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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7640188" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Yeah, the arms and armaments tend to be 15th-16th century, but the culture, costumes, architecture, technology, social and political arrangements of most D&D settings tend to be early 19th century. Urban environments very much resemble Dickensian London and not Medieval London. You've got unified nation states with centralized government and standing armies, abundant coinage, and so on and so forth.</p><p></p><p>My theory on this is that there is only so far back into the past someone can extend their imagination. The Medieval World is too many steps removed, to remote, and too alien for most people to imagine, so when they do imagine it they just imagine the 19th century with castles. Gygax, a better student of the history than most, admitted that much of his inspiration for D&D came as much from the American West and the frontier as it did from anything Medieval. I could write a ton on this topic alone, and why I think it is true, but one tidbit that convinces me further is that as we march forward in time so too is our fantasy marching forward in time. More and more fantasy stories are being set explicitly during industrial revolutions, Victorian eras and even settings corresponding to the late 19th century. Eberron is the D&D version of this, having moved the setting from what was more or less Regency England sans gunpowder, to the beginning of the 20th century. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>So you are subtly shifting the conversation here from, "How does society respond to resurrection?" to "How does the society respond to immortality?" And I'm not going to get too much into that except to say that immortality is a big deal, and a lot of my nations are ruled by some sort of immortal figure or figures because their is nothing like immortality to provide political stability. As but one example, one of the nations of my world is actually ruled by a demigod named Pharon, who is literally the immortal son of the goddess of the sun. And yes, it's somewhat an Egyptian trope, but the point is that if you really could have nations ruled by immortal gods, they'd probably would be ruled by immortal gods. Another nation is ruled by immortal (or nigh immortal) alchemists who have discovered the secret of manufacturing youth, and political power is more or less literally distilled in that nation. And so on and so forth.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I don't know why you'd think that except that it's pretty alien to your own cultural mores. But, if your immortal ruler is a provably wise and decent fellow, you are probably pretty much all on board with him continuing, especially if you can look at nations with less political stability or less wise rulers and go, "There but for the grace of Pharon go we."</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Faith? What's faith got to do with it? We're talking about a world were the gods tend to be daily active and meddling in the affairs of mortals and granting them magical puissance. If the least religious nation in the world was less centered on religion than the medieval Catholic church, then it would be a great surprise. The typical daily affairs of the D&D world should be far more religious than they are usually portrayed. Again, that's part and parcel of being unable to reach back very far in ones imagination.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Part of it is a demographics issue. Just how many 5th level casters do you have in the first place? If you can only cure one person in 500 per day, then you might not be able to make a dent in an epidemic. There is also a serious issue that if you case 'cure disease' then your target develops no inherent resistance to the disease and is so quite possibly susceptible to reinfection. So medical knowledge doesn't become obsolete just because you have magic, although it's very important to note that D&D settings tend to have very advanced medical knowledge as well. But, beyond the demographics issue, there is the question of what disease is in the first place. The germ theory of disease that was ultimately vindicated was another (you guessed it) 19th century discovery. It's not at all clear that in a fantasy world germs exist or that disease comes from germs, because the magical theory of the world is still rooted in antiquity. You'll need to decide whether disease is caused by germs, bad smells, evil spirits, or something else. If you decide it's caused by evil spirits, then curing a plague involves a lot more than just curing the effects of the disease, but instead going after the root cause with wards against evil and exorcisms and the like.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>No, of course not. You don't have to go quite as far as Warhammer and Nergal, but in a world were there are sentient embodiments of disease then they will have cultists and servants and even aside from that you'll have madmen and serial killers that spread diseases for their own perverse pleasure. Plus you have problems like ghouls and werewolves. If your demographics are low enough you'll probably have clergy that refuse to cast cure disease on "merely" influenza because they are worried about what might come up later in the day when they are out of spells, and will instead try to treat what is treatable using mundane medical knowledge.