Constructing D&D's Default World

[Dean]

As much as D&D pretends otherwise it does have a default setting of sorts. It's fluff is written with preconceived setting notions in mind and those notions are essentially derived from conglomerating every fantasy show and video game in the last 40 years into an amalgam default setting. Like most assumptions in D&D design this world has gone completely unstated and uncodified for 5+ editions now and that can cause confusion. In particular there are lots of questions about how mid to high level magic affects the world. The question of how Teleport, Remove Disease, or high level wizards in general affect the shape of society in the world of D&D has been asked many times.

I think that to codify the D&D "default" world the biggest question you need to answer is what level everyone is. When D&D actually prints mechanics for generating NPC levels the results are schizophrenic and insane and posit worlds where 26th level wizards live in forts built by 16th level experts who beseech 5th level Paladins to help the sick townsfolk who shouldn't exist cause there's a dozen clerics in town that could cure them all instantly.

But just because the stock answers are wrong doesn't mean that answers couldn't be given that would give a functional representation of the society D&D pretends would exist. Here is the societal level breakdown that I think would make the D&D worlds the D&D stories try to tell.

We'll split society into four groups of ascending level: Civilians, Adventurers, Legends, Phenomenons. Here's what each should be and how many of each there should be...

Civilians: (3 levels in an NPC class) Every sentient being in D&D should have 3 levels in an NPC class. Not more, not less. 3. Every Peasant in the world should be a 3rd level commoner, every guard a 3rd level warrior, and every blacksmith a 3rd level expert. Between feats, ability scores, and skills there is already plenty of room to differentiate the masses without any need at all for 19th level commoners to even be an option. PC's should also get the bonus hp, skills, spells, and bab bonuses they retain from their origins as 3rd level experts, aristocrats, warriors or adepts. This gives the D&D world a little bit of room at the bottom and gives us a populace that is afraid of wolves but can beat housecats in a 1 on 1.

Adventurers: (1-6 levels in a PC class) Anyone with even a single level in a PC class goes here. They are literally the 1%. Someone with even a single level in a PC class is a badass and has cleared his head and shoulders above the masses by some noteworthy amount. Adventurers are level 1 through 6 and possess amazing capabilities to the public at large. A 3rd level Wizard can shoot fire from his hands, change his form, and speak on the wind. A 3rd level Barbarian can kill 4 trained men in a straight duel and may be the strongest man those men had ever seen. Adventurers higher than 6th level are rare enough that the world can be considered to operate on E6 principles

Legends: (7-10 levels in a PC class) One in a hundred people will get even a single PC class level. One in a thousand of those will hit 7th level. The people above that point are the movers and shakers in the world. They can do the impossible and are seen by the populace with awe and fear. The rarity of individuals of this power level tells us why high magic hasn't revolutionized the world. Teleport hasn't overhauled trade because their are only 4 people who can Teleport and they're busy running their empires and fighting each other. It also explains why the PC's are tasked with saving the world instead of a bunch of high level wizards doing it. Namely that the high level wizard is the one that put you on the job anyway because he can only do so many things a day and spending two weeks saving the world means he might as well give his empire away.

Phenomenons: (11+ Levels in a PC class) The game only works for a couple more levels here. When all sides of a conflict can summon unlimited angels it becomes uninteresting, so playing past level 13 isn't advised. Still those last few levels are big deals. There are no default characters at this power level. Phenomenons are campaign dependent and they each define the campaign. Most Phenomenons are in the past, they're ancient history. Any that rise up from the populace today will necessarily change the face of global politics. If a baddie finds a way to hit 13th level then he's the BBEG, a threat to the entire world. If a great hero rises from the ancient past as a 13th level Cleric then he's the only chance the Gryphon Empire has to reclaim its former glory.

The percentages of each category are approximately
Civilians: 99%
Adventurers: 1%
(Breakdown by level: 1st level 50%, 2nd level 33%, 3rd level 10% 4th level 4%, 5th level 2%, 6th level 1%)
Legends: .00001%
(Breakdown by level: 7th level 40%, 8th level 30%, 9th level 20%, 10th level 10%)
Phenomenons: ?

Which means that for a campaign world with a population of 5 Million, a number equal to all of Europe at its worst times and probably twice the population of the LoTR's world, you would get the following breakdown:

Total Population: 5,000,000
Civilians: 4,950,000
Adventurers: 50,000
Legends: 50

Those 50,000 Adventurers By Level-

1st: 25,000
2nd: 16,500
3rd: 5,000
4th: 2000
5th: 1000
6th: 500

Those 50 Legends By Level-

7th: 20
8th: 15
9th: 10
10th: 5

This would give us a campaign where the reason for Fabricate not obviating the entire economy can be that the 2 guys with that spell never thought of doing that. Where every king isn't Raised on death because neither of the Clerics who can do that want that to happen. The magic exists and it effects society but it doesn't suffocate it. It also allows tremendous extraplanar threats like Balors to still exist and be absolutely terrifying. A plot where a Balor is trying to break into the Prime is now a legitimate save-the-world plot because it would literally take the entire world to try to kill him and they might not win. It's a world where most of the D&D plots D&D wants you to play can occur.

