Magic Vs. Economics

[Neeek]

Also, I'd disagree with your assement of how long it takes to make an outfit. I'd guess it'd take longer than a day per outfit. I've never woven anything, but knitting an outfit would take weeks.

[Username17]

There are a number of problems with that example. There are some cubic foot/square foot errors and a mischaracterization of the fabricate spell. The US Cotton Council defines a cotton bale as being 17 cubic feet and 500 pounds, which puts the density of cotton at over 29 pounds/ cubic foot.

Furthermore, the fabricate spell works on 10 cubic feet per level when used on plant matter such as cotton.

So the example has two decimal place errors against the magician. So if you wanted, you could leave everything the same and then have the Wizard making one hundred times as much stuff.

-Username17

[User3]

Isn't this the way stuff is supposed to be in D&D?

The common man doesn't have more than a few coppers to his name and just barely ekes out a living through subsistence farming. He gets oppressed by single level orc warriors. His land is ruled by the knighthood, the church or the wizard-emporer, who, depending on alignment, will either help him, ignore him, or spit on him. Powerful characters have all sorts of treasures and wealth, but he'll never see any of it unless he gets brave enough to risk his life on a very dangerous adventure and gets lucky trying to seize the fabolous riches for himself.

Yeah, spellcasters could create anything they want, but it's a dark age thanks to whatever cataclysmic event(s) the DM chose as the campaing history, so very few people know anything about magic in the first place. Powerful monsters and high-level characters aren't very interested in doing anything productive anyway, mostly because they're too busy slaying each other, but also because most of the population just doesn't have anything of much value. The vast majority is locked in serfdom. There might be a tiny class of craftsmen and merchants who actually manage to save up small piles of gold pieces, but it's going to still be too insignificant to attract much attention from the Great and Terrible. That's the social and economic relationship D&D encourages because that's actually what the standard setting is supposed to be like.

[User3]

There are a number of problems with that example. There are some cubic foot/square foot errors and a mischaracterization of the fabricate spell. The US Cotton Council defines a cotton bale as being 17 cubic feet and 500 pounds, which puts the density of cotton at over 29 pounds/ cubic foot.

There are a number of problems with that example, but they are on your side. Here's a link about cotton production: Link

As you can see, getting cotton down to 29 lbs a cubic yard is actually quite hard. It requires cotton gins and 19th century tech, which the default fuedal socety doesn't have. The last line of this
link puts all-cotton insulation at 1.6 lbs per cubic foot, and that seems a more reasonable density for picked cotton.

Furthermore, the fabricate spell works on 10 cubic feet per level when used on plant matter such as cotton.

....which is the calculation my example used. What's your point?

Even with a cotton gin getting your density down to 12 cubic feet per 500lbs, you are still looking at a density of 41 lbs per cubic foot, for a total of 4100lbs of material for or 2050 outfits per casting of Fabricate by a 10th level Wizard, meaning you can give a population of 100,000 a new outfit(2 lbs) every 48 castings, assuming you have a cotton gin factory and cotton fields(or a bound Djinni producing Dispel-able cotton).

Of course, Shrink Item might be able to maximize your castings of Fabricate (I say might, as I don't really know how two transmuations are really supposed to interact). Assuming this works, you can reduce the volume down to 1/16th of its normal, you can get 4000 times the cotton into the area. The problem is that Shrink Item works on 2 cubic feet per level, so our 10th level wizard can only shrink 20 cubic feet at 10th level per casting, meaning that to reduce down the entire load of baled cotton for a town of 100,000, you need 243 castings of Shrink Item to turn 200,000 lbs of 41lb per cubic foot cotton into a small enough area to Fabricate into clothes(304 cubic feet if its all been shrunk, so thats three castings of Fabricate).

I'm sure that there is a sweet spot where your Shrink effects optimize you use of Fabricate, but I don't know where that is, and all my math makes it seem like a small effect.

