The Great Leap Forward in FantasyLand

[Saxony]

Of course, there's still the underlying problem of how there would be a fantasy Great Leap Forward as envisioned by 3E (and probably 1E to 2E) D&D. Or rather, even if people could identify reasons, methods, and people responsible... why exactly would it happen?

What exactly is the incentive for an 11th level wizard or cleric ....

You are merely pointing out the most obvious properties of every DnD campaign setting ever. Either that or you have forgotten that the hypothetical fantasy universe we are discussing is embedded in a game and is not a standalone story.

The world has problems. Evil armies. Warlords. Demonic invasions. Bandits. Motherfucking Sauron stand-ins. Problems must exist for the playing character heroes to have anything to do.

So of course the quality of life isn't going to miraculously raise itself if the campaign setting is left to its own devices. Of course 11th level spellcasters aren't going to do this automatically, as influenced by their physical, social, and mental environments (the aforementioned campaign setting). That's what the heroes are for.

So to answer your question:

"The PCs or DM will make this happen. That's how DnD works."

Sometimes I doubt your intelligence, but I remember you like to argue for the sake of arguing.

[Saxony]

Evil industrializes better than Good.

I would agree with most of your points, though I'd point out that evil countries are more likely to full on assassinate leaders they don't like.

You're right that evil countries understand might makes right, and won't want to be the nail sticking up when the hammer comes down. So they might accept the new evil overlord's terms of "Resist and I kill you" fairly well, and might even approve of such tactics (while they think benevolent rulers are pansies). But it will be a grudging acceptance, and the oppressed orc nation will be plotting your death at all points in time. Probably. I mean, they won't actually like being oppressed and find the concept of being ruled in any way (rather than being the rulers) offensive.

Maybe you could actually oppress the good nation more easily. They're less familiar and prone to doing whatever it takes (because they have moral restrictions on behavior) to resist oppression.

Transplant the oppression tactic "Work in the coal mines until you die, or I kill you now" type of industrialization to the peaceful halfling (hobbit) villages where no one can really mount a proper resistance or even think to kill the evil overlord in her sleep.

[Omegonthesane]

Transplant the oppression tactic "Work in the coal mines until you die, or I kill you now" type of industrialization to the peaceful halfling (hobbit) villages where no one can really mount a proper resistance or even think to kill the evil overlord in her sleep.

The problem is, Good and Good-leaning creatures tend to have the trait of empathy - so when you impale all the union leaders, while an Evil group might think "Fuck, this guy is hardcore, I don't wanna be next", a Good group will almost inevitably think "How dare he commit this atrocity, we will band together and take revenge". Good works together better than Evil, and you do not want your oppressed underclass to identify with eachother - the ability to rebel and revolt can come with time and fury, even to peaceful hobbits, but it might as well not be present if they're too busy watching their backs and worrying about their own turning on them.

[MGuy]

Of course, there's still the underlying problem of how there would be a fantasy Great Leap Forward as envisioned by 3E (and probably 1E to 2E) D&D. Or rather, even if people could identify reasons, methods, and people responsible... why exactly would it happen?

I'd actually would need you to explain why it hasn't happened yet? Even in our own history there were a bunch of nations that had ideas, structures, etc that were well ahead of their time. The only thing that stopped them was destruction. Since a lot of places in D+D settings not only survive multiple apocalypses, wars, etc and moreover keep records of it and have people that live longer I'm absolutely baffled about how the setting can stay so rooted where it is over so long.

What exactly is the incentive for an 11th level wizard or cleric to stop what they're doing and use their spells to bootstrap the economy? First of all, what exactly would they gain from this other than the happiness of sophonts? I mean, dictators from our world do (and did) get something out of empowering the masses. Their lives benefit from more food diversity, more sources of entertainment, more conveniences, etc. (EDIT) J.P Morgan definitely had a better life than Thomas Jefferson. And Gordon Gekko had a better life than Morgan.

But Mordekainen? Raistlin? Varsuuvius? By the time a full spellcaster gets to level 11, let alone level 15 or so, they can with careful planning get almost everything they want regardless of whether the mundanes are healthy and educated urbanites or pre-literate neanderthals chewing squirrel bones. They don't get anything personally out of empowering sophonts that they can't get with magic unless we're talking about the information age.

With this train of thought I don't understand why you haven't asked about why spellcasters care, at all, about what happens to mundanes. They care enough to torture/rule them. They care enough to constantly save them. However, you think they can't care enough to actually advance them?