[Prak]

I may need to nab this sort of assumption for Midgard, it would help me to keep things on a ten level track but also have a bit of room for peons and some room for world-shaking midgard serpents and shit.

Would you change anything about experience gain and leveling? It's not inconceivable for a party of NPC3/PC1s to hit tenth level inside of a few months of gaming.

[Dean]

The last time I used by the book leveling black presidents were only in sci-fi movies.

If I needed to implement a kill based XP system I would use the slow XP progression chart which is presented in Unearthed Arcana I think. What I prefer is to just make the game take place at a certain level and have people's power grow due to accumulation of magic items, learning their character, finding new spells and tricks and so on. It makes games feel more like an actual series where your character grows in a natural feeling way and also helps you balance the game.

A middle ground and the one I might recommend would be to use the slow kill based XP progression in a game with an established level cap. That way in a few months of playing people could go from 1-6 or 7-10, top out their tier and reach the limit of their character's natural power and then get to enjoy the process of flexing it a few inches higher every session through finding new and exciting things.

[Eikre]

I was about the post about EXP rates. Clearly, PCs have a hidden and innate ability which lets them get any appreciable EXP from anything, ever, which they get in a suite along with the superior stats from being 4d6/drop or point-buy characters. Also, nobody ever gets EXP from facing an insufficiently challenging encounter.

Beyond that, everyone gets their second NPC hitdie by getting their first boner, and their third by learning how to stay alive without their parents. NPCs gain their first adventurer level the moment they do anything to endear themselves sufficiently to the players that they are ever remembered by name.

At the apex of the the "adventuring" tier, people start doing that E6 thing where EXP gets cashed out as bonus feats instead of level advancement. Further levels are rewarded at the culmination of every effort which successfully changes the world for all time.

[Prak]

Beyond that, everyone gets their second NPC hitdie by getting their first boner, and their third by learning how to stay alive without their parents. NPCs gain their first adventurer level the moment they do anything to endear themselves sufficiently to the players that they are ever remembered by name.

...Now I just have this image of a very developed four year old War3 who runs around the woods nut kicking black bears and shit, desperate to have an adventurer remember his name so he can gain an actual level of barbarian.

[Seerow]

One thing you could do to slow exp progression down is count the NPC levels (which if I understood Dean correctly everyone has in addition to adventurer levels) towards ECL for determining exp rewards and progression to next level. So you're in a level 5 group of 4 players and complete a level 5 challenge, that's normally worth 375exp each, out of the 5000 exp you need to level.

But if you count as level 8, you earn only 200exp out of the 8000 exp you need to level. Your leveling rate just got got cut in third.



Alternatively, you could go with an e6 style thing, where past some level (probably 6) you have to earn so many pseudo-levels where you gain a bonus feat or something along those lines before gaining a real level. You can either make it a one time thing (say earn 5 feats at level 6 before being able to progress into level 7, and continue normally from there until 10), or something where you have to gain progressively more feats between each level (like get to level 7, earn 2 feats, to gain 8 earn 3 feats, to gain 9 earn 4 feats, and to gain 10 earn 5 feats. Since each feat is supposed to take a little less time than earning a full level, by the time you actually hit level 10 you've got as much experience under your belt as an epic level character under standard rules.

[codeGlaze]

I think there might be room to flip [max level of NPCs] (3 in this case) over to a level 1 PC. So NPC3/PC1 would not exist.

NPC3+(plot magicz!) would result in a PC1.

PC1s would be local heroes. Or "the renowned soldier" from a militia group or something. NPC 1 - 3(or whatever cap there is) allows for regular-person, non-heroic growth. Flipping over to PC1 gives you (golden-thread-in-the-weave) status... or what ever.

[Dean]

Beyond that, everyone gets their second NPC hitdie by getting their first boner, and their third by learning how to stay alive without their parents. NPCs gain their first adventurer level the moment they do anything to endear themselves sufficiently to the players that they are ever remembered by name.

I was actually planning on....basically exactly this. 1st level NPC's could represent children, 2nd level for adolescents and 3rd level for anyone with an adult body.

When an NPC does something so special they gain a PC level they would gain +2 to all their stats instead of +1 for a normal 4th level.

@Codeglaze: I wanted to use the NPC levels to address starting characters fragility and lack of feats. You could just give everyone +1 BAB, +10hp and a feat if you wanted the same rough effect with no levels.

[codeGlaze]

@Codeglaze: I wanted to use the NPC levels to address starting characters fragility and lack of feats. You could just give everyone +1 BAB, +10hp and a feat if you wanted the same rough effect with no levels.

My point was just that once you clear hurdle into PC (or hero), NPC levels merge into your first PC level. (Pretty much what you said, I think.)

There's also Shatner's 0th level mechanics from his USE-system post.

Below is my 0th level rules.

---Level 0 and Slightly Altered Leveling Up mechanics---

One of the things that have always bothered me about DnD is that the order of leveling matters. That is, a Fighter 1/Rogue 1 will have fewer skill ranks but more hitpoints than a Rogue 1/Fighter 1 because you get maximum HP and 4x the usual number of skill ranks at 1st level. Also, I've always been a little uncertain about the current roll-for-hp each level. Over time all characters will trend towards the hp average for their class (5.5hp per level of Fighter, 2.5hp per level of wizard, etc.), meaning that bad rolls will eventually be balanced by good rolls... that's just the math. However, players rarely roll more than a dozen hit dice for any one of their PCs so characters can be decidedly over or under average. So, more tweaks...