</p><p></p><p>As for warfare, you should have the sort of warfare you want. In my game there is a 'Heavy Infantry' feat that allows you to form shield walls and fight in ranks with great efficiency, and one of the things that allows is that if you form a shield wall you get 'Evasion' versus spells that have a reflex save. So you can have heavy Roman style infantry basically weathering fireballs by turtling against such attacks much as they would a rain of arrows. Honestly, one of the reasons there are so few wizards on my battlefields is that they low level wizards don't stand much of a chance, and high level wizards got that way by staying off the battlefield. But of course, I've achieved that by altering and being selective about my rules, not only creating rules that favored low level fighters against magic but also altering magic so that, for example, low level magic always had a range of effect that was lower than could be achieved by low level slingers and archers. And of course my demographics mean that the number of wizards that can fly (moved up to a 4th level spell, BTW) around invisible with a wand of fireballs is pretty darn small anyway, and less certainly than the number of fighters of that level which is itself too low to make an army out of. If you have to make an army out of 2nd level characters, you won't use wizards. Yes, it might be different if you could make armies of 10th level characters, but you can't - in the entire nation of Amalteen where my last campaign started there were like 350,000 people and 1 10th level wizard. There are also some cultural reasons why wizards tend to stay out of politics and keep their heads down, and this further helps to explain why the most common sorts of low level magic items favor fighters and not wizards.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Remove the temporary from that and then you have the problem: create water, create food and water, continual light, wall of stone, wall of iron. But yes, on top of that you have the obvious problems like fabricate and polymorph any object, and Gygax help you if you allow it 'Lyre of Building'. Those are things you need to tweak in cost and mechanics if they aren't going to be campaign breaking.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Your assumption that a wizard can "form it perfectly to your specifications" as an act of will is the big tweak that I've made to tone down a lot of this stuff. What I've been doing is requiring craft skill checks to get the results that you want as well increasing the time required to add fine detail (time isn't instantaneous, it's more like you can do hours of work in minutes), which tends to keep PC wizards under control. And what keeps NPC wizards under control is that Fabricate is a 5th level spell and in my demographics the number of wizards of that level which could actually flood the market with fabricated goods is too small to do so, and they tend to think that they have better things to do with their time anyway. In other words, the time and spell slots of a 10th level wizard is so valuable, that while they in theory replace dozens of blacksmiths in practice this isn't that cost effective because with the same time they could be making dozens of mundane swords, they could be working on things that the blacksmiths can't on their own make.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>This assumes researching and applying magic is easier than technology, and I don't think that needs to be the case.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Oh, by no means am I offended. In fact, I love that you are asking lots of interesting questions. You aren't remotely coming off as overly aggressive. I enjoy the debate, and believe me, if you think you are coming off as a bit aggressive, wait until you see me get rolling.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7640188, member: 4937"] Yeah, the arms and armaments tend to be 15th-16th century, but the culture, costumes, architecture, technology, social and political arrangements of most D&D settings tend to be early 19th century. Urban environments very much resemble Dickensian London and not Medieval London. You've got unified nation states with centralized government and standing armies, abundant coinage, and so on and so forth. My theory on this is that there is only so far back into the past someone can extend their imagination. The Medieval World is too many steps removed, to remote, and too alien for most people to imagine, so when they do imagine it they just imagine the 19th century with castles. Gygax, a better student of the history than most, admitted that much of his inspiration for D&D came as much from the American West and the frontier as it did from anything Medieval. I could write a ton on this topic alone, and why I think it is true, but one tidbit that convinces me further is that as we march forward in time so too is our fantasy marching forward in time. More and more fantasy stories are being set explicitly during industrial revolutions, Victorian eras and even settings corresponding to the late 19th century. Eberron is the D&D version of this, having moved the setting from what was more or less Regency England sans gunpowder, to the beginning of the 20th century. So you are subtly shifting the conversation here from, "How does society respond to resurrection?" to "How does the society respond to immortality?" And I'm not going to get too much into that except to say that immortality is a big deal, and a lot of my nations are ruled by some sort of immortal figure or figures because their is nothing like immortality to provide political stability. As but one example, one of the nations of my world is actually ruled by a demigod named Pharon, who is literally the immortal son of the goddess of the sun. And yes, it's somewhat an Egyptian trope, but the point is that if you really could have nations ruled by immortal gods, they'd probably would be ruled by immortal gods. Another nation is ruled by immortal (or nigh immortal) alchemists who have discovered the secret of manufacturing youth, and political power is more or less literally distilled in that nation. And so on and so forth. I don't know why you'd think that except that it's pretty alien to your own cultural mores. But, if your immortal ruler is a provably wise and decent fellow, you are probably pretty much all on board with him continuing, especially if you can look at nations with less political stability or less wise rulers and go, "There but for the grace of Pharon go we." Faith? What's faith got to do with