Then you have the essential problem that comes up where you have to produce that cotton in the first place, either by djinni or fields and serfs. It would take one acre to produce two 500lb bales (per this link), or one djinni can cast Major Creation once per day to produce 20 cubic feet per day(which we'll be generous and assume is the 41 lb per cubic foot kind). To give every serf a new pair of clothes, you need 200,000 lbs of cotton, so regardless of your tricks, you need to guard and harvest 400 acres of land each year and operate a functioning cotton mill/gin, or have one djinni tied up for 243 days out of the year for the dispel-able cotton.

Of course, you can instead have a "naked day" in which everyone in town takes off their cloths and tosses them into a pile, and then a wizard comes by and turns all their old ratty clothes into newer clothes. Aside from being wierd, this saves on materials but vastly increases your castings as you start using the density of cloth (my 3 lbs per cubic foot came from a towel advertisement, meaning using the towel density we get 666 castings of Fabricate and almost a year's work, assuming we get max density on the clothes piles).

Regardless of how you do it, its terribly ineffecient for Wizards to Fabricate anything except luxery goods like adamanite swords. Either its inefficienct on spell power because the amount of castinf requires the wizard to not have magic powers anymore. Basically, you are better off letting the peasants make their own goods, since the work required to corner the clothing market of a single city of 100,000 is takes an entire 10th level wizard.

[Username17]

As you can see, getting cotton down to 29 lbs a cubic yard is actually quite hard.

All I'm seeing is that you don't know what you are talking about. The link you referenced refers to cubic feet, not cubic yards, and the key innovation is the compress (circa 2000 BC) rather than the cotton gin. Ginning isn't required for any of that, it just removes the seeds without the use of the two comb method.

Of course, Shrink Item might be able to maximize your castings of Fabricate (I say might, as I don't really know how two transmuations are really supposed to interact). Assuming this works, you can reduce the volume down to 1/16th of its normal, you can get 4000 times the cotton into the area.

Last time I checked, shrink item dropped things to 1/16th in each dimension, meaning that it reduces the volume down to 1/4096.

But you know what? You're so fvcking sloppy about decimal places and geometric terminology that I no longer know what your point is. We long ago established that a single magician was individually more productive at anything he felt like doing than thousands of ordinary people working long hours.


Even using your claim that a single magician is only two thousand times as productive per casting as is a commoner, let's consider the populations in a 100,000 person populace. According to page 139 of the DMG, there are at least 4 13th level Wizards, 8 11th level Wizards, and 16 9th level wizards (though you could easily have twice that and some 15th level wizards besides). So there are are at least 28 people in town who can individually allocate one spell slot per day to produce 58,220 outfits. For one slot. In one day.

Is the scale to which ordinary people are completely outclassed coming into focus? If the wizards decided that everyone in the city needed to wear panda costumes, they could make that a reality within the day.

And sure, it is more efficient for Wizards to make expensive, useful, or difficult to manufacture items because they are graded on volume rather than anything economically limitting. But that doesn't change the fact that having anyone but a Wizard make anything is economically unviable. It just means that things that don't cost a fair amount aren't available for purchase.

Peasants don't have money. There's no money in making things peasants could afford, so the production facilities (Wizards) don't make them. That means that peasants have to make them for themselves, which means that there isn't a surplus of any of this crap and such items are not available for sale in the market.

Peasant outfits shouldn't even have a price, they don't exist in stores.

-Username17

[User3]

Even using your claim that a single magician is only two thousand times as productive per casting as is a commoner, let's consider the populations in a 100,000 person populace. According to page 139 of the DMG, there are at least 4 13th level Wizards, 8 11th level Wizards, and 16 9th level wizards (though you could easily have twice that and some 15th level wizards besides). So there are are at least 28 people in town who can individually allocate one spell slot per day to produce 58,220 outfits. For one slot. In one day.

