Kaers are the way to go

[Sma]

This is largely an exercise in futility, but I´m always for godd for a little senseless rambling.
Recently there have been a number of threads (here and at nifty) about the way all that magic and it´s influence on society.

What I´d be interested in would be a way of building some resemblance of a working society that integrates all those broken spells. If the outcome is weird, let it be so !

IMHO it would revolve around some sort of source, sink system. One the Source side you have numerically bigger population of good people ranging from benevolent Wizards supporting farming communities to socialist style theocracies.
The sink side would obviously be populated by the Evil type stuff. Rangiong form orc hordes, cackling wizards, to all those monsters out there.

I´ll start this off with a quick cut and paste of the Earhtdawn concept of Kaers

Dubbed kaers, these dwellings would protect their occupants against the Horrors on the theory that strong enough walls will keep out even the most physically powerful Horror. The natural, solid, earthen walls of the kaer would also provide protection against those Horrors that travel through astral space or by means as yet unknown. However, Navarim warned that an earthen barrier might not be enough to withstand every Horror.Navarim’s book also offered other means of protection. Cities couldbe shielded under domes woven of True Air. Kaers could be built beneath the sea and protected by True Water, and so on. Navarim believed that the underground kaer would offer the strongest defense,though even it might be breached.

Obviuosly some concepts don´t transfer do D&D, but I hope the concept is understandable.

So, basically civilization is restricted to heavily defended settlements. I´m not trying to push this concept but at the moment something along theose lines seems to me the only workable way. If you start to spread beyond a rather limited distance it becomes much to difficult to protect your borders.

Thoughts, Ideas, Flames ?

Sma

[Username17]

The big question is how big you think the Sink side is, and how active.

The vast majority of Sink forces are going to be killing people slower than cigarettes and aren't going to make a meaningful dent in society whether there's a source side or not.

Which goes like this: regardless of the age of humanity, the mortality rate is 100%, in the long run the only thing which actually cuts into populations is death before having kids. Anything else is meaningless. In ancient times the life expectency might be 40, but people who survived long enough had like six kids. In the D&D world, people can still go ahead and have six kids and all, and since a very small number of Paladins can keep people from keeling over all the time from sickness, society can afford to feed a lot of people to the manticores.

In fact, every couple can expect four out of their six kids to be eaten by manticores before they have a chance of having children themselves and still come out with a stable population base. Now, at no time in Earth's history has predation been a 60% killer of humans, but the D&D world could easily support it.

OK, so 3 out of every 5 people are going to die by violence, if we believe that they die at a random time during their life, and that the "natural" life expectency is 80 years - the average human life expectency is 56. That's actually pretty middle-ages standard, so we'll go with it.

So let's consider a population of 20,000 babies born this year. Over the next 80 years, 12,000 of them are going to die by violence, and the rest from old age. The 8,000 of them who live out their whole life will presumably end up having children of their own, if they have 6 children per couple - that's 24,000 babies born to the next generation. So 16% percent of people are going to have to go unmarried, or we are going to have to reduce the number of children per family to only 5.

But it gets better than that. Of the 12,000 people who die by violence, roughly 6,000 of them are going to die after they've had the ability to have kids - so we actually need to drop the tally further down to more like 4 kids a piece, and the population is still growing.

---

Where are we at now? We are at the population getting killed at the rate of .75% per year. A murder rate of 7.5 per thousand per year - which is fricking unheard of (the statistic is normally measured in hundreths of a murder per thousand people per ten year period, so we are talking a homicide rate which is thousands of times the size of any real world homicide rate). So in a 20,000 person city, the size of Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius went off - they are losing 150 people a year to rampaging monsters.

That's an amazingly large number of dead people all the time, and it's about 3 people every day. Now let's think of what major predators do. A Lion pack whacks a zebra about once every four days. This means that if you are feeding humans directly to the manticores (and you assume that the manticores are eating one human per meal), that means that 12 such groups of beasts could be sustainably hunting humans off of one city.

Further, they don't all have to be manticores. If you assume each Sink, each "threat" is taking off a person every four days, there can be about 12 threats per city.