it? We're talking about a world were the gods tend to be daily active and meddling in the affairs of mortals and granting them magical puissance. If the least religious nation in the world was less centered on religion than the medieval Catholic church, then it would be a great surprise. The typical daily affairs of the D&D world should be far more religious than they are usually portrayed. Again, that's part and parcel of being unable to reach back very far in ones imagination. Part of it is a demographics issue. Just how many 5th level casters do you have in the first place? If you can only cure one person in 500 per day, then you might not be able to make a dent in an epidemic. There is also a serious issue that if you case 'cure disease' then your target develops no inherent resistance to the disease and is so quite possibly susceptible to reinfection. So medical knowledge doesn't become obsolete just because you have magic, although it's very important to note that D&D settings tend to have very advanced medical knowledge as well. But, beyond the demographics issue, there is the question of what disease is in the first place. The germ theory of disease that was ultimately vindicated was another (you guessed it) 19th century discovery. It's not at all clear that in a fantasy world germs exist or that disease comes from germs, because the magical theory of the world is still rooted in antiquity. You'll need to decide whether disease is caused by germs, bad smells, evil spirits, or something else. If you decide it's caused by evil spirits, then curing a plague involves a lot more than just curing the effects of the disease, but instead going after the root cause with wards against evil and exorcisms and the like. No, of course not. You don't have to go quite as far as Warhammer and Nergal, but in a world were there are sentient embodiments of disease then they will have cultists and servants and even aside from that you'll have madmen and serial killers that spread diseases for their own perverse pleasure. Plus you have problems like ghouls and werewolves. If your demographics are low enough you'll probably have clergy that refuse to cast cure disease on "merely" influenza because they are worried about what might come up later in the day when they are out of spells, and will instead try to treat what is treatable using mundane medical knowledge. As for warfare, you should have the sort of warfare you want. In my game there is a 'Heavy Infantry' feat that allows you to form shield walls and fight in ranks with great efficiency, and one of the things that allows is that if you form a shield wall you get 'Evasion' versus spells that have a reflex save. So you can have heavy Roman style infantry basically weathering fireballs by turtling against such attacks much as they would a rain of arrows. Honestly, one of the reasons there are so few wizards on my battlefields is that they low level wizards don't stand much of a chance, and high level wizards got that way by staying off the battlefield. But of course, I've achieved that by altering and being selective about my rules, not only creating rules that favored low level fighters against magic but also altering magic so that, for example, low level magic always had a range of effect that was lower than could be achieved by low level slingers and archers. And of course my demographics mean that the number of wizards that can fly (moved up to a 4th level spell, BTW) around invisible with a wand of fireballs is pretty darn small anyway, and less certainly than the number of fighters of that level which is itself too low to make an army out of. If you have to make an army out of 2nd level characters, you won't use wizards. Yes, it might be different if you could make armies of 10th level characters, but you can't - in the entire nation of Amalteen where my last campaign started there were like 350,000 people and 1 10th level wizard. There are also some cultural reasons why wizards tend to stay out of politics and keep their heads down, and this further helps to explain why the most common sorts of low level magic items favor fighters and not wizards. Remove the temporary from that and then you have the problem: create water, create food and water, continual light, wall of stone, wall of iron. But yes, on top of that you have the obvious problems like fabricate and polymorph any object, and Gygax help you if you allow it 'Lyre of Building'. Those are things you need to tweak in cost and mechanics if they aren't going to be campaign breaking. Your assumption that a wizard can "form it perfectly to your specifications" as an act of will is the big tweak that I've made to tone down a lot of this stuff. What I've been doing is requiring craft skill checks to get the results that you want as well increasing the time required to add fine detail (time isn't instantaneous, it's more like you can do hours of work in minutes), which tends to keep PC wizards under control. And what keeps NPC wizards under control is that Fabricate is a 5th level spell and in my demographics the number of wizards of that level which could actually flood the market with fabricated goods is too small to do so, and they tend to think that they have better things to do with their time anyway. In other words, the time and spell slots of a 10th level wizard is so valuable, that while they in theory replace dozens of blacksmiths in practice this isn't that cost effective because with the same time they could be making dozens of mundane swords, they could be working on things that the blacksmiths can't on their own make. This assumes researching and applying magic is easier than technology, and I don't think that needs to be the case. Oh, by no means am I offended. In fact, I love that you are asking lots of interesting questions. You aren't remotely coming off as overly aggressive. I enjoy the debate, and believe me, if you think you are coming off as a bit aggressive, wait until you see me get rolling. [/QUOTE]
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