Yes, they can do it in one day...if they have 116,440 lbs of industrially compressed cotton in one spot. Good fvcking luck with that, since that calculation requires a component that takes thousands of man-hours to gather and process(unless you want to summon up djinni until you get 119 djinni that agree to serve that day, only to get cloth that vanishes in an area Dispel).

Raw materials are the one thing wizards can't magic up easily, meaning that the economy can run quite efficiently on trade in raw materials and services if nothing else. Any model where wizards make any meaningful economic contribution by themselves is unworkable given the contraints of their powers. The math just doesn't add up.

[erik]

Of course, when it comes to owning raw material, casters again come out on top as farmers and miners. Anything mundanes can do, mages do better.

For farming and lumber: Plant Growth those fields and then send your followers with hordes of wood woses to do the harvesting.

For mining: Transmute Rock to Mud or Stone to Flesh (ew!) to ease all the cumbersome digging, One can reasonably research Detect Metal if you wish. Things like Augury and Divination can tell where the good mining sites are at. Again, the crappy parts of the job like carrying mud and sifting through it for metal can be given to wood woses and unseen servants.

For fuel purposes, perpetual motion machines do wonders to keep the furnaces hot all year round.

[Neeek]

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Is the scale to which ordinary people are completely outclassed coming into focus? If the wizards decided that everyone in the city needed to wear panda costumes, they could make that a reality within the day.

Now I have to come up with a plan that involves needing to clothe an entire city in panda costumes.

[User3]

Of course, when it comes to owning raw material, casters again come out on top as farmers and miners. Anything mundanes can do, mages do better.

For farming and lumber: Plant Growth those fields and then send your followers with hordes of wood woses to do the harvesting.

For mining: Transmute Rock to Mud or Stone to Flesh (ew!) to ease all the cumbersome digging, One can reasonably research Detect Metal if you wish. Things like Augury and Divination can tell where the good mining sites are at. Again, the crappy parts of the job like carrying mud and sifting through it for metal can be given to wood woses and unseen servants.

For fuel purposes, perpetual motion machines do wonders to keep the furnaces hot all year round.

Once again, practical considerations make all of these ideas extremely inefficient.

Each Unseen Servant or Wood Wose is a creature with a Str of 2 while working, so that means that while a 10th level wizard or druid might be as good as 50 children when gathering rice, he's just blown all his slots and he's effectively not a caster anymore. He's also stuck within Close range of all his Unseen Servants/Wood Woses, since that spell only works when the thing doing the work is within range of you, so you can't even have a beer at the inn while your stuff is workin for you. Additionally, Wood Woses can't use technology in ways like "opening a chest," so I'm pretty sure they can't use axes to chop lumber or scythes to cut wheat.

The Divination spell will only give you a short phrase or cryptic riddle, so their's no guarantee that it'll be even a decent way to find ores, and Augery will simply tell you if you'll get good or bad results from an action done within the next half hour, so thats really a bad means of finding ores. Contact Other Plane might work, but only if you make the yes-or-no question "if there a lot of ore here?". Basically, finding ore via divination is only a little less hit and miss than real ore mining.

Transmute Rock to Mud actually isn't the spell you use to mine, since it collapses tunnels. Stone to Flesh is a better choice, but it takes a lot of spell slots to use and manpower, and you might even accidently turn the ore you are looking for into flesh(or mud, with the other spell).

Plant Growth is actually the only spell thats a good idea, and only when used to improve harvests. Basically, I figure every crop set on fire by magmin or orcs or dragons you get three crops inproved by Plant Growth, so it tends to even out for the peasants that gather the crops. While it probably can be used to increase lumber production in its Overgrowth function, the fact that it makes a deep thicket means that the amount of work needed to get that wood has increased exponetially.

As for perpetual motion machines, my answer is simple: who cares? Mankind has had perpetual motion machines when he built the water mill and the windmill, and the default DnD world assumes they already have that. Wood is also cheap and easy to gather. Does a forge get better when you burn XP to make it?