And that's before we take the heroes into account. If the heroes are busily whacking threats, keep in mind that the average is about 12 threats. That means that if the heroes whack a threat every year or so, the number of threats has to be growing by about one per year, and so on if the heroes are more active.

With a strong hero contingent, the city of 20,000 could be beseiged by literally dozens of major threats continuously, so long as they get driven off about half the time by the heroes when they go after human prey.

-Username17

[Sma]

So now that we see that we could support a good couple of dozen threats per major city, but i still want more.
To support all the predators out of the combined Monster Manuals there would need to be a pretty fast growing population of herbivores if we don´t want vast unpopulated stretches of land.
You need an area of 20-400 sq.km to support a pack of lions, wolves range from several 100 to 1000 sq. km. so for the sake of keeping the distances smallish, I´ll simply postulate them and give them the fast growing fauna to sustain them.
When cities of any sort come into being the predators dont leave and turn onto the humans instead or get replaced by ones that do.

So we get a dozen lion pack equivalent threats, which still leaves us with another dozen or so threats that kill puny huminz by eating their brains, killing them for their swag or because their god tells them to.

The question remains whether there is a way to make hamlets and all the other small stuff viable. You will get some around a nice or tyrannical wizards tower. But the isolated village in the middle of the woods would be out, I think.

On a different note, just how difficult is mining once you´ve got access to the elemental plane of earth ? You could get a portal usable once per tenday for just 1000 gp, more if you want to send out expedition more often. Scout a good mining spot build a portal, and mine it dry. Rinse, repeat.

Another thought. How would warfare be conducted ? Standard troops don´t hold up well under fireball bombardment, while single Characters would have difficulties securing the newly conquered lands.

Sma
stealth edit

[User3]

"The vampires only take what they need. Usually only two or three people a month."
------------------------------Van Helsing



I've always been a proponent of the "pet demon" theory. At some point a powerful priest/wizard strikes a deal with a powerful-ish outsider; something with detection abilities and the like. The peasants make sacrifices (of good works, or cash, or blood sacrifice, etc), and the totally unsleeping demon watches over the peasants(possibly while invisible). When something nasty gets within range of the demon, it goes to work.

It has to stay within range of the hamlet, so heroes and the like and needed for the whole "and then we hunted it back to it lair."

The demon also wouldn't react to a class of beings, like Humanoids. So evil people could live in your community, and not get eaten by demons, but the first evil manticore that attacks the day-care center is in for a fight. Wars could also be fought without having to do a whole "the village of Springfield is protected by am Erinyes, and the village of Rusty Shunt is protected by an Osyluth. We'll never conquer this country!"

So at this rate, evil lurks at the edges of town and picks off people getting firewood in the forest, but doesn't really do a clean sweep of the town. (As we all know that a mid level demon can go town to town and murder thousands before hitting a powerful enoguh hero.)

[Username17]

How would warfare be conducted ?

It wouldn't be.

That's a pretty bold statement, but here's my reasoning:

You can't effectively defend against a teleport ambush. You can't stop someone from gating you to the negative energy plane to handroll taquitos while they stab you. If the "other side" wants you dead, te only thing they have to do is decide to kill you and you are dead.

There's unstoppable weaponry, but it's not the Fire and Forget nuclear hellfire we are familiar with, it's unstoppable pinpoint murder magic that you won't know about until you are dead. There's no MAD policy possible here, and as a consequence no possibility of the formation of any major power structures (because any sufficiently important target can and will be destroyed).

The natural consequence, therefore, is isolated city-states. Fettleburg is not going to form the Fettleburgian Empire ever because even attempting to conquer the next city over would result in the deaths of all of their major leaders. And so on. Each population unit is basically going to keep its hands totally off ny other population unit because the people who make that decision won't survive any other decision.

Nonetheless, conflicts happen. These would be handled entirely by deniable assets who hide their identities and run around causing havoc. So no armies ever march up to the city gates of Fodlewhop the Kuo-Toan capital and demand tribute, but the Orcish settlement of Khangtor almost certainly funds Zorro and his gang of cutthroats with money, equipment, and booze upon discovering that he's going that way anyhow.

Since people vanish in the woods almost every other day, nearby settlements are probably going to kill any of your people they spot trying to gather resources on what they consider to be their side of the fence. That and fund groups of wandering foreign thugs to go to your area and break stuff.

