Constructing D&D's Default World

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 10:12 pm

K, right. Resource acquisition isn't the motivation of most villains. Revenge over perceived wrongs is a common one. Not having enough jewels/slaves doesn't work for a 'wish economy' villain. I can't think of a non-Golarion Kitchen - Sink Setting that uses other planets, though I recall the first dual class wizard earned his 'fighter level' stabbing Barsoom natives - but I can't think of any settings that include any type of focus on other planets - planes address that need in standard D&D.

Regarding the criteria, I understood the basis of this thread to make a coherent setting that supports the core assumptions of D&D, requiring changes to cosmology, background and rules that don't support that settings apparent assumptions. Thus, a coherent setting seems the primary goal.

Without arguing too much on what the minimum requirement to qualify as 'kitchen-sink', I think it has more to do with the kinds of stories you can tell and less about what specific objects there are. Intelligent flying whales are possible in every setting; they potentially add something to every setting; failure to include them doesn't, by itself, disqualify a setting from being described as a kitchen sink.

Evil planetary empires fall in that same category.

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sun Mar 29, 2015 11:51 pm

A kitchen sink fantasy game still qualifies as kitchen sink if you have no planetary empires, but it is worse at being kitchen sink. For a kitchen sink game, having more possibilities accounted for is, all else being equal, flat-out better than having less.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 12:45 am

DSMatticus - your post is correct, the points you have raised are correct, and it still isn't enough to prevent Greater Teleport planet hopping.

A large enough number of demons have at-will Greater Teleport, so can presumably teleport "up" as far as they have a clear enough visual to go, and then repeat that process until they're outside the atmosphere, and then repeat it again with blobs of the vacuum of space until they've got the idea that practically all space fits the description of "here be bugger all", then repeat it in fewer hops than they would otherwise need until they're within the atmosphere of the planet they actually want to invade, then just add a few more hops to get from the atmosphere to the ground.

The only variable that changes is the number of at-will Greater Teleports required for your first foray to Pluto, or the Alpha Centauri system, or the Andromeda galaxy. Or the planet Transsexual in the Transylvania galaxy for all I care.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 1:22 am

There is no clear way to define the limits of vision. You can see galaxies millions of light-years away, but to you they are just balls of light in the sky. You can see a traffic sign for miles, but if you want to read it that's a distance generously measured in hundreds of feet. On "flat" terrain, the curve of the Earth will pull things out of your line of sight after three miles, and I don't think anyone would ever say they are comfortable sketching objects they can see on the horizon.

Mars is 140,000,000 miles away. Teleporting to Mars ten miles at a time would take 972 days - two and a half years. You could travel for an actual month and not be sure you were making progress at all. It's not impossible, but two and a half years is a long fucking time to chase a ball in the sky. Hilariously, when you arrive at your destination, Mars will be on the other side of its orbit, and you will need to wait another year for it to return - unless you chased Mars along its orbit, in which case you're an idiot because Mars is ten times faster than you and you'll never catch it.

Edit: I'm not saying it's impossible, but after a month of continuous, twenty-four hour labor you would be farther away than when you started (because orbits). I don't know what sort of cosmological understanding you'd posit among the denizens of hell, but the amount required to accomplish this and not chase your tail infinitely is actually kind of nontrivial and implementing it requires keeping your bearings in space while aiming for an empty point in that space. And that's just Mars.

RadiantPhoenix · Post by **RadiantPhoenix** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 1:25 am

By my calcs, assuming the universe is expanding at 70 km/s/Mpc, every meter you can move per round towards your target relative to that target allows you to travel 7.74 Lightyears, assuming unlimited patience.

I would estimate 1km as within an order of magnitude of the correct eyesight-based GT distance, so you could reach Pluto, but not the other side of the galaxy.

Of course... patience is not unlimited, and it would take you almost a month to cover the Earth-moon distance at this rate, if you never rested or messed up.