Basically, the economic contribition of spellcasters is minimal at best, and is probably only enough to counteract the effects of fantasy problems like undead outbreaks and demon invasions.

[PhoneLobster]

Transmute rock to mud doesn't need to collapse tunnels, thats crazy talk.

Even if it did it has no effect on strip mining.

And it doesn't matter a damn for the purposes of accidentally turning the ore to mud because you just turn it back once you mine it out. Actually you might WANT to turn the ore to mud because its convenient to do so.

And anyway I'm fairly certain there is a 3rd edition version of "Dig" floating around out there not too far off the core.

If peasants DO possibly (and its hard to say) actually have any place picking fruit and harvesting crops it doesn't really mean a damn thing. Being fruit pickers for a primary industry you don't own or control that requires crop "enhancing" spells you can't cast that supplies a manufacturing industry you can't be a part of does not make you a well rewarded part of the economy.

I live near a major vineyard area. Wines sell for A LOT of money, but grape pickers get treated like crap and paid very little. And 20 unseen servants for a few days a year could probably replace them for any given winery anyway.

And good luck working for a few weeks a year tops. Especially when your boss can transmute stone to flesh you if you refuse to accept his conditions.

Wind mills and water mills are NOT perpetual motion machines and are limited by location, reliability and output. A firewall under a steam engine is also more powerful, runs 24 hours a day short of breakdowns and can be anywhere.

You can even "divine" ores by many other means, best of all by turning into a burrowing animal and going down to check it out. Druids can do this how early?

Infact why dig out the intervening earth at all when you can just have earth elementals and stuff go down there and bring back whatever it was you wanted.

Its the economic contribution of peasants which is minimal at best.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

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And it doesn't matter a damn for the purposes of accidentally turning the ore to mud because you just turn it back once you mine it out. Actually you might WANT to turn the ore to mud because its convenient to do so.

What's the good of having your iron ore turned to mud if you can't tell it from the granite you just turned to mud too?

-Desdan

[erik]

Des, their different densities could be used to sort them out pretty easily.

I'd rule that metals are not rocks and thus not turned to mud however, but hey. Otherwise you run into the awesomeness of turning people's full plate and sword to mud!

I was thinking of strip mining as the main use for rock to mud, but it likely wouldn't be too shabby for tunneling either. So long as you don't do horrendous amounts of rock to mudding without setting up supports. There's no reason that rock that has been mudded is any less stable than rock that has been dug. Come on now, we don't have to assume that just because magic makes jobs easier that they have to be done stupidly.

The idea for wood woses and unseen servants is that a low level mage can cast a bunch and have them do all his work for him. Say a level 3 specialist wizard with extend spell... he could pop off a fair number of unseen servants which will last a working day, and if he doesn't feel like carrying a damn thing, he can make a floating disk carry the stuff for him. This is for simple, low strength labor like sifting through mud for metals, picking cotton, sowing seeds, etc. One low level wizard doing the work of about 5 peasants by just taking a walk across the field is a fairly big advantage I'd say.

It's not that miners can't also mine, and farmers can't farm. They can! But wizards and druids have a huge edge over them. So all things being equal, the wizards and druids will dominate those economies.

A large furnace that never needs fuel is a pretty big deal actually.
Little known glass-making fact. A major reason why the sandwich island glass making sites were so successful back in the day had almost nothing to do with the glass, and everything to do with it's location's access to fuel. That is, lots of wood that they could burn to keep their furnaces properly heated at all times.

Peasants as I see it, are self-sustaining and that's about it, when it comes to their impact on the economy. Anyone who wants to compete in any economy had darn well better have a spellbook or animal companion. Peasants would likely strive to get their kids to learn magic to help with work. Having one kid who can do the work of several adults would make life a lot easier on the farm.