But the entire national army is just there to bring down attacking manticores with massed archery.

-Username17

[User3]

Teleport ambushes don't really work if you are prepped for them. Just having a mass of Symbols in a room keyed to all the "not us" guys is a pretty hard thing to deal with. Several illusion spells will fool scrying("So they teleported into the privy? And set off a Firewall trap, too?"), and several spells exist to just to block travel (Dimensional Lock stops all into and out travel, as does Forbiddance). The nobility hides in the castle, and the armies fight.

The defender wins on this front. When the war is over, you hope that all the 10th level Wizes on the other side got killed.

The massed army can really take a beating. Luckily, the average city has like four or five guys who can do a number on an army, and not all of them are on your team(some are like evil, and spend their time Scrying on the ladies' bathhouse).

I think every army basically has to have a guy with a few high-level mage-killer effects. Once you hit about 10th level as a wizard, you can take on wizards 10 levels higher than yourself. Sure, their magic is has higher DCs, is more dealy, with longer durations and caster levels, but a Solid Fog is just as annoying to an Archmage as it is to a 10th level guy. Throw in a few wands,scrolls, or staves for the apprenti to throw around, and the few guys who CAN smash that army know that they stand a good chance of biting it in the conflict. Of course, once you get access to True Res., its not an issue. Bring that guy back to life six times in a day and he'll just keep coming.

Based on the nature of rulers(who will use any resource until it breaks or burns out), I think wizards will form guilds and have a strict non-interferance policy, with special groups allowed to fight only monsters, or invading armies who don't have a policy of non-inferenance.

I mean, how can you compete with a government when people in power cast Suggestion every time they want something. Wizards would be hated and reviled, and mothers would smother babies demonstrating magical power.

A system of strict non-interferance is the only way.

[User3]

...it's unstoppable pinpoint murder magic that you won't know about until you are dead. <snip> ...the entire national army is just there to bring down attacking manticores with massed archery.

1. Besides screen, is there any way to stop teleport ambushes?

2. How would you equip the army for melee: sword and board, or reach polearms?

[User3]

I like the way Planescape covered it, but that is somewhat os a special case.

There are 1st level commoners around in Sigil, and they survive because 1) they are useful, 2) there are a lot of them, 3) they reproduce fast, 5) you never can really be certain that the 'commoner' isn't a Pit fiend in disguise, and 6) if you cause too much disturbance The Lady will Maze you.

The whole idea of there always being a 'bigger fish' works surprisingly well in D&D.

-Catharz

[Username17]

The whole idea of there always being a 'bigger fish' works surprisingly well in D&D.

No it doesn't. The DM is just telling you "If you fuck up my world I'll throw a temper tantrum and hit you with my giant penis!" That's a metagame reason for players to not go ape nuts, but it's not a rational solution, it does not hold the backstory together.

Basically, there's absolutely no reason for wyverns to not just feast on commoners, they can't even comprehend that killing enough of them is going to get powerful arch mages to wipe out their species. If wyverns exist, they have to be in small enough populations relative to the human settlements on which they feed so that the humans can keep up with the population loss. Which means, as detailed, that the humans are losing about three humans total per week out of a city of 20,000.

The "bigger fish" crapola doesn't change those numbers at all.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

But wasn't that the same as what you were talking about in the modern roleplaying thread? That you can't just randomly decide to kill people in the middle of a decent sized Realworld city like you could in the fantasy equivilant because the government by default has the biggest dick and will use it to smash you? How is killing your player's Troll Street-Sam for rampaging across Downtown Seattle any different from having your player's cheesemonkey Druid flayed alive by the Lady of Pain's shadow for rampaging through Sigil?

Are you advocating a game where there is explicitly no threat that is signifigantly more powerful than the party playing it is at that time?

-Desdan

[User3]

1086071307[/unixtime]]

The whole idea of there always being a 'bigger fish' works surprisingly well in D&D.

No it doesn't. The DM is just telling you "If you [EDITED] up my world I'll throw a temper tantrum and hit you with my giant penis!" That's a metagame reason for players to not go ape nuts, but it's not a rational solution, it does not hold the backstory together
....