Everyone starts at 0th level; this way level 1 is mechanically no different than any other level. At 0th level you get:
1) a skill upgrade in 2 different skills of your choice, +/- additional skill upgrades equal to your intelligence modifier (to a minimum of 0).
2) 4hp
3) no weapon, armor or shield proficiencies
4) all racial training and skill upgrades (in effect, all of your racial benefits are applied as part of hitting level 0)
5) one feat

Every level thereafter you pick a class and get:
1) 1 skill upgrade to be used on the skill of your choice. If your intelligence modifier increased during this level then you gain additional skills per point of increase.
2) a number of skill upgrades usable only for class skills, determined by what class you are gaining a level in.
3) d4 addition hp plus the bonus hp from the class (+0 wizard, +2 rogue, +4 cleric, +6 fighter, +8 barbarian)
4) all class features, special abilities, proficiencies, spells, etc. granted by the level of the class you are gaining, minus any you gained from ELOs
5) your base save and base attack advance along their respective progressions based on the class you are gaining, provided it hasn't already from an ELO
6) You get 1 feat at every 3rd level (3rd, 6th, 9th, etc.)
7) You get 1 attribute point every 4th level (4th, 8th, 12th, etc.)
8) If ever you are out of class skills to gain training in, you instead gain one additional skill upgrade in the skill of your choice.

If a class offers a d4 hit die (like wizard and sorcerer) then it offers +0 hp per level. A d6 hit die (rogue, bard, etc.) offers a +2, d8 (cleric, monk) offers +4, d10 (fighter, ranger) offers a +6 and a d12 (barbarian) offers a +8. If a class offers 6 + int mod skill points per level or less (this is all classes except rogue), under this new system it offers 1 skill upgrade in a class skill per level. If it offers 8 + int mod than it offers 2 skill upgrades in class skills per level.

So, I decide to make a 1st level Half-Orc barbarian, with an intelligence mod of -1 and a constitution mod of +2. He starts out at level 0 with 1 skill upgrade (2 + (-1 int mod)), one feat, 4hp (con mod isn't applied at level 0), no weapon/armor/shield proficiencies and all his racial bonuses (+2 strength, darkvision, skill upgrades to intimidate, gather information and survival, etc.).

He then takes his first level, choosing the class "barbarian". He gets 1 skill upgrade for any skill and 1 skill upgrade for a barbarian class skill (the barbarian class only grants one skill upgrade per level). He gains 1d4 + 10 hp (+8 from his level of barbarian, +2 from his con mod). Assuming he rolls a 1, his new HP total will be 4 (level 0) + 1 (d4 result) + 10 = 15. He gets all the features, proficiencies, saves, base attack, etc. from taking a level of barbarian (rage, progression along the favored fort save track, medium armor proficiency, etc.). He does not get an extra feat or attribute point since level 1 is neither a 3rd level nor a 4th level... the feat characters used to get at level 1 they now get at level 0. This way, if my barbarian decides to take a level of monk next level he won't have a weird hp and skill disparity than the character who went Monk first, then barbarian.

This change does mean that players will have slightly more HP than average (you get an extra 4hp from 0th level) but I can live with it taking one extra dagger stab to take down a PC in exchange for smoother leveling numeric progression.

[Emerald]

Do the monster demographics look like the PC/NPC demographics (meaning there are tons of orcs and goblins, dozens of minor demons, and a handful of dragons and beholders)? If so, the XP rules don't have to be changed much if at all to slow leveling down:

1) Monsters would be a lot more lethal to adventurers, comparatively speaking, since having those NPC levels means that you're effectively 3 levels of class features behind, which means an even-CR threat is more like a CR+3 threat, which means there would be a lot more dead adventurers than successful ones.

2) Once you have a few PC levels under your belt, you start running out of even-CR monsters to challenge you, and your leveling rate slows dramatically when you're a 6th-level character constantly facing CR 2s.

3) Assuming you manage to make it all the way to the mid levels, you probably don't have the time or inclination to go out and kill monsters for a while given all the responsibilities you now have (and the fame and notoriety that would make ditching your duties to power-level very much frowned-upon).

So even if a few months' worth of adventuring days would bring someone from Civilian to Legend status quickly, most Civilians would only make it a level or two into Adventurer tier, and adventuring days would grow further and further apart with each new level and be less and less lucrative in terms of XP, thereby slowing down XP gains even going by the book for XP rewards.

[Judging__Eagle]

An other consideration may be that the low value of raw precious metals (the D&D "piece" is 9g, about 9 pennies in weight; the 15gp of a longsword is a substantial amount of mass) may have to do with low population levels. Perhaps the high mortality rate of levels 1-3 is what keeps adventurers from achieving the higher levels? Perhaps, mid-level adventurers are deliberately wasted on "world ending" challenges in order to preserve the resources of higher level adventurers.

