Castles of Crystal, Wars of Genocide!

[solous]

Thanks for the reply SHARK

I'm quite glad to learn that there is a good chance for your world to be published, and it's nice (and quite logical IMHO) that the players in your campaign can indeed become "history figures", so to speak....

At the moment, I'm trying to make up my mind between searching for all the things related to your campaign on enworld or just waiting for a nice big book to be published about it

Whatever, congratulations for all the work you've done so far, and my best wishes for any publishing deals (yes this last one isn't as altruistic as it may seem, since I definitely like what i read about your campaign )

 

[CrusadeDave]

Question about Divination in Shark's world.

I want to start out by simply saying that this thread has been the most inspirational and useful source of information for my homebrew campaign setting, that I only wish that I would have had this information before I sent in my WotC setting 1-Pager. So many of the flaws in my campign world have been exposed by this line of thought.

So Thank You.

SHARK, in your campaign setting, you've got to have at least 20-30 High level diviners/Loremasters or ArchClerics/Contemplatives who commune with their god on a hourly basis.

At some point, Epic level characters have the ability to become omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Obviously the way for Epic level characters to not feel Omnipotent is have them face off against other Epic Level characters. SHARK, you've proven that it is possible to scale encounters against an Epic Level Party.

To me, as a DM and world creator, having characters be all-knowing and ever-present are much bigger obstacles to good storytelling. How can a DM present an enjoyable scenario to players when their characters can unravel any mystery and go straight to the heart of the matter with the right Epic level divination, scry, teleport without error? Does everything just become Buff, Scry, Teleport?

SHARK, I'd love to know what techniques you use to keep your Epic Level characters from knowing everything and being everywhere at once?

In the campaign world I'm building specifically for characters to have fun playing 1st level to 30th+ I'm playing around with two ideas to combat this problem, and wondered if anyone has any ideas or feedback.

First, I have a benevolent force at work in my world. This force is, of course, trying to destroy the world. It has tapped into the "temporal" streams and is attempting to manipulate the actions of the world. One of the ways it does this is to act as a "gateway" for divination magic. If someone is looking for an answer, whether arcanely or clerically, the benevolent force has the option of trying to change the result of the divination in order to further it's own purposes. This could mean not allowing it to work, leading the party to kill the wrong person, or allowing the party to succeed in it's goal, as it will have unintended consequences.

The other idea I have is sort of a humanity check. As a character starts stretching the limits of what the human brain can comprehend, with regards to knowledge, time or space, (Not power, since humanoids are flawed to alwas seek more power) they start losing their sanity. Continuous failures of a humanity check start making characters more delusional, thinking they are gods, and generally losing their sanity.

Thanks.

 

[mmadsen]

Perhaps this thread has run its course, but I'd like to continue discussing the original topic; it's interesting.

To reiterate, I think there are a few reasons why people might be apprehensive about epic-level play:

1. The rules break down at high levels. Actually, they don't seem to break down too badly, but older versions certainly did -- and people remember that.
2. They have no experience playing at epic levels. It takes a long time to get a party up to epic levels (if you don't skip past any levels), and the game definitely changes by the time you get there. People are apprehensive because Epic D&D is a different game they don't quite know how to play.
3. The campaign loses logical continuity. If the campaign wasn't designed from the get-go for epic levels, then its history stops making sense once we introduce epic elements. "Hey, where were all these 30th-level Wizards the last time the Chaos Lords attacked? Why were we saving the world?"
4. The consequences of epic magic (or even high-level magic) are impossible to predict. The more magical the game becomes, the harder it is to understand anything. Ask Aristotle what the world would look like with nuclear weapons and networked computers. Right, he'd have no frickin' clue.
5. How do you stock a dungeon for four 30th-level guys?

That's a start.

 

[seasong]

One of the issues I have with SHARK's setting (i.e., a reason I couldn't run it) is because with armies in the millions, and people marching to war all the time, I have to wonder how long until the population has dropped below the threshold necessary to support epic events!

So I started playing with demographics, slavishly following the D&D rules for aging, etc.

It turns out I was wrong... in a really horrible way. Assuming a city of 65,000 (which requires 135,000 rural folk, and minimum 2 5th level clerics with the plant domain), there will be sufficient clerics, of sufficient level, to cast raise dead 5,900 times per day, and resurrection 3,900 times per day. Assuming a military force of 1% of the entire population (20,000 soldiers), almost half of the force can be raised from the dead each day.

War in SHARK's world would consist of attempting to blow away more than half of an enemy's armies per day - not an easy task by any measure - or kill off some 900 clerics (per 20,000 people in the army), 250+ of which are epic level.

Anyway, I'm continuing to play with these numbers, to see where they lead me.

 

[jgbrowning]

Originally posted by seasong
One of the issues I have with SHARK's setting (i.e., a reason I couldn't run it) is because with armies in the millions, and people marching to war all the time, I have to wonder how long until the population has dropped below the threshold necessary to support epic events!

So I started playing with demographics, slavishly following the D&D rules for aging, etc.

It turns out I was wrong... in a really horrible way. Assuming a city of 65,000 (which requires 135,000 rural folk, and minimum 2 5th level clerics with the plant domain), there will be sufficient clerics, of sufficient level, to cast raise dead 5,900 times per day, and resurrection 3,900 times per day. Assuming a military force of 1% of the entire population (20,000 soldiers), almost half of the force can be raised from the dead each day.

I think there's a few problems with your example. DMG says at most 1 in 10 people live in a city (DMG p155), so minimum rural population for city of 65,000 is 585,000 (650k total-65k city pop) while maximum is 910,000 (975k total-65k city). 1% of 650,000 is 6,500 soldiers. 1% of 975,000 is 9,750 soldiers. To get 20,000 soldiers out of 650,000 people you need a 3% pop to be soldiers.

