Magical Ways to Emulate Modern Techonology

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 3:05 am

You make 4/3rds as much food with the same labor, so the ratio of labor to food should be the inverse of that: 3/4ths. 75%. 25% reduction.

But wouldn't it be easier to commission a few thousand Murlynd's Spoons instead? Why grow plants when you can magic staples into existence?

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 3:55 am

Prak wrote:Plant Growth specifies a 1/3 increase in crop productivity. That means 25% fewer people need to work the field?

Okay so say you have a field that takes 4 dudes, each putting out 1 unit of labor - 4 units total. Then a druid comes along and puts horseshit on it or something and BAM crops grow better WOW. Now you have 3 dudes that each put out 1 1/3 unit (4 total) and one who's out of work and itchin to kill hisself some druids. Or horses. They're less dangerous.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 4:42 am

Ah, I'm with you now.

I wouldn't necessarily go with Murlynd's Spoons, OS, but the basic idea has a point. Silos of Create Food are even better.

...once the druids have gone around doing their crop blessing for a few generations and you have a magitech revolution underway.

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 1:31 pm

momothefiddler wrote:
Prak wrote:Plant Growth specifies a 1/3 increase in crop productivity. That means 25% fewer people need to work the field?
Okay so say you have a field that takes 4 dudes, each putting out 1 unit of labor - 4 units total. Then a druid comes along and puts horseshit on it or something and BAM crops grow better WOW. Now you have 3 dudes that each put out 1 1/3 unit (4 total) and one who's out of work and itchin to kill hisself some druids. Or horses. They're less dangerous.

I'm not following why the 4th dude is suddenly out of a job. He still has to tend his field/section, and plant growth is not automatic, it's a "potential" productivity increase. Even assuming that it is automatic, I still the 4th dude as having a job to help make more of a surplus for sale or in case of a bad times in some form.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 3:16 pm

Yeah, the two outcomes I can see are:

1) All four people keep working, the yield is higher, and they have a bigger surplus to turn into cash, improving their standard of living.
2) Since their established lifestyle requires less labor, the fourth person does something else with their labor, like go to Druid College.

momothefiddler · Post by **momothefiddler** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 6:36 pm

Yeah that part was mostly a joke, since this part in Prak's initial post was explicitly about having extra labor available.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 8:35 pm

nockermensch wrote:
Wiseman wrote:Anyways, I have a question. What about magitek like vehicles? Like hovercycles or airships? Or magical cannons. Would those significantly disrupt gameplay?
The answer is another question: "how easy and cheap are they to produce?"

D&D already has long range mobility and artillery, but these are called "monsters" or "spellcasters". For machines to even begin to disrupt the status quo they'll need to compete with those. A magic cannon has to be cheaper to make and/or easier to operate than a wand of fireball, for example, or people will keep using the wand just for the ease of carry.

Well they should be easy to produce and obtain. The problem with a lot of airship rules and such is that they cost so much that by the time a player can afford one, they have access to things like overland flight and teleport and thus no longer care.

Also, I'm willing to homebrew magic items to perhaps replace main items as well. So instead of a goat figurine, you have a hovercycle figurine.

Also, the broadcast corporations thing gives me an idea. This was originally going to start in sigil... (with some rewrites to the factions), maybe the Fated are a secret society like the Bilderberg or Illuminati?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 8:46 pm

Yeah, it was a very, very shallow understanding of what made the industrial revolution possible. There are a lot of things that can provide the population boom in D&D.

If Pumpkin Kings exist in your D&D world, one necromancy college can make pumpkins a staple wherever they can transport them. Basically, the college sets up a small area, 30x30', and lines up a PK, some skeletons, and an ashen husk-
Step 1- PK uses Grow Vines on a corner 10' plot, and moves to the next corner.
Step 2- 9 Skeletons given orders to harvest pumpkins move into the sprouted plot and harvest 1 fruit each (pumpkins average 9 fruit per 6x8' plot)
Step3- Ashen Husk follows, staying 15' or more from the fresh patch (where PK is), dessicates harvested vines, and then sets them alight.
Step 4- Repeat with new corner 10' patch.

Plot Diagram


P	S	P
S	S	S
P	S	P

P= 10' Pumpkin mound, S= 5' Space

1 hour of using grow vines 1/rnd produces ~5400 pumpkins. If the PK works for 8 hours they produce ~43,200 pumpkins. Pumpkin has about 118 calories per lb, and pumpkins average ~20 lbs. So 1 pumpkin has ~2360 calories in it. Basically, a single Pumpkin King 1 working 8 hours a day growing pumpkins can feed 43,200 specialists their daily required calories. They'll get tired of pumpkin, sure, but that just means that the area around Tombstone Polytechnic Institute has about 40,000 ways to prepare pumpkin. If you have 4 Pumpkin Kings, you can either work them only 2 hours each, or you can support 172,800 specialists.

Now, granted, this hinges on having 6th level character who don't mind walking around in a circle for a few hours. But even assuming he just spent a day working his pumpkin patch, he could provide 43,200 days of food.

If he's higher level, he can also have a doom patch worked by skeletons and pollinated by undead bees, which basically becomes a less obvious Black Lotus farm that produces something like 360 doses of BLE per day, per 10x10' patch, meaning he can bankroll a small organized crime ring and provide them poison for assassinations.

erik · Post by **erik** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 8:50 pm

Wiseman wrote:Well they should be easy to produce and obtain. The problem with a lot of airship rules and such is that they cost so much that by the time a player can afford one, they have access to things like overland flight and teleport and thus no longer care.