-Username17

It isn't metagame, it is in game. Metagame would be the DM saying "If you fuck up my campaign world, I'm gonna drop a giant rock on your character's heads."

In game is where everything has its place, and you shoulden't rock the boat too much. Obviously a human commoner won't survive long in the Abyss. Unless they happen to be under the protection of a Demon lord for some reason...

However, you can't go around knocking off bubbers in Sigil without a care. The Harmonium are going to come after you and knock your head off, and if the enforcers can't do the job, the freaking Factol is going to do it.

And if you start messing around with the factols, eventually the lady will put you down for good.

This has nothing to do with the DM's cock and whatever he or she might do with it.
It has to do with a sort of logic that is almost instinctual for most humans. Those for whom it isn't usually don't reproduce or find themselves in positions of power.

-Catharz

[Username17]

But wasn't that the same as what you were talking about in the modern roleplaying thread? That you can't just randomly decide to kill people in the middle of a decent sized Realworld city like you could in the fantasy equivilant because the government by default has the biggest dick and will use it to smash you? How is killing your player's Troll Street-Sam for rampaging across Downtown Seattle any different from having your player's cheesemonkey Druid flayed alive by the Lady of Pain's shadow for rampaging through Sigil?

That keeps humans in check, so long as they stick to major populated areas - think of them as PCs. Of course, in the early 1900s, Tigers attacked 800-900 people per year in India, so the fact that this was going to send big penis NPCs (hunters) after their asses was evidentally completely lost on them.

This sort of bigger gun enforcement only affects people actions, not monster actions. You still have to explain why human settlements exist at all based on people and monstrous populations. Revenge against the monsters completely doesn't enter into that equation. At all.

Are you advocating a game where there is explicitly no threat that is signifigantly more powerful than the party playing it is at that time?

If the PC actions are going to be meaningful, that's pretty much how it has to work. You play "the heroes", which means that you are the biggest dick on the human side. If you aren't the biggest dick on the human side, you are the sidekicks, not the heroes. And "cleaning up the monsters so weak and meaningless that the heroes don't bother to go after them" isn't anybody's idea of fun.

In more modern games, you often play "the police", which is an entirely different form of game altogether, in which you are part of an organization which is collectively the biggest penis on the human side - and then you represent only a small investigative arm of it. That works fine, but it's nothing like default D&D.

-Username17

[Maj]

If the PC actions are going to be meaningful, that's pretty much how it has to work. You play "the heroes", which means that you are the biggest dick on the human side. If you aren't the biggest dick on the human side, you are the sidekicks, not the heroes. And "cleaning up the monsters so weak and meaningless that the heroes don't bother to go after them" isn't anybody's idea of fun.

If there are monsters so weak and meaningless that the heroes don't bother to go after them, why can't the PCs be monsters so weak and meaningless that things more powerful than them don't bother to go after them?

If you are playing a hero and you must be the "biggest dick on the human side" already - what's the purpose of leveling at all? You're already big and bad enough to combat anything out there.

[Username17]

If you are playing a hero and you must be the "biggest dick on the human side" already - what's the purpose of leveling at all? You're already big and bad enough to combat anything out there.

Only if your side is objectively stronger. Most fantasy adventure stories are predicated on that not being the case.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

If a tenth level party singlehandedly stops an orc invasion into a city that's one of the larger trade hubs of the game world, do you really think the merchants are going to go "These people are tough indeed, but let's save all our appreciation for Greycloak the Wizard. He didn't have anything to do with this, but he could have stopped it even easier than these people did. HE'S the real hero!"? Stopping the sacking of a city by yourself is a meaningful event no matter what, and if Greycloak the Wizard is busy stopping Blackcloak the Wizard from opening a portal to the hoary netherworlds and unleashing an army of demons, why should he care what's going on in one mortal city with an orc problem?

-Desdan

[Username17]

If the PCs can't harass the peasants because a bigger badder mo fo is going to whup their ass, explain to me why it is that the manticore needs to be stopped by them. If you are using the "giant stick" method of preventing the PCs from smacking around the populace, you are by default also using it on all the monsters...

The world has constraints, not the player characters. If the PCs are held in check with threats then so are the Chimerae and there's nothing for the PCs to do!