And of course the flip-side to this is that empowered sophonts are actually a threat to some of their self interests. Even if we're proposing a Star Trek-like utopia, some of the spellcasters are going to want things that the masses at large are never going to allow like child sex slaves, fresh brains, and demonic sacrifices. They're not only not incentivized to spend decades, if not centuries of their time doing boring shit like using Major Creation to make pesticides and using Command Undead to harness the labor of Colossal Skeletons, but an empowered population is actually a threat to them. The status quo is that most of the time Szass Tam or Xykon or whoever can pretty much just kill and torture whomever they feel like as long as they don't run afoul of the minority of people who can stop them. But when we start talking about things like police officers armed with wands of fireball patrolling the streets life gets a lot more dangerous to them. Therefore, bad guys and even 'neutral' guys have a huge incentive to go around torching public libraries and freeing slaves.

Believe it or not most people do not draw this kind of conclusion about the people around them. Gun nuts typically want other gun nuts to have guns, regardless of the credible danger it puts them in for their neighbors to have the right to own a gun. While evil guys indeed might think of anybody else with power as a threat I doubt most neutral people would even think about or care enough to prevent someone from possibly garnering the same amount of power that they have. The effort it would take to police the acquisition of power locally and abroad, and the enemies it would make for them just doesn't seem worth it for generally neutral folk. In fact, as I'm thinking about this only the evil minded people seem like they would be particularly motivated to make sure other societies are raised up because it would actually work against the atrocities they would want to commit.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to come up with a plausible reason why spellcasters would choose to empower other people to get and do things that they don't need or want and why other spellcasters would allow this to happen without resorting to DM fiat, rules-based cheese loops, or getting on your knees and begging the 0.1% not to be dicks.

This question is a bit odd. Why do we start with the assumption that any spellcaster doesn't just already want to advance their local society from the get go? What is keeping any random high level spellcaster(s) from just doing that for whatever reason they want? There are a number of ways that a spellcaster can shut themselves from the world such that what happens to mundanes is both out of sight and mind for them but what if they don't want to do that?
While I can see why evil spellcasters would want to stop them you have to tell me why good spellcasters would not.

[Omegonthesane]

MGuy - first you need to cross the hurdle of why any arcane caster levels higher than the point at which he can squander his days snorting coke off of succubus tits, because apparently in the Den all wizards regardless of alignment degenerate into crackheads with no higher ambitions.

Or more seriously - most humans are kind of lazy and kind of selfish, and the Den tends to assume that this will extend to high level PCs. I would be inclined to disagree, because by having ground their way to high level, a high level PC has proven that they have ambitions far greater than hedonism, ambitions for which they have risked life and limb to gain XP and magic items.

[Mord]

Every 15th level spellcaster had parents at one time. Some of them have gnarly badass stories of being orphaned and raised by wolves and now they're sociopaths. Others will see their aged parents living in a squalid shitpile scratching a meager life from the dirt and say "it would be really easy for me to make it so that they don't have to live like ass anymore."

For every wizard who forgets everyone and everything that makes a person recognizably human and spends their immortality doing coke off succubus tits, there will probably be at least one wizard who remembers that they have a family and friends who are not world-striding demigods.

Look at real-life rich humans. They're grasping shitheads to people they don't know, but they generally make sure that their families and friends are taken care of. I fully expect that D&D mages create miniature Great Leaps Forward all the time, but that the benefits never propagate to the civilizational level because those mages don't give a shit about anyone anyplace larger than their own home village. Bringing your entire extended clan to live in a paradisical demiplane is probably pretty common, though the acquisition of new genetic material might be a sticking point as the generations progress.

Once you get high-level mages born and raised in metropoli, then you might start seeing some actual society-level changes wrought by magi seeking to improve the lot of their loved ones. Sadly, for some reason, adventurers always seem to hail from rural nowhere...

[Lago PARANOIA]

The "project" is rapid industrialization. I shouldn't have to point out the obvious reasons why an Evil society would want to rapidly industrialize in order to do more evil, and why the leaders would back these efforts.

Yeah, and? If you don't have a bottom-up revolution (which isn't going to happen, because evil) then it needs to be enforced top-down, communist-style, by visionaries willing to inflict all manners of cruelties onto the people below. Unfortunately, there are more Pol Pots and Pinochets than Stalins and there are more Stalins than Lenins and Maos.

History is replete with instances of brief golden ages being exploded by the selfishness or cruelty off leaders. If you're cranking up the selfishness and cruelty, you should expect to see the number of cultures that break through the industrial and economic barriers go down.

I think this effect would be cancelled out by the increased incentive for long lived races to try to improve the world and a greater willingness to plan for the long term.

Yeah, and? I'm sure that even celebrated historical figures like Abraham Lincoln and Mahatmas Ghandi want to make a world a better place and even have the cred to do so. However, the morals of Ghandi would be considered vile compared to that of an average Canadian college student of today. Morals and science advance much faster than the span of someone's life.

Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who don't act as moral or academic impediments to society no matter how old they get and God bless them all. However, the biggest factors towards eroding racism and religious thinking and scientific backwardsness and all sorts of civilization-eroding nonsense isn't education or even propaganda but the death of the previous generation.

. Whenever you have two competing industries (Horse Breeders and Car Makers) in a society where both produce similar goods (Personal Transportation), and one industry does so better (the Car Makers) due to that society giving one of the two an advantage, you see the weaker industry shrink and the stronger industry grow, but the total amount of product produced stay proportional to the demand for that product. As long as the dwarves value spells as much as humans do, they will have as many spells being cast, even if those spells are cast by a cleric instead of by a sorcerer.

This is the wrong way to think about it. Yes, as a proportion dwarves will have more wizards and clerics than humans do and much fewer sorcerers. But the absolute number of spellcasters (and of course spellcaster power) will be smaller.

Sure, if you have a human with rolled stats of a 14 in intelligence and 14 in charisma, they can be either a wizard or a sorcerer. Whatever they pick, the number of spellcasters in the society will go up by one. If a dwarf has a 14 in intelligence and a 12 in charisma, they're forced to be a wizard. The number of spellcasters in the society still goes up by one.

However, if you have a human whose pre-racial bonuses was all 10s except for charisma, which was a 14, you can still get a decent sorcerer. But a dwarf facing this situation can't become a spellcaster at all. They can't just become a wizard or a cleric to make up for it. Poking out the eyes of 10,000 people might produce more sculptors or musicians in the demographic than a random selection of 10,000 with functioning eyes, but it can't produce more artists. The effect is only neutral if they have a replacement aptitude as good as or better than something in the visual arts, which obviously won't hold true for most people.

If dwarves had some other kind of advantage, like population densities, then it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But nothing shows that they do. And kobolds, which could have a high population density due to their size, have a laughably bullshit reproduction rates.

That is completely bullshit. In my entire experience playing D&D, not once have I seen anyone stat up a character as a multiclass character between PC and NPC classes. You either have NPC levels, or you have PC levels, but not both.

I think you're just confused by the Law of Conservation of Detail and the spotlight fallacy -- you don't see the Commoner 1 / Expert 2s because they're not important for your individual story. And the anthropomorphic principle can make it so that the DM doesn't have to make you cognizant of these characters at all.

But the DMG is pretty clear. Those kinds of characters form the backbone of D&D demographics.

[Chamomile]

Grek didn't say anything about Commoner 1/Expert 2. He said PC/NPC multiclass, that'd be something Commoner 1/Rogue 2. This is unusual enough that I, personally, convert the NPC levels into half as many PC levels in a related class whenever an NPC needs to level up into PC levels. These are house rules, of course, but the point isn't the rule itself but the reason for its existence: NPC/PC multiclass is really bizarre and it is weird to have them happen at all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

You're doing a fantasy Great Leap Forward of a benighted population, so the mixing of loser and non-loser classes is unavoidable. It does raise the question of what the class demographics would look like after a couple of generations of universal education, free secondary schooling, and the Mutant Registration Act, but while you're in the transitional period you're going to have students and teachers who started out as adepts or experts or the 'wrong' class. Even in the Soviet Union it took a couple of generations to largely wipe out illiteracy. If we're talking about an industrial transition that looks like the United Kingdom or Japan, it'd be more like four or five.

[Grek]

However, if you have a human whose pre-racial bonuses was all 10s except for charisma, which was a 14, you can still get a decent sorcerer. But a dwarf facing this situation can't become a spellcaster at all. They can't just become a wizard or a cleric to make up for it.

This is false. A dwarf with a 14 in charisma before racial modifiers has a 12 in charisma. He can get nine whole levels in Sorcerer before his lack of charisma becomes a problem for him. And, since he's a 9th level sorcerer, he can personally learn to craft himself a Cloak of Charisma, solving all of his problems that way. Roughly 49.783% of dwarves have the attributes to eventually become some sort of spellcaster and then craft themselves a magic item to bootstrap their way into eventually casting 9th level spells. This increases to 91% with age - remember, becoming old in D&D literally makes you a better spellcaster.

If dwarves had some other kind of advantage, like population densities, then it wouldn't be that big of a deal. But nothing shows that they do.

The average dwarf lives for 351 years and starts being a spellcaster at age 31.5. The average dwarven magic user is therefore contributing 319.5 mage-years to society. The only races with more mage-years per capita are the elves and the gnomes.

[DSMatticus]

He can get nine whole levels in Sorcerer before his lack of charisma becomes a problem for him.