The original literary sources for D&D, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Howard, Vance, Tolkien, etc. all are fine with there being a single world-altering character and few enough active angels & devils on 'Earth' that you can count them on your hands. This might be related to magic levels as well, low magic settings tend to have almost non-existent magic and only a few named heroes instead of dozens.

The counter example to this of course are high fantasy realms where magic is prevalent at low rungs of the power scale. Often this magic world is presented as an "alternative" world where Earth's magic supposedly came from. Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms, the magic world in Neil Gainman's Stardust, the Xanth books, and other fantasy/SF books all share this model. There, while everything has some magic, there are still some "notable" magic creatures and objects, as well as the expectation one could always find a new world-altering resource in unexplored regions and perhaps finding relics from ancient dungeons.

With higher population; coin sizes, and conversion rates of civilian to adventurer might be lower. However mortality rates may also be also lower b/c "fantasy worlds" tend to not be overly grim and lethal. Perhaps why FR has a football league's worth of level 20 characters in 3e.

Trying to be both "high fantasy, low magic" & "high fantasy, high magic" often creates turmoil in many a D&D campaign, and the system isn't necessarily clear which is the go-to model.

[OgreBattle]

So a 3rd level NPC can become a 1st level PC? Doesn't that mean their BAB, saves, skills, and hitpoints are going to suddenly be reduced?

[codeGlaze]

If I understand correctly, the 3 npc levels are custom/adjusted. Not stock DMG NPC classes.

[Seerow]

So a 3rd level NPC can become a 1st level PC? Doesn't that mean their BAB, saves, skills, and hitpoints are going to suddenly be reduced?

This actually came up on GitP recently, this was my response:

Of course having a Commoner 3 be the norm makes playing level 1 adventurers seem a bit weird. But you don't want your level 10 character still maintaining 3 commoner levels. So the solution is that you begin trading out levels as you improve. First from commoner to a better NPC class, then from NPC class to real PC classes.


So you go something like:
Commoner 3
Commoner2/NPC 1
Commoner1/NPC 2
Commoner1/NPC 3
NPC 4
NPC 3/PC1
NPC 3/PC2
NPC 2/PC3
NPC 1/PC4
NPC1/PC5
PC6


Add in a few clauses like your skill points/BAB/HP won't go down as a result of trading out levels even if your new PC class is technically worse than your NPC class, and you get a little bit of background flavor for a character when they decide if they want to have been an Expert, Aristocrat, or Warrior.

Anyway, I like it because it provides a pretty clear power progression over 10 distinct steps, despite only covering 3 actual hit dice of progression. If you want to play a gritty low level game where a group of nobodies progresses into a team of heroes, you can start all the way down at 2 or 3 commoner hit dice and work your way up through it. If you want to start as actual player characters, start as NPC3/PC1, and those extra 3 hit dice will make the characters involved feel much more durable and heroic, and give you a fair bit more leeway on what you can send at them without an accidental TPK. And from that point following the progression you're gaining 1 PC level every levelup, just gradually losing the NPC levels.

It also fits nicely into an E6 world since you finally get rid of the last NPC hit die right as you hit level 6, so if that kind of lower level game is what strikes your fancy, you can just move right into gaining feats instead.

Note: The clause about not dropping BAB/skills is so you can do something like expert transition into Fighter, and keep the 6+int skills for your first few levels. Or Warrior transitioning into Wizard and keep the HP/BAB.


Thinking about it now, I guess it might be easier to describe as gestalting those first few levels, so you end up as NPC4//PC6, with those 4 NPC levels just gestalted over your first 4 PC levels.

[Dean]

I'll make two example 1st level PC's with NPC foundations as I conceive of them right now.

Alhandra: 3rd level Adept/1st level Paladin. If Alhandra has a +1 Con modifier she will gain 12hp, +1 BAB, 8 skill points, 1 feat, save bonuses, a familiar, and the ability to cast Cure Minor Wounds, Light, Bless, and Protection from Evil from her levels in Adept

Krusk: 3rd level Warrior/1st level Barbarian: If Krusk has a +2 Con he will gain 18hp, +3 BAB, 8 skill points, 1 feat, and save bonuses from his levels in Warrior.

Treating these characters as +1 level for the purposes of CR is reasonable. At 5th level and beyond that should stop being true because a dozen extra hp isn't gonna matter for shit.

It occurs to me just now that an easier way to do it might be to say that you build everyone as normal but add a 2 level NPC template onto everyone. That way the populace ends up the same with less complication. So something like that

Sentient Adult (Template)
The Sentient Adult template is applied to every humanoid of adult age. Pick 2 levels in any NPC class and write down the HP, skill points, BAB bonuses, saves, and class features those two levels would grant you. You gain those bonuses and features when you take your first level in any PC or NPC based class as well as one additional feat.

This way a 1st level Paladin would actually be a first level 1 HD character but he would still have the extra hp and skill points to let him survive the beginning levels. NPC's in this case would all be 1st level but gain the benefits of the template letting them do things like survive 10 foot falls and angry cats.

[FatR]

Whenever people try to construct a "realistic" DnD setting I often see the assumption that if high-level people theoretically have the ability to revolutionize economics and infrastructure with their magic, they would necessarily do so.