If, on the other hand, the manticore are not held in check by bigger badder threats - then neither are the PCs, and the PCs really can do anything they want.

The only thing which is stopping you from smacking around the commoners is that you are the heroes, and heroes don't do that. If you are playing an evil campaign, you actually do steal from commoners all the time.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Does anyone else think marauding, dumbass monsters shouldn't exist?

[Username17]

1086158062[/unixtime]]Does anyone else think marauding, dumbass monsters shouldn't exist?

Unlike most things in D&D, they actually exist.

click here.


-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Frank: Why can't the party be the stick and the dog, depending on situation? If the party kills an Orc Warlord and scatters his army to the winds, that's a signifigant meaningful act, that is NOT lessened by the fact that there are other, more powerful beings in the world that could do it more efficently. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if Elminster could have rooted out that Cult of the Dragon cell operating in Waterdeep, he didn't. The party did. That's meaningful.

If the party turns around and starts looting villages in Neverwinter, eventually they're going to kick up enough shit that someone's gonna get pissed off and smack them. And this doesn't just go for situations where the party's evil. If they go instead to Menzoberanzon and start raiding Drow settlements and breaking up slavery rings, then the drow are going to get pissy and send THEIR stick after them. And usually it's going to wind up working the same way. They're not going to send their 20th level, min-maxed to hell and back Priestesses to feast on their souls, they'll send someone they figure is about powerful enough to handle them.

And for the record, I agree with Draco. There are far too many marauding monsters in the game as written. Marauding, animal-intelligence monsters should be relativly weak IMO, like wolves and the aforementioned tigers. The kind of things that can easily take down a low-level commoner stupid enough to wander blindly out of civilization, but not so powerful as to be able to actually effect a villiage itself. If wolves are wandering actually into your villiage and carrying off your children, you have worse problems than wandering monsters.

Other monsters should be rare, if not unique. I take alot of cue from Greek Mythology where most monsters were unique because they were either cursed mortals or created to punish other mortals. There was one minotaur, one hydra, three harpies, and so forth. For my money, the most interesting and worthwhile enemies are members of the sentient races anyway. I've also trimmed my races down to half a dozen or so instead of the, what was it Frank said, 50-some? sentient races in the MM. But that's neither here nor there.

-Desdan

[Draco_Argentum]

1086159176[/unixtime]]

1086158062[/unixtime]]Does anyone else think marauding, dumbass monsters shouldn't exist?

Unlike most things in D&D, they actually exist.

I liked the movie but big cats are hardly marauders in the D&D sense. There isn't much hope that they'll walk through a town of 200 and kill everyone.

Is anyone here even remotely scared of tarrasques? Why does it exist, its a danger to society that can be made extinct pretty easily. Same goes for the other creatures. Either they are scared of human settlements and leave them alone or they're smart enough to realise that pissing off intelligent creatures will eventually bite you in the ass. Anything else should've been hunted to extinction by now. I'll grant an exemption to stuff that dosen't live near intelligent races.

[Username17]

They're not going to send their 20th level, min-maxed to hell and back Priestesses to feast on their souls, they'll send someone they figure is about powerful enough to handle them.

That's good for game balance, if you run around doing stuff, you'll generate plot hooks and end up fighting enemies of your level. But it doesn't make any sense. A 20th level High Priestess of whup ass can kill your entire party with a single free action. If you go to the other side, the Symbul can kill your whole party as a free action too.

And I don't mean "If she finds you, she can kill you with a free action" - that's not impressive. No, I mean that with a single free action she can cast Greater Scrying, Greater Teleport, Cloud Kill, and Greater Teleport again - finding, travelling to, and slaying your party and then putting herself right back into her own bathtub with a single word. It's not easier for these high level people to send low level parties after you - it takes more time just to explain the situation to a 4th level ranger than it does for her to simply wipe you out.

---

And if she can do that, she can do that to the Orc Warlord. She can do that to the Orc Warlord in less time than it takes for her to tell an underling to scrounge up some adventurers to go do it. And so we have to come up with a reason for her to not do it.

And if she's too busy to do it herself, she's obviously way too busy to tell anyone else to do it - so we might as well consider the entire world as if she isn't there. And the same with the Drow High Priestess. These are apparently just fairy stories told to scare adventurers into eating their vegetables, because otherwise you'd be dead already.