Stubbazubba · Post by **Stubbazubba** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 2:23 am

What's to stop the denizens of one Hellish planetoid from creating a telescope that can glimpse the details of an alien atmosphere, or at least determine that there is, in fact, an atmosphere with clouds or what-not around that ball in the sky? I'm honestly asking, because I don't know what kind of tech level that kind of telescope would really require. If such a telescope could be made with fantasy iron age technology (or whatever we're allowing planar beings to have here), then seeing clouds ought to be enough to teleport into them: it doesn't take much to get a good idea of what a cloud is like once you see there is one over there.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 3:01 am

I also don't know what kind of magical or technological tricks someone could pull to shorten their trip time, and what sort of gains they would imply. In part because I haven't thought about whether or not there are magical shortcuts and have no idea what sort of technology and cosmological understanding the D&D world is supposed to have, and in part because the limitations are inherently fuzzy enough that it's difficult to make an objective assessment to begin with. It's one big "ehh, I 'unno" all around.

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 4:00 am

Honestly when I was describing the hell planetoids I imagined (and this is a point that I actually did not make clear at all in my posts, mostly due to thinking it was mostly irrelevant) a series of planets that are smaller than earth (hence planetoids rather than planets), but much closer together, to the point where you could look up and see them in the sky as slightly smaller than the moon. Like no need for telescopes or whatever other fuckery to find out what they are, you can look up and actually see them and identify them as something distinct from the stars. (And yes I know physics is going to say "fuck you" to that kind of planetary formation. Different plane of existence, different rules, plus fantasy. I don't really care).

So the question really boils down to, can someone teleport to the moon with no better information about the moon than what they can tell from looking up at it (and having some idea that it is in fact an actual place rather than a big spirit in the sky or something)?

That said, I doubt that will actually change anyone's opinion on whether it's possible or not. The same people against using Greater Teleport to go to a planet you haven't physically been to before are probably still against the idea of Greater Teleporting to the moon. But it does avoid all of the questions about getting a telescope or knowing enough about astronomy to understand that dot of light is in fact a planet instead of a star like all of the other dots of light in the sky.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 7:10 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Now you might ask, if we're going up to Evil Planetary Godkings, why aren't we allowing things to go up one more notch to Evil Space Popes, rulers of multi-planet masses of evil? And the truth is, we actually probably should do that. The final boss of the game is merely the highest tier you intend to write on the grounds that you don't think that enough people will care about a new vista to make it worth the page and conceptual space. Not because there literally are not and cannot be new obstacles to overcome. It's D&D, you should never weep because there are no more lands to conquer. Never.

That's actually an absurd and impossible demand. There will always be a highest boss. The fact that you can't write infinite content for something will make that true. So since there will be a highest boss you might as well plan around trying to make that coherent. There also are limits of power even if you tried to write a game with no upper power limit, and limits of power means there are limited obstacles to overcome before you even start writing a game. D&D characters are incredibly high powered but it is possible to go higher, and if you did so and successfully wrote Creatures of Light and Darkness the RPG (which I would fucking love) you would still reach a point where obstacles and challenges fall away and cannot be replaced. When characters can move to any point in space instantaneously (as several CoLaD characters do) that removes obstacles you can create in the movement game. When characters are literally undefeatable like the Steel General that removes obstacles you can create in the combat game. When characters can time travel and rebirth themselves and see all and know all and a thousand other things you will eventually reach a point where there are no more obstacles you can overcome and no more lands you can conquer. It's unavoidable even if someone could write a game that moved to those heights of power. The only game that actually can advance endlessly in power is one where no one actually gains meaningful abilities. 4E could probably be modified to allow infinite successions of space popes but that's only because they'd all be orcs with +1million, +10 million, and +100 million added to each stat.

FrankTrollman wrote:So you ran a game that was E10 and people thought that was OK. Good for you. But other D&D players still find purpose in going to 11. And if that bothers you, you are in the wrong game.