Not just air ships. Boats are fucking expensive in most fantasy games and I don't fucking get it. Having a group vehicle is good times. You get to establish more of a party identity, a sort of mobile base of operations that the characters care about, a place to store their booty. Can start establishing a larger organization by having hirelings for crew.

It's not just that they cost so much that they become obsolete, they cost so much that to have one you would have to sacrifice vital adventuring gear if they are coming from the same funding source.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 10:05 pm

And then you have to worry about them getting damaged/lost in game and simply taking a huge chunk of your character down in one go . .

Shady314 · Post by **Shady314** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 10:24 pm

The problem as erik pointed out isn't the cost per se but the lack of official alternate funding.

Players need some sort of discount, or points set aside etc. that are specifically for the buying of these sorts of kewl but partly cosmetic effects.
Like in WoD how some points must be spent on backgrounds and then the game makes one of those backgrounds "owns a ship."

Or taking the first level of the pirate class gets you a ship as a class feature.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Mar 14, 2015 10:51 pm

Ok, I have no clue how long it takes to build a galley, but the cost of the timber is about 5300g, according to A&EG's commodities (well, between 5300 and 53,000, but...). So the material goods for a galley are 1/6th the actual stated cost, and I'll bet it could be built by a team of, like, 10 guys in a week or two. Which would come to 6280gp for a galley if you're buying the lumber and paying a team to build it.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sun Mar 15, 2015 9:26 am

The simplest 3e rule is that PCs can have background or structural wealth equal to their gear. So if you rescue 50,000gp and kit up with it, you can also have a nice house in the city. When you get your first million, you can have a big castle. Players trade up as they feel the need.

Game-wise, you can even say that you're really buying the castle, and the titles involved give you the gear you wanted in the bargain. No one actually sells magic items, they just come with being a part of the community, or the trade guild with ships.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Mon Mar 16, 2015 7:00 pm

Ships are expensive and difficult to acquire for the same reasons all other forms of infrastructure are expensive:

1) D&D isn't up to modeling much beyond very rudimentary combat
2) Because the game can't do it well the developers are afraid of it
3) Because they're afraid of it, they disparage it

Ergo, D&D isn't about owning a castle or running goods past the Haunted Forest in your river barge because it's 'supposed to be about fighting monsters and gaining loot'.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Mar 16, 2015 10:58 pm

I would partially agree with that idea, but you're kind of implying a suggestion of conscience thought behind it. It would seem to me to be more to do with a perceived level of power behind castles et al. than a conscious decision. A Bag of Holding is equally able to be the foundation of playing Ledgers and Logistics, but even a type 4 is a third the cost of a Galley, which could be used to play Ledgers and Logistics, or to be the center point of a sea campaign about killing Sahuagin and taking their fish-loot. A party of four that includes a druid or ranger could each get bottles of air and climb into a Type 3 bag of holding to be carried by an eagle animal companion, and that would obviate the Haunted Forest just like sailing your river barge, except that it's harder for the GM to justify a bandit encounter if your mode of transport is a bird than it is if your MoT is a barge down a known river that merchants frequently use.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 12:17 am

Wouldn't it be pretty easy to shoot down a cargo bird?

(edit to add) I would totally play a game called Ledgers and Logistics.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 12:33 am

Occluded Sun: Look up Campaign for North Africa. The only war game that takes as long as the actual conflict to play out, and with almost as many forms.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 12:35 am

If you know what you're looking for, but the idea would be to give the perfectly normal looking eagle a bag of holding that's carrying things, and it's easy enough to disguise the bag any of a number of ways.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 12:35 am

Occluded Sun wrote:Wouldn't it be pretty easy to shoot down a cargo bird?

(edit to add) I would totally play a game called Ledgers and Logistics.

tiny target, way up in the sky, moving reasonably quick and you have to know that it is there in the first place, and good luck on identifying the correct one . . there's probably dizends if not hundreds of birds around at any given moment, especially in a medival setting . .

Edit:
Damn you Prak! ò,Ó;,

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 1:16 am

tussock wrote:The simplest 3e rule is that PCs can have background or structural wealth equal to their gear. So if you rescue 50,000gp and kit up with it, you can also have a nice house in the city. When you get your first million, you can have a big castle. Players trade up as they feel the need.

Game-wise, you can even say that you're really buying the castle, and the titles involved give you the gear you wanted in the bargain. No one actually sells magic items, they just come with being a part of the community, or the trade guild with ships.

I like this. I'd go further and actually create a separate currencies. One karma currency for magic items that is explicitly 4th wall-breaking. And a stronghold currency used to create an awesome base and draw in followers. And lastly a mundane monetary currency used to buy stuff. Some adventurers might not even care about this currency, which is as it should be.

For the karma, you'd trade it in to get treasure from a monster's lair, or just drawing an artifact sword from a stone and a sweet scabbard to place it in. You'd also get predetermined loot from enemies, not just stupid 4e treasure spawning.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 9:44 pm

Wasn't there a fan-supplement that attempted to apply D&D rules to a world composed entirely of cities? Urbis, I think it was called.

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 10:46 pm

Occluded Sun wrote:Wasn't there a fan-supplement that attempted to apply D&D rules to a world composed entirely of cities? Urbis, I think it was called.

Yes. Web only wiki as far as I know.