---

So you are the heroes. There isn't a Symbul, and you have to kill the Orc Warlord or he's not getting killed. Which means that you are the enforcement arm of the forces of righteousness. Do you know what that means? It means that you are frickin Doc Holiday, if you decide that you'd rather work for the Clampets, then the forces of evil run this town.

You can't have it both ways. If the heroes have to save the village that means they can also choose to condemn it. If they can't choose to condemn it, they also can't choose to save it and may as well go home.

Is anyone here even remotely scared of tarrasques?

We haven't eliminated volcanoes. I figure the Tarrasque is just a natural dissaster that happens to be alive.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Does this mean that you advocate the dispatching of of US Special Forces teams to domestic disturbance calls?

There is such a thing as economy of force.

-Desdan

[Essence]

In a population of approximately 8 billion adult "people" (as determined on the other thread), if 1/9th of them are Chaotic Evil, that's 888,888,888 people who are Chaotic Evil.

If 33% of them are asleep, 33% of them are relaxing and doing their business, and 33% of them are doing their "work" of Chaotic Evil acts left and right all over the world, that's 296,296,296 Chaotic Evil people active in the world at any given instant.

If only 20% of those people are doing anything worthy of notice at any given instant, that's 59,259,259 people.

If those people are all, as the DMG seems to vaguely imply, working in groups of four, that's 14,814,814 seperate noticable Chaotic Evil events happening at any given instant.

If there's one hundred thousand creatures out there who can stop one of these acts as a free action (rather generous in most worlds, I should think), that still leaves fourteen point seven million Chaotic Evil acts that need counteraction by other forces of anti-Chaotic Evil-ness.

The same, of course, goes for every other alignment. There's always going to be plenty for an adventuring party to do.

Even if you assume that only 2%, rather than 20%, of people are doing something worthy of notice at any given instant, you still have one point three million events that need attending to. That's enough to keep 325,000 seperate adventuring parties busy.

Got heroes?

[User3]

I had a point, and then Essence made it.

Right, Ok.

Lots of stuff happens in a big, bad world. Who says that the Simbul(correct spelling) and Elminister(possibly correct) and all the other good guys out there even hear about every adventure that happens?

The Curse of the Black Pearl(Pirates of the Carribean) doesn't even look like an adventure, just a 10 minute attack on a town. Most of adventure takes place off the charts. There were only like 40 people in that whole movie who had an idea that something was afoot.

Lord of the Rings was a story where even though armies clashed and demons walked the land, only about 20 guys knew the 411. In fact, Lord of the Rings has several epic characters who have more important things to do than ferry some artifact to mount Doom. They had other responsibities, and possibly lacked the talents necessary to do the job(that elf queen chick totally would have been corrupted).

Assuming that being able to kill people equates to power is a basic fallacy in DnD. Its why immortality, and even long life has been such a scary topic for WOTC an why they have a "nerf the immortals" stance. They'd hate to think that you could kill the villain, loot his palace, and the village would still be destroyed.

Adventures are about success and failure, and not a "kill or be killed."

PS Scry and die is an excellent way to get a lot of dead mages, even with all of your spells as free actions. I know that I would have a few traps in my house for the first mage with an attitude to pop into my bathroom.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I dunno if I would go that far, Ess. Having just shy of three billion evil people in the world kicking up trouble really does lessen the impact of the party's deeds. At that point who cares if the Orcs got routed today, because tomorrow the Mind Flayer Slave Caravan arrives.

My point is that even if the major campaign NPCs are heroes, they probably aren't going to go scouring the land for every pursesnatcher and cattle theif around. If Greycloak the Wizard decided to make sure that no evil went unpunished, his nemesis Blackcloak wins. Why? Because as Greycloak is scry-and-dieing muggers, Blackcloak's completed the spell to create the stable rift between his tower and his infernal master's realm.

That's why economy of force exists. Because not only are you meteing out punishment that may not fit the crime when you respond to all infractions with maximum force(A minor concern, I know, since historically most crimes were answered with executuion), but you keep those providing that force from paying attention to less visible but more important matters.

-Desdan