The fact that we currently have the ability to completely remove hunger and epidemic diseases from the world, yet a significant part of the Earth's population suffers from them daily disproves that assumption. Particularly as upgrading your Ring of Protection from +4 and +5 or presenting a nice gift to your [insert superpowered being that caters to your fetishes here] concubine might be a tad more vital than buying Bentleys and eating in five-star restaurants.

Sure, a world where a cabal of high-level wizards decided to establish infrastructure and education that uplifted significant parts of the planet to magicpunk levels might be fun and it can exist, but presence of high-level wizards does not make its existence mandatory.

The same goes for empire building. Sure, given the human nature, it is reasonable to assume that most of high-level adventurers are going to be ambitious. However, it also not unreasonable to assume that most of highest-level adventurers would be those who channeled their ambition into further pursuit of excellency in their art, not distracting themselves with either duties of administration or feasts, harems and other perks of being a ruler. Depending on how cynical your setting is, this can result in a setup like your average superhero setting, where a bunch of toughest people on the planet regularly smack down wannabe overlords as their charity works; or in a setup like Hunter x Hunter setting, where the local adventurer-equivalents largely are selfish fucks who have secured for themeselves massive privileges with no attached responsibility, but have no interest in boring stuff like actually running the society and also understand that if the world is wrecked hard enough, their luxuries and comforts will go away.

[Emerald]

Whenever people try to construct a "realistic" DnD setting I often see the assumption that if high-level people theoretically have the ability to revolutionize economics and infrastructure with their magic, they would necessarily do so.

The fact that we currently have the ability to completely remove hunger and epidemic diseases from the world, yet a significant part of the Earth's population suffers from them daily disproves that assumption.

The difference is that where in the real world the issue of solving famine, disease, poverty, etc. requires the involvement of many countries and corporations and the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of people to do anything, in D&D it only takes one person to get started on that kind of thing with just the resources at their personal disposal, and the populations that need to be fed and infrastructure that need to be overhauled are orders of magnitude smaller and less complex.

It doesn't even take the cabal of wizards you mentioned; a single mid-level caster of Good alignment who wants to change the world (a profile that fits one-sixth to one-fourth of most adventuring parties) can decide that, gee, it's been a week since Dark Lord Murderface von Evilstein was defeated and no other world-endangering threats have popped up in the meantime, so maybe he can spend a few days and a few dozen spell slots trying to change things for the Greater Good. Pretty much all the game-changing get-rich/powerful-quick tricks only take a single caster to start up and can easily be tweaked to serve the Greater Good instead (spam wall of salt to make tons of money -> spam wall of stone to build towns, bind lots of efreeti to get lots of free money -> bind lots of planetars to provide food and healing, etc.).

Sure, a single caster can only do so much, and there are plenty of evil people who'd want to interfere with such a plan, but high level casters tend to be good at obtaining minions to do their bidding and protecting what's theirs against all comers, and if a single Dark Lord can go off and scheme for a few years and come out the other side with an Evil Empire and legions of mooks large enough to threaten all the nations of the world, a Light Lord should be able to do the same with a Good Empire and legions of happy, well-fed, well-educated citizens. I'd find it much less likely that, with all the tons of Good casters in settings with multi-thousand-year histories, the combined momentum of a bunch of those single motivated casters over the centuries haven't led things towards that economic and infrastructural revolution.

[Username17]

The real spanner in the works as far as trying to brush things off with a "we haven't solved these problems in the real world even though we could" argument is alignment. It isn't just that we have people with the power to advance society and defeat hunger and disease, it's that we have these people and they have "Good" written on their character sheet!

Basically, we have theodicy. We have characters who are powerful enough that they are capable of solving social and economic problems, they are super genuises beyond the intellect of real world mortals, and they are specifically Good. Or even "Exalted Good" or some crap.

Take alignment out of the picture, and you can make the plausible claim that the wizards and priests of the world have more important things to do with their time than to administer flood relief and eradicate filth fever. But as things stand, you are told by stats and alignment that characters desire to fix world problems and are smart enough to know how to go about doing it - leaving only the third leg of arguing about whether they are powerful enough to do so.

As it happens, characters are powerful enough to affect positive change in addition to being smart enough to know how and Good enough to prioritize doing so. Which brings up the new paradox: Why isn't the campaign world a much nicer place?

Basically, the short answer is that various changes to mid- and high-level magic should be made to change how it interacts with certain stuff to make bypassing whole areas of the global economy that are supposed to be important less easily achievable. But mostly alignment (and their thrice damned cousins: the infinitely sized alignment planes) have to fucking go. You can't really have a working campaign world until you cut off at least one of the legs of the theodicic tripod, and alignments are by far the shittiest leg of that stool.

-Username17

[FatR]

The difference is that where in the real world the issue of solving famine, disease, poverty, etc. requires the involvement of many countries and corporations and the cooperation of hundreds of thousands of people to do anything, in D&D it only takes one person to get started on that kind of thing with just the resources at their personal disposal,

And on the contrary - while in the real world a powerful person need to have countries and corporation and shit beneath him to retain power, so cooperation and paying some mind to the problems of small people are inherent in the system, in DnD they... aren't. A powerful wizard can just fuck off to his Magnificent Mancion or even all the way to Olympus to chill with his angel girlfriend because wiping commoners' asses for them while presenting a big nice target for wizard pretenders who want to kill him and take his spellbook is not his idea of good time. You might notice that very few people in our world devote themselves to charity works to the exclusion of their personal lives, and, with how DnD works, reforming society/building infrastructure is a charity work for a high-level characters - as opposed to securing a power base.