I"m also interested how shark protects the massive grain fields that are needed to support such numbers. Small tactical unit hits on grain producting areas could easily lead to mass starvation, (if not of the soldiery because of their access to magic, but of the peasantry). Perhaps magic food production is very common.

From a medieval historical perspective, 1 in 10 is not a bad number, but some research suggests it may have been as high as 1 in 5 in some areas that were well-developed, while the DMG suggested lower of 1 in 15 is appropriate for others.

edit: sorry hit send to fast. raise dead also requires a 500 gp diamond. thats a lot of diamonds, don't you think? 5,000 raise deads is 2,500,000 gp of diamonds and all the soldiers come back with 1 hp and a lost level. thats 2,500,000 gp of diamonds, with each diamond being worth 500 gp each. i don't think so...

joe b.

 

[seasong]

I think there's a few problems with your example. DMG says at most 1 in 10 people live in a city (DMG p155), so minimum rural population for city of 65,000 is 585,000 (650k total-65k city pop) while maximum is 910,000 (975k total-65k city). 1% of 650,000 is 6,500 soldiers. 1% of 975,000 is 9,750 soldiers. To get 20,000 soldiers out of 650,000 people you need a 3% pop to be soldiers.

Oddly enough, the DMG would be right about the 1 in 10 urban ratio, except for plant growth. A single 5th level priest with plant growth can, over one year, increase the production of 1,250 square miles of farm land by +1/3. With the same number of farmers. The result is that the urban ratio is closer to 3 in 10 (32.5%, natch), and much larger cities are supportable.

The city example I gave requires 2,500 square miles of farmland, 135,000 farmers, and 2 priests at level 5.

1% of 200,000 is 2,000, that was my bad. In this case, the clerics can raise everyone about 5 times per day.

For the math as I'm working on it, you can check out my work in progress. I show everything in heinous detail there.

I"m also interested how shark protects the massive grain fields that are needed to support such numbers. Small tactical unit hits on grain producting areas could easily lead to mass starvation, (if not of the soldiery because of their access to magic, but of the peasantry). Perhaps magic food production is very common.

As near as I can tell, an army of 1 million will require a support population of at least 20 million. That converts into roughly 250 thousand square miles, which is a lot of land. If perfectly circular (for minimum borders), the border will be something like 1800 miles long... so about 550 soldiers per mile. The best bet would be to have roving patrols and swift-moving, centralized troops that can get where they're needed fast... and lots of divinations to know where someone may attack.

From a medieval historical perspective, 1 in 10 is not a bad number, but some research suggests it may have been as high as 1 in 5 in some areas that were well-developed, while the DMG suggested lower of 1 in 15 is appropriate for others.

As mentioned above, that's pre-magic. I'm trying to look at things from the SHARK perspective, with magic being used well.

edit: sorry hit send to fast. raise dead also requires a 500 gp diamond. thats a lot of diamonds, don't you think? 5,000 raise deads is 2,500,000 gp of diamonds and all the soldiers come back with 1 hp and a lost level. thats 2,500,000 gp of diamonds, with each diamond being worth 500 gp each. i don't think so...

You are right. Hm. Okay, so including epic casters only (who will rightly take the Get Rid Of Material Components Forever epic feat), raise dead can be cast ~2,144 times per day. With our reduced army of 2,000 soldiers, that's pretty good .

 

[mmadsen]

I'm enjoying the quantitative analysis of raise dead and resurrection, but I thought I'd point out that SHARK's world has no such magic. He prefers to use Fate Points (a la Warhammer) to keep his players in the game.

 

[seasong]

That's fine - I'm talking to the original question, which was "how do epic level worlds work in D&D", not "how does it work after we remove the broken stuff". Someone who doesn't want that should be able to take the math I've done and edit out raise dead pretty easily.

I can see why he did, though - one epic no-component raise dead per day per soldier is pretty hard to swallow.

 

[jgbrowning]

Few comments, seasong. Plant growth wouldn't alter the need for work on fields. if a field is 1/3 more productive its also going to need more work because every living plant would be growing 1/3 faster. forests, weeds, etc..

The fields would require more care (perhaps proportional to the amount of yield) so your additional population gain would not all go to the cities.

your assumption that a 50+year old is 20th level is counter to the core rules demographics. DMG 139-140. (core rules do not equate age with level) Using the rules for generating NPC's listed in the DMG a metropolis with 65,000 people has no epic level spell casters. You should probably use the core rules demographics instead of substituting the aging one.

joe b.

 

[seasong]

Regarding plant growth: Actually, most of the labor is per square foot, regardless of the amount of grain produced. If it is growing a third faster, that is more likely to mean one extra growing season than a particularly large growing season.

DMG demographics: The DMG demographics have zero rules for a dangerous world or a less dangerous world. They offer no equations, no statistics, no method for calculating the effects of wars, plagues, or frontier settlements vs cozy imperial capitals. They do not explain in any form or fashion how they arrived at those numbers, or how quickly an NPC should level up... and yet, from their demographics, NPCs obviously do level up.

And I sincerely doubt that NPCs level up as they acquire more neighbors. This isn't The Sims.

So I used what works in the real world: birth rates and death rates. And once you have a death rate, you have a rough idea of annual CR... which gives rise to levelling. And if you want to slack off the death rate for a calmer world, you get different advancement rates and lower levels (but more very old people).

Another point about the DMG demographics: these are the same demographics that assume medieval rural:urban ratios, and then don't even try to account for their own magic system. As SHARK, mmadsen and others have point out, they've left a lot of holes to fill.