It was E13 and part of my argument is that's the highest power level that the D&D game can support. It's not the highest power level I personally like so I stopped writing there, it's that if you want to go above it D&D doesn't have a game for you. There isn't a story that can be told with 17th level Wizards played by the rules unless you ignore massive swathes of them, and if you're ignoring most of the games rules you aren't really playing the game. If you want to play ever upward of 13th level you just have to start playing a different game. Characters in Munchausen or Amber Diceless can fight space popes but characters in D&D can't because D&D doesn't work there. Your ideas are in the wrong game, not mine.

Now if you'd like to posit a fictional game that transitions seamlessly ever upwards through Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, DC Comics, then Creatures of Light and Darkness then I would agree with you for that game but D&D isn't it and that's what I'm writing for.

Chamomile wrote:A kitchen sink fantasy game still qualifies as kitchen sink if you have no planetary empires, but it is worse at being kitchen sink. For a kitchen sink game, having more possibilities accounted for is, all else being equal, flat-out better than having less.

But whether all else is equal is the question. The question is "Is the loss of coherence worth the content added". I would argue that the clusterfuck immediately surrounding people trying to figure out how planetary hell empires would even work indicates that their costs are extremely high both in conceptual space taken up and coherency. Those are important resources in a group storytelling activity like D&D because having players not understand what's happening, how, or why is very hazardous to their ability to participate.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 7:26 am

Dean, you quoted me saying that the game's highest boss was the last one you had time and inclination to write based on how many people would use it vs. how much effort and page space to put it in the game. That is what you quoted me saying. Now, before I say a single fucking thing to any of your arguments, I want you to explain how you think that's an absurd or impossible stance. Hell, I want you to explain how you think that shit you just wrote was a response to what you quoted me saying at all.

- Frank

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 7:35 am

What is the meaningful difference between "picking that area over there, guessing that it has a certain description based on areas just like it that you've spent a few rounds teleporting in, and trying to Greater Teleport there based on that description" and "trying to Greater Teleport somewhere you have only ever heard of by clear description" as you explicitly can do?

I must admit, my first thought was to see if there was a "Range: Trollolol" scrying spell that targets locations instead of people, and lo and behold, no dice.

As a comparison point, are the Viking 1 photos of Cydonia a good enough description to GT to Cydonia and kill some sectoids?

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 7:50 am

Omegonthesane wrote:What is the meaningful difference between "picking that area over there, guessing that it has a certain description based on areas just like it that you've spent a few rounds teleporting in, and trying to Greater Teleport there based on that description" and "trying to Greater Teleport somewhere you have only ever heard of by clear description" as you explicitly can do?

It's the difference between knowledge and inference. Whether or not that's a real difference, well... find a bunch of philosophy majors in one place and ask. Observe the resulting argument.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 8:04 am

Not because there literally are not and cannot be new obstacles to overcome. It's D&D, you should never weep because there are no more lands to conquer. Never.

That's actually an absurd and impossible demand. There will always be a highest boss. The fact that you can't write infinite content for something will make that true. So since there will be a highest boss you might as well plan around trying to make that coherent. There also are limits of power even if you tried to write a game with no upper power limit, and limits of power means there are limited obstacles to overcome before you even start writing a game. D&D characters are incredibly high powered but it is possible to go higher, and if you did so and successfully wrote Creatures of Light and Darkness the RPG (which I would fucking love) you would still reach a point where obstacles and challenges fall away and cannot be replaced. When characters can move to any point in space instantaneously (as several CoLaD characters do) that removes obstacles you can create in the movement game. When characters are literally undefeatable like the Steel General that removes obstacles you can create in the combat game. When characters can time travel and rebirth themselves and see all and know all and a thousand other things you will eventually reach a point where there are no more obstacles you can overcome and no more lands you can conquer. It's unavoidable even if someone could write a game that moved to those heights of power. The only game that actually can advance endlessly in power is one where no one actually gains meaningful abilities. 4E could probably be modified to allow infinite successions of space popes but that's only because they'd all be orcs with +1million, +10 million, and +100 million added to each stat.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 5:36 pm