Then we have to examine the means of working a world-wide change. And then we have to notice that the common tricks like using Wall of Stone or Fabricate to conjure stuff out of nowhere do not actually revolutionize the society in any way. They are no different from operating a stone quarry or a small manufacture, except that you have to rely on goodwill of a wizard who casts them. In fact, thoughtlessly spamming them would probably impact the society negatively, by putting actual stone quarries and manufactures out of businness and not providing any alternative forms of employment even theoretically. At most you can strategically use them to improve infrastructure.

The real massive changes to the world depend on one of the following:

(1)Chain binding. Pointless to even consider, as I've yet to see a game where chain binding wasn't either spot nerfed or subjected to a gentlemen's agreement.

(2)Custom-crafting magic items on a large scale. This is a massive project, and in most versions of DnD it requires either XP or GM-controlled material components. Here's where you need a whole cabal of powerful spellcasters that is both already dominating the world (so good wizards are not busy checking evil wizards, like in FR or Greyhawk) and is willing to invest time and resources in the effort. This is not an impossible scenario. But there is no reason for this to be the default scenario.

[Emerald]

You might notice that very few people in our world devote themselves to charity works to the exclusion of their personal lives, and, with how DnD works, reforming society/building infrastructure is a charity work for a high-level characters - as opposed to securing a power base.

And yet there are such people, and as noted it only takes one to get things started. Years before he left Microsoft, Bill Gates started investing a great deal of money into providing aid for third-world countries and improving education worldwide, despite the fact that whether poverty-stricken children go to bed hungry or inner-city kids fail algebra had no bearing whatsoever on whether he retained control over his company. Warren Buffett is pushing for reform of taxes on corporations and the wealthy to make them more fair for the 99%, despite the fact that if that reform succeeded it would directly impact his profits and personal wealth. Neither of them is D&D-style Good, and yet they're willing to use their power and influence to help disenfranchised people at great cost to themselves, people that would otherwise have no impact on them whatsoever.

While currently the Gates Foundation can't brute-force the poverty problem because it has to work through aid channels, cooperate with local governments, accept and allocate donations according to various criteria, and so forth, if Bill Gates were to wake up tomorrow a high level wizard he could directly attack the problem without going through intermediaries--say, teleport over to Africa and spend a few days to summon up a bunch of planetars to start feeding the people directly (while ignoring the ensuing media debates over whether those are Christian or Islamic angels he summoned), use control weather to help solve the current drought problems there, and use some Enchantments to persuade the local leadership to be less corrupt and cooperate better, all while crafting a small army of dedicated wrights and golems to keep improving the infrastructure after he leaves.

And that's all in a modern context where Bill would have to consider media opinion, modern military responses to his actions, the interests of all the other foundations and companies investing in Africa, the developed countries of Africa who might resent perceived Western interference, and so forth; in a D&D context, all of the war-torn villages are not part of an interconnected world, they're on their own and surrounded by monsters, so a wizard would have total free reign to pick an out-of-the-way region, set up shop there, and undertake whatever projects he wanted.

They are no different from operating a stone quarry or a small manufacture, except that you have to rely on goodwill of a wizard who casts them. In fact, thoughtlessly spamming them would probably impact the society negatively, by putting actual stone quarries and manufactures out of businness and not providing any alternative forms of employment even theoretically. At most you can strategically use them to improve infrastructure.

You're assuming the poverty-stricken outlying villages in D&D Land have access to quarries and enough skilled workers to make full use of them. A wizard can bring raw materials to areas that lack them, or more raw materials to areas that have enough for their current needs but would need more to grow and improve. Not to mention that the wizard is much faster than the quarry, so he can build walls around a village that sees frequent monster attacks but can't spare the large number of people needed to fortify the village, and he can rebuild a village torched by the armies of the Evil Overlord in the last big conflict.

On a global scale the impact of a single caster is certainly a drop in the bucket, but on the local scale a single caster can make a big difference, particularly if he chooses an area whose needs are best suited to being fixed with his particular talents.

The real massive changes to the world depend on one of the following:

(1)Chain binding. Pointless to even consider, as I've yet to see a game where chain binding wasn't either spot nerfed or subjected to a gentlemen's agreement.

Firstly, if we're talking about working through the "realistic" implications of D&D magic as you posited, rather than what a given DM would do to maintain intra-party balance and prevent plot derailment, houserules and gentlemen's agreements don't enter into things.

Secondly, in my experience, chain binding is only spot-nerfed once you actually start trying to wish for tons of magic items, pick up spellcasting minions, or build up a huge demonic army, and group agreements talk about not abusing planar binding rather than not using it at all. In such a scenario, binding angels to feed peasants isn't going to trigger nerfs or be considered abusive anymore than binding one or two devils to guard the party's base of operations while they're out or binding an archon to go scout things out would.