All of this is why on my homebrew land, a full 10% of the population were full fledged wizards (the number would have been higher, but the "magi-industrial" revolution was fairly recent and only so many people can be apprenticed at a time), and they ran all the notable economies. It's the only way I could make sense of it all.

[edit: typoes]

[User3]

I'd rule that metals are not rocks and thus not turned to mud however, but hey. Otherwise you run into the awesomeness of turning people's full plate and sword to mud!

Ores are combinations of stone and metal. In fact, most stone gets its color from the metals in it. Houseruling that Transmute Rock to Mud seperates the ores into metal and rock is a pretty big leap of faith, and sets up the spell to be useless in a lot of situations.

I was thinking of strip mining as the main use for rock to mud, but it likely wouldn't be too shabby for tunneling either. So long as you don't do horrendous amounts of rock to mudding without setting up supports. There's no reason that rock that has been mudded is any less stable than rock that has been dug. Come on now, we don't have to assume that just because magic makes jobs easier that they have to be done stupidly.

If Tranmute Rock to Mud works any faster than digging, then its less stable, by definition. The spell even says it causes cave-ins!

Even if it worked the way you'd like it to work, you are still tying up the time of a high level wizard. Not only can a wizard make more money doing anything else, but he's also ocupied when manticores come to eat your babies. He's not even getting XP for his time.

The idea for wood woses and unseen servants is that a low level mage can cast a bunch and have them do all his work for him. Say a level 3 specialist wizard with extend spell... he could pop off a fair number of unseen servants which will last a working day, and if he doesn't feel like carrying a damn thing, he can make a floating disk carry the stuff for him. This is for simple, low strength labor like sifting through mud for metals, picking cotton, sowing seeds, etc. One low level wizard doing the work of about 5 peasants by just taking a walk across the field is a fairly big advantage I'd say.

Let's do the math, shall we? A 3rd level specialist has 4 1st level slots and 3 2nd level slots, assuming bonus spells from a high Int. With Extend, he's doing 4*3=12 hours of work from his 1st level slots, and 4*6=24 from his 2nd level slots. Assuming the peasant work at least 12 hour days(which they do, during harvest season), a 3rd level wizard is as good as 3 peasant children (since his crap has a Str of 2) and one adult assuming himself.

Guess what? That sucks. He's a highly specialized and very talented guys and if orcs come over the horizon during harvest season (which they will, since they'll attack in the spring and summer) he's not going to cast a Web to stop them or an Invisibility to escape, he's going to die. He's also wasting the best travelling months not XPing. "Farm wizards" can't even make enough money to scribe new spells into their spellbooks, based on the rate that farm laborers are paid.

It's not that miners can't also mine, and farmers can't farm. They can! But wizards and druids have a huge edge over them. So all things being equal, the wizards and druids will dominate those economies.

But things aren't equal. Mindflayers boil up out of the Underdark, orcs raid every spring, and enemy wizards decide to animate undead hordes. A wizard that blows slots to be the best farmer is not going to survive when the monsters come.

A well known wizard is actually more vulnerable. People in a fantasy world know that wizards have spellbooks and magic items worth hundreds or thousands of GP, so any wizard showing his face had better be very powerful or else a few bandits with bows will ambush him or killl him in his sleep.

Considering the numbers of wizards in a standard DnD world, and the fact that they need to XP and research to gain power, I think the idea of a "farmer wizard" is downright stupid.

[Crissa]

Digging is caving in.

But if you have Shape Spell, you can make the area of the spell fit the tunnel you want. Want a nice, round tunnel in rock? Poof, you have mud. Of course, this mud is a liquid, so the smart mage will not be standing below the cast area...

...But aside from that, it seems a better way to mine, as the now-liquid-rock will just ooze out of the tunnel, and if the place for the mine was stable to begin with, it won't collapse.

Taking a wall of iron and shaping it into a nice circle, and you now have a mage who basically replaces TL-8 tunnelling equipment.