You need a charisma of 10 + spell level. 12 cha will take a sorcerer to level 4, at which point they increase their charisma to 13, which will take them to level 6. If they want to go higher than that, they'll need boosters. Or they can temporarily exceed their limits by casting eagle's splendor (which briefly carries them to level 14).

The only races with more mage-years per capita are the elves and the gnomes.

Wut. A mage can only produce one mage-year per year. A population of dwarves that is 10% mages produces as many mage-years per year as a population of humans that is 10% mages. The fact that the average dwarf mage produces more total mage-years than the average human mage doesn't mean anything for this metric, because they are also contributing those mage-years over a much longer period of time. The only way in which age would be an advantage is if leads to more mages (i.e., either dwarf population explosion because they never die and keep spitting out babies, or dwarf mage explosion because everyone has time to learn magery) or better mages (i.e., because they are older they are higher level).

[ishy]

He can get nine whole levels in Sorcerer before his lack of charisma becomes a problem for him.

You need a charisma of 10 + spell level. 12 cha will take a sorcerer to level 4, at which point they increase their charisma to 13, which will take them to level 6. If they want to go higher than that, they'll need boosters. Or they can temporarily exceed their limits by casting eagle's splendor (which briefly carries them to level 14).

Actually 12 cha will be fine for lvl 5 too (since you'll get lvl 3 spells at lvl 6) and 13 cha will be enough for lvl 7. At level 8, you'll have 14 cha.

[Grek]

@Charisma:
Remember, sorcerers get their spells a level late. Here's the level by level breakdown for one:
1st: Your charisma is 12 and you can cast 1st level spells.
2nd: Your charisma is 12 and you can cast 1st level spells.
3rd: Your charisma is 12 and you can cast 1st level spells.
4th: You put your level up point in Charisma. Your charisma is 13 and you can cast 2nd level spells.
5th: Your charisma is 13 and you can cast 2nd level spells.
6th: Your charisma is 13 and you can cast 3rd level spells.
7th: Your charisma is 13 and you can cast 3rd level spells.
8th: You put your level up point in Charisma. Your charisma is 14 and you can cast 4th level spells.
9th: You make a Cloak of Charisma +2. Your charisma is 16 and you can cast 4th level spells.

@Age:
If we assume that the number of baby dwarves born each year is equal to the number of humans born each year, that venerable dwarves are no more likely to be powerful mages than venerable humans and that the populations start out at the same size, the dwarves still end up with roughly three times as many mages simply because all of their people (mages included) live for three and a half times as long, more than making up for their slightly lower numbers of mages. Their age pyramid is a lot taller, even if it isn't any wider at the base.

[deaddmwalking]

I've played a Aristocrat 1/Fighter X in a low - magic game.

[DSMatticus]

@Charisma: oops.

If we assume that the number of baby dwarves born each year is equal to the number of humans born each year, that venerable dwarves are no more likely to be powerful mages than venerable humans and that the populations start out at the same size, the dwarves still end up with roughly three times as many mages simply because all of their people (mages included) live for three and a half times as long, more than making up for their slightly lower numbers of mages. Their age pyramid is a lot taller, even if it isn't any wider at the base.

You're assuming dwarves will end up more populous because longevity. That's not a per capita advantage - everyone lives three and a half times as long, non-mages included. But it's also really, really not a safe assumption. D&D rips its setting caveats from periods of human history in which populations did not reliably go up each year. It would be much more accurate to consider D&D societies from the perspective of relatively fixed populations limited by resources and conflict.

Amusingly, dwarves do have an advantage when populations are fixed - they spend the smallest percentage of their maximum lifespan as youth. Humans hit adulthood at 15, and have an average maximum lifespan of 91; elves, 110/552; dwarves, 40/351. Though, you have to remember that not all sources of mortality scale with longevity. Owlbear attacks happen on the owlbear's schedule, not your's, and if you're an elf you have to survive six times as many of them as a human before you're old enough to die of old age. Combined with the fact that elves spend 110 years as children, it's difficult to imagine elvish society as anything but a barely contained lord of the flies waiting to happen.

[Prak]

So, I was thinking about replicating modern consumer tech with magic for a modern-esque D&D setting. Cantrips really seems like the workhorse of consumer magic, with prestidigitation enabling SMS-like devices that either etch messages onto or use the color option to paint them onto a plaster tablet, and then repair the plaster on command, Ray of Frost paired with a flame elementite to create hardcore sterling engines, Ghost Sound for all your various notification needs...

Then you just need to handwave NPC incomes such that a family of commoners can at least afford a single spellphone on a two year "free device" style contract.

Better consumer tech can use better spells, like smartphones being mimicked with Minor Image and such.

Of course, you need to handwave some kind of network, but that's just world building, really.