(2)Custom-crafting magic items on a large scale. This is a massive project, and in most versions of DnD it requires either XP or GM-controlled material components. Here's where you need a whole cabal of powerful spellcasters that is both already dominating the world (so good wizards are not busy checking evil wizards, like in FR or Greyhawk) and is willing to invest time and resources in the effort. This is not an impossible scenario. But there is no reason for this to be the default scenario.

A single wizard changing a whole society overnight with tons of items is infeasible, yes, but we're talking about starting small. Crafting two decanters of endless water to help a drought-stricken city, or a few lyres of building to help rebuild a war-torn city, or a pair of crystal balls to form the start of a communication network among nearby cities, is not going to break the bank, and the wizard can make incremental improvements in between adventures--not only to build up his gold and XP reserves and to give him time to possibly find like-minded casters to help out, but also to let the groups he helped get used to the new developments to ensure they use those gifts to best effect, rather than just dumping a whole magitech upgrade on them and expecting them to cope.

[Prak]

In the real world, we have Elon Musk who is so philanthropic it might almost be a disease of his mind except that he's actually a billionaire because of it.

Now imagine Elon Musk in D&D land as a wizard. Sure, he's probably got an ivory tower made of blow, and a handful of succubi concubines, but he's probably also solved world hungry by making omnibenevolent treants who wander around and give people food literally off their backs. Because making an ivory blow tower and creating a demon harem takes, like, a day, and making super-good fruit bearing treants is, like, another day. Two tops. If all else fails, you go to Carceri and talk to the diseases crafter and make a disease that has no symptoms except causing plants to sprout a wide array of fruits, nuts and vegetables in large quantities and makes the act of picking those products and giving them to people feel good.

[FatR]

Firstly, if we're talking about working through the "realistic" implications of D&D magic as you posited, rather than what a given DM would do to maintain intra-party balance and prevent plot derailment, houserules and gentlemen's agreements don't enter into things.

But they very much do. Rooting your supposed default DnD setting in very specific quirks of a particular edition that are very much not used by the that edition playerbase is stupid. And chain binding is seriously less used than, say, optimized Incantatrixes. I've been in games where Incantatrixes and similar bullshit were allowed. But even there we didn't chain bind. Mostly because we undestood that this will bog down the game. I have yet to see a campaign diary on the net where chain binding was a fact of life.

Just in general, settings go through editions without suddenly suffering major changes because rulers of the current one happen to allow certain world-changing abuses. And they will continue to do so. Assuming abuses you personally happen to like as the default state, even though they contradict player expectations of DnD and high fantasy in general, and don't even exist in most editions, is one of the the key reasons Tomes fail.

Secondly, in my experience, chain binding is only spot-nerfed once you actually start trying to wish for tons of magic items, pick up spellcasting minions, or build up a huge demonic army, and group agreements talk about not abusing planar binding rather than not using it at all.

So basically chain binding is spot nerfed once you start chain binding.

In such a scenario, binding angels to feed peasants isn't going to trigger nerfs or be considered abusive anymore than binding one or two devils to guard the party's base of operations while they're out or binding an archon to go scout things out would.

Binding a handful of angels to feed peasants won't trigger a serious discussion on Planar Binding's brokenness. And it also won't change anything in the world significantly. It is just a DnD version of humanitarian help.

But binding an army of angels to police your whole society and reeducate the peasants into whatever jobs you feel are appropriate for them... yeah that's not going to fly.

A single wizard changing a whole society overnight with tons of items is infeasible, yes, but we're talking about starting small. Crafting two decanters of endless water to help a drought-stricken city, or a few lyres of building to help rebuild a war-torn city, or a pair of crystal balls to form the start of a communication network among nearby cities, is not going to break the bank, and the wizard can make incremental improvements in between adventures--not only to build up his gold and XP reserves and to give him time to possibly find like-minded casters to help out, but also to let the groups he helped get used to the new developments to ensure they use those gifts to best effect, rather than just dumping a whole magitech upgrade on them and expecting them to cope.

Yeah of course. That might work. But that is not guaranteed to work. Until the point where your enhanced society creates a wizard academy that produces wizards conditioned to be productive members of society and trained to both defend it and further develop its infrastructure (which, depending on core assumptions on how XP work might not be possible at all), all the positive changes you create can be undone if a less charitable wizard rolls into town, kills you, and plunders all the the items from the populace to peddle them to a visiting arcane, or if you just get eaten in some random dungeon and leave a power vacuum.

Or the local benevolent wizard might put the whole thing far in the bottom of his schedule, because dealing with various evil wizards, and dragons, and beholders, and organizing societies of adventurers to help him in dealing with them understandably comes first. Which returns us to my initial point in this thread.

Unless the setting is massively saturated with hundreds and even thousands of high-level characters (which, to be fair, is true for FR or Golarion) and fairly stable, I just don't see the fact that a handful of people have powers theoretically allowing for a massive societal impact as much of a problem.

[Emerald]

Firstly, if we're talking about working through the "realistic" implications of D&D magic as you posited, rather than what a given DM would do to maintain intra-party balance and prevent plot derailment, houserules and gentlemen's agreements don't enter into things.

But they very much do. Rooting your supposed default DnD setting in very specific quirks of a particular edition that are very much not used by the that edition playerbase is stupid.