Now, you're undervaluing peasant children. Aside from carrying the loot to market, children dominate the harvesting market. They're cheap, quick, eat less, and replacable. And your children don't need food, shelter, or replacing. You've just made one low-level mage the equivalent of an entire cotton-picking crew!

And honestly, I look at Mages as being the Software Engineers of their world. Now, when you hire a hacker, programmer, what have you, the easiest way to get a job automated is to give them it as a task. They'll figure out a way to make those spells take as little effort as possible, researching some way to Extend or Maintain them without them being there.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

Even if it worked the way you'd like it to work, you are still tying up the time of a high level wizard.

Aside from a continued insistance that because stone to mud explicitly states that it CAN cause cave ins, you know, when you specific cast it on the CEILING, that it therefore ALWAYS causes cave ins...

And aside from an apparent insistance that not only does ore turn into mud without sifting the metal out but also that you know, transmute mud to rock doesn't exist to make the whole thing a good idea even if it does work like that.

AND an aparent disintrest in strip mining and miner slaves with burrowing movement entries...

This above comment kinda annoys me.

A high level wizard can clothe the kingdom with a few days work a year, he can arm the kingdom in as little time he (or his or cleric druid buddy) can probably feed it in as little time...

Even if he spends 11 months of the year training, researching, adventuring, engaging in paranoid convulsions about how all the other wizards are out to get him or just plain resting he still has like WEEKS of totally spare time after creating a surplus in every other field of the economy in which he may as well spend exploiting the only remaining resource in the kingdom and doing a bit of mining.

And thats without manipulating time, creating copies of himself, or even creating cheap magic items for low level minions.

Still its much wiser for a wizard or cleric to planar ally or bind an bunch of earth elementals and tell them to go retrieve metal or ore type or precious gem X from a certain area and put it out back of the refinery 24 hours a day until their duration runs out.

Have you seen the strength on an earth elemental? They're going to be bringing truckloads of the stuff. And there are probably much better outsiders than them to get it for you.

Heck getting earth djins to go get you all the diamonds in that there mountain isn't even outside of the fantasy and mythological precedent.

[User3]

Aside from a continued insistance that because stone to mud explicitly states that it CAN cause cave ins, you know, when you specific cast it on the CEILING, that it therefore ALWAYS causes cave ins...

Check the bolded section below. I think that destroying all the rock supporting a ceiling (which you created with the spell) is at least as bad as destroying half the pillars....

CAVE-INS AND COLLAPSES (CR 8)
Cave-ins and collapsing tunnels are extremely dangerous. Not only do dungeon explorers face the danger of being crushed by tons of falling rock, even if they survive they may be buried beneath a pile of rubble or cut off from the only known exit. A cave-in buries anyone in the middle of the collapsing area, and then sliding debris damages anyone in the periphery of the collapse. A typical corridor subject to a cave-in might have a bury zone with a 15-foot radius and a 10-foot-radius slide zone extending beyond the bury zone. A weakened ceiling can be spotted with a DC 20 Knowledge (architecture and engineering) or DC 20 Craft (stonemasonry) check. Remember that Craft checks can be made untrained as Intelligence checks. A dwarf can make such a check if he simply passes within 10 feet of a weakened ceiling.
A weakened ceiling may collapse when subjected to a major impact or concussion. A character can cause a cave-in by destroying half the pillars holding the ceiling up.
Characters in the bury zone of a cave-in take 8d6 points of damage, or half that amount if they make a DC 15 Reflex save. They are subsequently buried. Characters in the slide zone take 3d6 points of damage, or no damage at all if they make a DC 15 Reflex save. Characters in the slide zone who fail their saves are buried.
Characters take 1d6 points of nonlethal damage per minute while buried. If such a character falls unconscious, he must make a DC 15 Constitution check. If it fails, he takes 1d6 points of lethal damage each minute thereafter until freed or dead.
Characters who aren’t buried can dig out their friends. In 1 minute, using only her hands, a character can clear rocks and debris equal to five times her heavy load limit. The amount of loose stone that fills a 5-foot-by-5-foot area weighs one ton (2,000 pounds). Armed with an appropriate tool, such as a pick, crowbar, or shovel, a digger can clear loose stone twice as quickly as by hand. You may allow a buried character to free himself with a DC 25 Strength check.