I keep wondering how neither Spelljammer nor Planescape gave us any sort of evil space popes. for D&D - those sorts of settings would seem ideal for antagonists who had already conquered uncountable realms / planets / planes / targets for greater teleport and now had their sights sets on yours.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 5:52 pm

While I can't vouch for Spelljammer, I always thought Vlaakith CLVII, Lich Queen of the Githyanki, was a good approximation to the evil space Pope in terms of culture. In terms of power base, Asmodeus certainly seems to fit the bill, ostensibly the ruler of all 9 layers of Baator and engaged in multiple wars.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Mar 30, 2015 5:56 pm

Ah, so Dean is specifically attempting to pick a fight with a sentence that he is taking out of context and that's why the things he's babbling about seem like gibberish.

Josh wrote:I keep wondering how neither Spelljammer nor Planescape gave us any sort of evil space popes. for D&D - those sorts of settings would seem ideal for antagonists who had already conquered uncountable realms and now had their sights sets on yours.

The False Worlds of the Ilithid were basically that, but there wasn't ny Space Pope because the Ilithid empire is apparently decentralized. The Beholder Tyrant Ships are a bit more like that, in that The Great Mother has a fleet of Tyrant Ships that each have a Hive Mother dominating them.

If your game went on long enough to want to have a space pope to fight, The Great Mother of Orbkind wouldn't be a bad candidate.

-Username17

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 6:36 pm

Frank you're thrashing. You say the game should be able to go on forever, the characters gaining power forever, and there always being new bosses to fight and lands to conquer. That's wrong, and you're talking about D&D which has real limits and that even in a fictional game your goals are implausible. Stop maneuvering, it's cowardly.

Anyway what I want to talk about now is Demons and Devils and greater teleport. I don't think their world would look anything like yours or mine. A world where your bathroom could be on a different continent than your kitchen without inconveniencing you would look a lot different. The very concept of cities or towns forming around mutual areas of protection makes no sense, because the bandits are always next door. This would also change architecture unrecognizably since most defensive structures, even walls, no longer make sense. Armies would also look nothing like the Blood War is supposed to as forced marches don't work when everyone can just be places instantly.

Armies, forts, and battlements are extremely important to the imagery of D&D's Hell. It's actually hard to find imagery of Hell that doesn't feature fortrresses and defensive architecture that Hell's mechanics make pointless.

With the goal of maintaining the existence most of the classic elements of Hell I suggest that only Demons and Devils above CR 6 gain Greater Teleport. The imagery of the bat winged Demon appearing in a cloud of brimstone seems more appropriate for fiends of great power than Dretchs. By creating a lesser demon/greater demon divide you create the set of fiends that needs to be led to battle en mass and those that do the leading. It's good for the game if Horned Devils can bamf around a battlefiend but it gives that same Horned Devil a reason to build walls and towers around his domain if not every Lemure can do the same.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 6:42 pm

Dean, remember when you quoted me saying this:

FrankTrollman wrote:The final boss of the game is merely the highest tier you intend to write on the grounds that you don't think that enough people will care about a new vista to make it worth the page and conceptual space. Not because there literally are not and cannot be new obstacles to overcome.

You fucking copied that and pasted it in to your own statement. You obviously read it. Why are you being such a Zak S and insisting that I am "dodging" or whatever the fuck instead of taking aim at my actual stated position as quoted by you, you stupid asshole!?

-Username17

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 7:31 pm

Not pictured in this thread: D&D's default world.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 8:02 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Dean, you quoted me saying that the game's highest boss was the last one you had time and inclination to write based on how many people would use it vs. how much effort and page space to put it in the game. That is what you quoted me saying. Now, before I say a single fucking thing to any of your arguments, I want you to explain how you think that's an absurd or impossible stance. Hell, I want you to explain how you think that shit you just wrote was a response to what you quoted me saying at all.- Frank

It's not impossible, but it is really stupid. All games end, and all games should end. You'll have to convince me that ending for lack of content is a tragic occurrence, because I really don't buy it. As a game goes on, some people get sick of their characters; some people get excited about new systems; house rules get proposed that can't be applied until the next games; players who aren't currently the MC get the itch to run a game. I played two 5-year-long games with the same game group, one AD&D game and then a 3.0 game after that. One ended explicitly because the system didn't really support high level the play; for the other it was probably a major factor. In neither case was I personally sad to see it go. Honestly, I think that social dynamics inhibit people from proposing that a game should end, and there's positive utility in building in break points that shake up existing groups.