Coming up with "obvious" houserules is also stupid, because every group is going to have their own houserules, and a default setting by definition the setting before houseruled modifications have been made.

Just in general, settings go through editions without suddenly suffering major changes because rulers of the current one happen to allow certain world-changing abuses. And they will continue to do so. Assuming abuses you personally happen to like as the default state, even though they contradict player expectations of DnD and high fantasy in general, and don't even exist in most editions, is one of the the key reasons Tomes fail.

See, you started talking about people making "realistic" D&D settings, but now you're talking about player expectations of D&D settings. If settings designed according to player (and designer) expectations matched up with settings designed according to what the rules actually encourage and imply, we wouldn't have the Tomes deconstructing all of that and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

In the default setting-as-envisioned-by-most-players of 3e, the vast majority of NPCs are 1st-level mud-farming serfs in a basically medieval world, and spellcasters (aside from PCs and BBEGs, of course) are rare and mysterious, hence the many complaints about magic "not feeling magical" and many botched attempts to run low-magic games. In the default setting-as-actually-stated-by-rules of 3e, 0.4% of the time a village of only 20 people will contain 1 commoner of 13th level, 2 of 6th level, and 4 of 3rd level, and every single city of over 25,000 people has 4 clerics, 4 druids, 4 sorcerers, and 4 wizards of at least 13th level and there's a 96% chance of having at least one cleric or druid capable of casting 9th-level spells.

Even idly pondering about what those casters might do in their spare time gives you a very different setting than the one players expect, hence this thread.

Secondly, in my experience, chain binding is only spot-nerfed once you actually start trying to wish for tons of magic items, pick up spellcasting minions, or build up a huge demonic army, and group agreements talk about not abusing planar binding rather than not using it at all.

So basically chain binding is spot nerfed once you start chain binding.

No, chain binding is spot nerfed if you use it for breaking things. As I said in the very next paragraph, if the outcome of "I sit there for a few hours and bind a thousand outsiders to my will" is not "...to give me a bazillion magic items!" but rather is "...to feed and clothe a bunch of peasants!", it's not gonna get a nerf.

But binding an army of angels to police your whole society and reeducate the peasants into whatever jobs you feel are appropriate for them... yeah that's not going to fly.

And why not? Putting aside the campaigns I've run or been in where the whole point was building a kingdom or improving the world in general, pushing around a bunch of peasants rarely triggers a nerf from most DMs, in my experience. Anyone trying to break the game isn't going to do it by pushing around said peasants, and if they were you can already pick up a bunch of loyal minions with Leadership to do whatever you'd do with Operation Angelic Utopia.

Yeah of course. That might work. But that is not guaranteed to work. Until the point where your enhanced society creates a wizard academy that produces wizards conditioned to be productive members of society and trained to both defend it and further develop its infrastructure (which, depending on core assumptions on how XP work might not be possible at all), all the positive changes you create can be undone if a less charitable wizard rolls into town, kills you, and plunders all the the items from the populace to peddle them to a visiting arcane, or if you just get eaten in some random dungeon and leave a power vacuum.

Yes, that's entirely possible, in which case the benevolent wizard in question isn't the guy who kickstarts the Magical Revolution, and successive benevolent wizards can keep trying it until one experiment makes it to the self-sustaining stage. We're not pinning the world's hopes and dreams on a single particular character, here, we're saying some single character can kichstart things, as opposed to the real world where no single character, no matter how talented or motivated, could reshape a whole society all by himself.

Or the local benevolent wizard might put the whole thing far in the bottom of his schedule, because dealing with various evil wizards, and dragons, and beholders, and organizing societies of adventurers to help him in dealing with them understandably comes first. Which returns us to my initial point in this thread.

Unless the setting is massively saturated with hundreds and even thousands of high-level characters (which, to be fair, is true for FR or Golarion) and fairly stable, I just don't see the fact that a handful of people have powers theoretically allowing for a massive societal impact as much of a problem.

Just because PCs routinely encounter level-appropriate evil every single day of their careers doesn't mean the same holds for everyone else. If the world is so finely balanced between Good and Evil that someone can't take a few days off here or there to relax and possibly start experimenting with uplifting some villages, then (A) Evil would swoop into the resulting vacuum and crush the world forever the first time an adventuring party suffered some character deaths and had to go back to town to spend their gold resurrecting the dead ones, and more importantly (B) the first time any BBEG was killed Good would swoop into the resulting vacuum and turn the world into a paradise.

There are good dragons balancing out evil ones, good wizards balancing out evil ones, societies of aberration-slayers balancing out beholders, githyanki balancing out mind flayers--not in exact numbers, but in the general sense that there's got to be some reason civilization isn't already a smoking demon-infested ruin. In such scenario, societies can spare a few good guys to try to improve things for the little people.

[Wiseman]

Can anyone explain to me how exactly "Chain Binding" works? I was never all that clear on the method.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Can anyone explain to me how exactly "Chain Binding" works? I was never all that clear on the method.

My understanding is that it goes basically like this:

1. Acquire 3 wishes from an Efreet
2. Wish for a LE candle of invocation
3. Get 2 wishes
4. Use candle to get another Efreet
5. Go to #1

There are other ways of doing it, I think.