak oil, but peak xp – the point where there are no more monsters to slay. At that point the wizard might think twice about further magical improvements. But as I have observed, each simulacrum can create a new one at less than the cost of a level, and cannot gain a level – it is essentially born with a stock of xp it has no use for except to burn on simulacra spells and permanency spells – so the opportunity cost lies in NOT producing a new simulacrum, rather than in producing one.
I guess those considerations are how the Culture came about …
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fn1: This always struck me as wrong, but whatever
June 10, 2014 at 9:20 am
Hmm. I’m not 100% convinced, though I agree its a possibility for any 28th level caster with a brain and an ounce of good in him. A distopia when a chaotic evil 28th caster arises is also a possibility.
I don’t think you’ve fully addressed the marginal cost issue because it’s not just money, its (more importantly) time. Every time he gets simaculurmed he needs to stand there for the casting time twiddling his thumbs. A 28th level cast will do that for the possibility of dragon genocide levels of xp, but not necessarily to appease a peasant (who can be dominated and told to piss off or kill his best friend or whatever just as easily).
If a utopia arises it’s more likely to be a side effect of the ultimate xp hunt rather than a deliberate objective.
On peak xp, there is no significant risk of this occurring. The high level caster can always portal to the (infinite) Abyss and find a sufficiently large demon army to kill to gain xp. Another possible side effect of this is the end of the Blood War as the caster eventually finds that only wiping out whole armies of fiends is sufficient to meet their xp lust.