AND an aparent disintrest in strip mining and miner slaves with burrowing movement entries...

Mostly because both ideas are dumb.

Strip mining has been a technological possibility since the invention of the water pump and crap like cisterns, so doing it with a wizard is not even interesting.

The burrowing rules say this:

Burrow: A creature with a burrow speed can tunnel through dirt, but not through rock unless the descriptive text says otherwise. Creatures cannot charge or run while burrowing. Most burrowing creatures do not leave behind tunnels other creatures can use (either because the material they tunnel through fills in behind them or because they do not actually dislocate any material when burrowing); see the individual creature descriptions for details.

Basically, this means that your Druid into burrowing animal idea is lame-tastic, with a side of lame.

Also, the earth elemental's Earth Glide ability doesn't say that they can grab stuff and take it with him, or that they can pull stuff out of the earth. If it did, then Earth Elementals would be the ultimate assasins as they'd take people with them into the earth and let them go.

Planar Ally also costs lots of money and you can't be sure of what you get, so its both a waste of time and a waste of money.

A high level wizard can clothe the kingdom with a few days work a year, he can arm the kingdom in as little time he (or his or cleric druid buddy) can probably feed it in as little time...

Show me the math where a cleric or druid feeds a kingdom of 400,000. I think you are talking out your ass. Plant Growth won't do it, and there's nothing you can summon that can do it.

Then work out the number of spell slots it takes to arm a nation of 400,000, and the cost in materials.

Until you've got some numbers, shut up. You don't know what you are talking about.

----------------

Basically, not only is the wizard economy technically unviable, its a huge weakness.

If you entire economy needs 100 casters with an average level distribution to run, then the day your neighbor with 200 guys of average distribution ambushes your 100 guys, they lose some guys but you lose your whole economy. Then they put your lazy and stupid people into work-farms to teach them useful skills.

[Crissa]

Umm.

K, how many days do these casters have to work?

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty]

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Then work out the number of spell slots it takes to arm a nation of 400,000, and the cost in materials.

Well they can't, but they don't care either. Remember that feeding commoners is useless.

You're locked into the idea that the wizard serves the needs of the commoners. He doesn't. Remember that the commoners mean absolutely jack. They don't have funds so there's no need to provide for themselves.

The wizard just cares about feeding himself and maybe sme other high level guys, which is a real easy task, or better yet made a moot point with a ring of sustenance.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

A few things that need to be mentioned.

The first is that everyone who gets that high a level has a goal, but the goal isn't always political power. Not everyone who can kill the king, wants to be the king. Especally if the DM is running the rest of his world according to source material precedent, where most of the good guys either won't try to sieze power for the sake of seizing power, or will at least try to be benevolant to the people below them.

The second thing is that with this much money changing hands in that volume in that way, there IS no economy. Or at least when you get down to the commoners, they don't give a shit about your gold, they're swapping pigs and goats for grain and seed. They've never handled money enough to get an idea of its value, except in some whacked-out The Gods Must Be Crazy way. If, as has been insisted, there is no aristocracy because it all gets blown away the second it's a conquerable threat, then the gap between rich and poor is so vast that commoners probably never get to handle money ever. This doesn't kill an economy per se, but it means that everyone of consequence was at one point in time a commoner, and if you never got a concept of a token economy when you were a mud farmer trying to grow stunted vegtables in a rocky outcropping, you wouldn't care about money when you become The Prophesised God-King of whatever.

-Desdan

[fbmf]

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
The earth elemental discussion has been split off into its own thread.
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