D&D General D&D, magic, and the mundane medieval

[Paul Farquhar]

one of the fun things we did on tic tok earlier this year was a series of videos asking what 1 cantrip you would want in real life...

Mending.

Followed by Guidance.

 

[Oofta]

Which makes a campaign really, REALLLY weird when we meet more than the one wizard that's in our group. If wizards are that limited (and note, I still have no idea why we're focused on wizards since clerics and druids would have just as huge of an impact on a setting) then how on earth have we met three of them by the time we're tenth level?

You can't have it both ways. You can't have "wizards and casters are so super duper rare that no one would see one" and "wizards and casters are so common that we bump into several every single adventure".

If you're hitting that it's either a matter of consistency by the DM or an issue of perspective. While casters in general are fairly rare in my campaign PCs run into more casters than your average Joe would because they seek out trouble. I'm not likely as an individual to come in contact with, say, a terrorist but I'm not in military intelligence. A firefighter likely sees far more houses ablaze in a week than I will in a lifetime. PCs are called in when there are extraordinary events and individuals.

On a related note, one of the things that bug me about the MM is that so many of the high CR monsters are casters. As I said, I prefer not to use them often but the number of entries for enemies above CR 10 that are not casters of some type is pretty limited.

EDIT: ninja'd by Pemerton.

 

[pemerton]

one of the things that bug me about the MM is that so many of the high CR monsters are casters. As I said, I prefer not to use them often but the number of entries for enemies above CR 10 that are not casters of some type is pretty limited.

Isn't there a fairly obvious reason for this? Namely, that the system makes it hard to build mechanically challenging and interesting opponents at those levels without drawing on the spell rules. It's the flipside of the contrast one often sees drawn between fighter and caster PCs at those sorts of levels.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Not when we're discussing whether or not they're mathematicians! I mean, bees build their hives by doing maths without knowing it, but bees aren't mathematicians.

oh god Im sorry I guessed

 

[Hussar]

Not necessarily. Philosophers are pretty rare, but in my life I've met dozens, and have more than one as a friend.

Supervillains are pretty rare, but Superman and the X-Men meet heaps and heaps of them.

What I do think tend to run your way is that a lot of D&D material treats magic-users and clerics as essentially ordinary parts of the social fabric: in Gygax's rules, for instance, all large groups of NPCs tend to have at least a couple hanging out with them, they are indentured into city guards and watches, etc. That part of his game isn't REH-ish at all. 4e D&D seems to me to have a similar vibe. I don't know 5e stuff well enough to comment on it.

By the same token though, you aren't limited to medieval levels of communication and transportation.

How many philosophers did you meet in your home town? Same goes for superhero genre. The supers generally can travel (sometimes very great distances) to meet and greet super villains.

But, in any case, like I said, it's really weird if your world is one where a spell caster of any sort is a one in a million anomaly and we've met three of them last week.

The problem is, the worlds that were built by various authors, particularly golden-age authors, were based on several conceits that RPG's aren't. REH's world is one where anyone who isn't human doesn't really have a culture to speak of. They're locked away in whatever out of the way place that the last surviving generation has settled in until Conan comes along and kills them all. And, we only meet anyone who can do magic at the behest of plot. We need someone who can raise the dead, so, poof, we meet someone who can raise the dead. We need a bad wizard to fight, so, poof, there's Thoth-Amon. It's all 100% based on plot and world building isn't even a consideration.

Once the RPG world hit though, all these questions about how to actually create a plausible world start to intrude. So, we get wizard guilds (is that even really a thing in pre-1970's fantasy literature), entire networks of spell casters that are found throughout the setting. The assumption of classism and outright racism that molded fantasy settings so that each group stayed separate from other groups because it was unthinkable that people wouldn't organize this way. So on and so forth. Which is why newer settings look virtually nothing like classic fantasy settings. The questions and baseline assumptions have changed, and changed significantly, in the past thirty or forty years.

 

[pemerton]

@Hussar, your question about hometown has a cheat answer because my home town is a city of four million people which has two of the world's strongest philosophy departments. And I spent over a decade studying and then teaching in them.

On the details of contemporary worldbuilding I absolutely defer to you: my knowledge of fantasy basically begins and ends with JRRT, REH and Le Guin's Earthsea (I know Elric and Lankhmar only through their RPG incarnations, and what I've heard beyond those).

As you probably know from my past posts, I think that the worldbuilding thing is a bit of an albatross around the neck of FRPGing. It creates these concerns both around GM fidelity to setting ("Am I using too many wizards?") and player fidelity to setting ("No, you can't play a XYZ because there are no XYZs in my world").

That's not to dismiss the importance of setting to RPGing, but you can have setting without world building and then most of these issues go away.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@Hussar, your question about hometown has a cheat answer because my home town is a city of four million people which has two of the world's strongest philosophy departments. And I spent over a decade studying and then teaching in them.

On the details of contemporary worldbuilding I absolutely defer to you: my knowledge of fantasy basically begins and ends with JRRT, REH and Le Guin's Earthsea (I know Elric and Lankhmar only through their RPG incarnations, and what I've heard beyond those).

As you probably know from my past posts, I think that the worldbuilding thing is a bit of an albatross around the neck of FRPGing. It creates these concerns both around GM fidelity to setting ("Am I using too many wizards?") and player fidelity to setting ("No, you can't play a XYZ because there are no XYZs in my world").

That's not to dismiss the importance of setting to RPGing, but you can have setting without world building and then most of these issues go away.

I see setting as a subset of worldbuilding. For me, setting without a larger context is just bad worldbuilding.

 

[Hussar]

Well to put it another way, how many superheroes are there in Smallville? Or from Gotham. New York is a bit different because unlike earlier superhero settings, Marvel decided that everyone starts in New York.

But anyway I do think you get my point. For example how many people lived in your city in 1200 AD.

 

[pemerton]

how many people lived in your city in 1200 AD.

Well as you know, Australia had not been invaded and colonised at that point, and its First Nations didn't build cities.

I had hoped I might provoke you into a thought about the worldbuilding-as-albatross issue!

 

[Hussar]

Well as you know, Australia had not been invaded and colonised at that point, and its First Nations didn't build cities.

I had hoped I might provoke you into a thought about the worldbuilding-as-albatross issue!

Not quite sure what you mean by albatross to be honest.

My point was that it would be reasonable to say that casters are a one in a million thing. But that gets really weird when the pcs stumble across casters in like every adventure.