I realize that will be a controversial position, so let's assume you don't believe that planned expiration does good things for a game. In that case, the question is what cost we pay for infinite scaling. We shouldn't be willing to pay very much, because only a tiny number of people will ever benefit from it and the benefit is fairly minor anyway. The costs are substantial, and there are two. First: significance. It's a really awesome feeling if the last boss of a campaign is also the last boss of the setting. If you work your way up and take out the biggest bad guy in the book, that's a feeling of accomplishment, and it also means your characters get a better happily-ever-after. Writing bigger enemies into the book makes whatever your characters achieve less satisfying. Also, your rules will be worse the more levels they're supposed to support. I suppose if you make no plans at all for epic scaling, your standard rules won't suffer, but epic will be terrible. Building in the potential for scaling puts constraints on your design for the tiers you care about.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 8:49 pm

Orion wrote:You'll have to convince me that ending for lack of content is a tragic occurrence, because I really don't buy it.

I submit that it is better for an open ended game to end because you are done with the game than because the game has stopped working. I find this position to be so obvious that I literally feel that I do not have to provide any supporting arguments at all.

This is like being challenged to defend my position of "not wanting nails to be hammered into my dick."

-Username17

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 8:51 pm

Games don't automatically end just because people are done with them. Something has to be done to make them end.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 8:55 pm

That runs so counter to my experience with RPGs that I honestly don't even know how to parse it.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 9:25 pm

Orion wrote:First: significance. It's a really awesome feeling if the last boss of a campaign is also the last boss of the setting. If you work your way up and take out the biggest bad guy in the book, that's a feeling of accomplishment, and it also means your characters get a better happily-ever-after.

No. It means your game as in "product" has an official victory condition, and every game as in "process" which doesn't end with satisfying this specific condition is an official loss. A definite biggest baddest guy makes the game worse.

But in a theoretically infinitely scaling product, the big bad of a single game is just the guy who you happened to kill last.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Tue Mar 31, 2015 9:43 pm

Franktrollman wrote:I submit that it is better for an open ended game to end because you are done with the game than because the game has stopped working.

I submit that the game telling you "The game is over" is superior to telling people they can play it after it has stopped working. I would be pleased as punch if D&D let you fight kings, demon princes, gods, intergalactic space popes, then multidimensional nevermonsters but it doesn't. It stops working and telling people they can go ahead and enjoy their epic battles with space popes is lying to them because the game broke down 2 bosses before that. It's not an option unless you get them to switch to Munchausen, which I have already said.

Your argument was that it's super important for Asmodeus to own a planet because that's bigger than the thing the last guy could have owned and it's important for D&D to have bigger and bigger bad guys so you can keep playing and upgrading and fighting. But that's wrong because you can't keep playing and fighting forever because all the rules crumble to dust and sand, which I've already said. So there's no point in ever making stats for or even allowing the existence of the multidimensional nevermonster's bigger brother because there's no one to fight him and there can't be.

Starmaker wrote:No. It means your game as in "product" has an official victory condition, and every game as in "process" which doesn't end with satisfying this specific condition is an official loss.

That doesn't make sense. I have never played a game where I killed Asmodeus or Nerull or whatever and none of my campaigns ended with my party giving a depressing speech that even though we saved the townspeople from destruction this is but one town and the evil of the world is ceaseless and will crash upon it like the tide until our actions are as nought. A party never ends a game shouting "Our impact is meaningless when seen in the fullness of time. We are all just meat slowly falling into a grave." then curling up on the ground to await death.

I doubt anyone here has ever played a game where they killed all the evil gods and demon lords. We still don't consider every game we've ever played pointless.