Does high magic = high tech?

[ajanders]

So what do you do after they're dead?
In all seriousness, the proles are like ...let's say fruit trees. You harvest the fruit, yes. But you never cut the trees down...not unless you're completely done with the grove.
Without a regular source of xp for your proles, they'll die of negative levels in a few years and you lose your supply of human capital.
Some rulers probably start on self-improvement programs for their people just so they can stay healthy and productive, whether that be defined as "able to do useful mundane work" or "able to provide xp on demand".
And while I know you haven't missed the obvious role-playing issue of what to do with the people who die from the xp drain, you haven't told us.
I know in the concepts I've mostly mooched from you, I'm making them undead. It's just too good a roleplaying hook for me not to use.
Your kilometerage likely varies dramatically, of course.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Well, at least in Urbis, the life force drain doesn't manifest itself as lost levels or XP, but as a loss of Charisma that usually stabilizes at a certain level (depending on the severity of the drain). Thus, no undead are created with this methods - although many of the living in these cities aren't much more lively than the average zombie...

That being said, there are probably some rulers around there who are experimenting with different methods of life force drains - which may result in true zombies and other undead.

 

[Jim Butler]

Re: Just Read Oathbound Preview....

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[WizarDru]

The fact of the matter is that, as written in the PHB and DMG, D&D magic mathematically is far too common to not have warped society beyond all reckoning. There have been numerous discussions of this before, and the economics of D&D, like so many aspects of it, should not be scrutinized too closely, lest you go mad.

Forget your expensive golems, for a moment, and take a simple spell like 'Unseen Servant'. Easily committed to scrolls, available for inexpensive wands....a 1st level wizard can summon a mock common laborer for 1 hour to do his bidding. More effective than a serf? Certainly not, but for many tasks, his equal at least. The humble light spell transforms the very nature of the game, as outdoor light sources should be virtually everywhere. The Mend spell alone will make most hedge-wizards common occurances in even the smallest village. How about Mount? Horses were expensive commodities...here's one that you can have for two hours/level, and you don't need to feed or house it. Sure, the farmer will miss that valuable manure, but since you're using Create Food/Water and Purify Food/Water, farming has become less important for some communities. And so on, and so forth.

I don't have a link, but I recall some extremely detailed economic analysis of 3Es model, and one thing became clear. Due to the relative ease of availability of magic in the D&D world, the actual base D&D world should look far more different than it actually does. Certainly, reasons can be created why this isn't so, but the fact is that any such analysis breaks down, since D&D wasn't created with an eye towards verisimilitude so much as game balance.

And that's just ducky, to me.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I don't have a link, but I recall some extremely detailed economic analysis of 3Es model, and one thing became clear. Due to the relative ease of availability of magic in the D&D world, the actual base D&D world should look far more different than it actually does.

Can someone please, please, PLEASE try to dig up this analysis and post a link to it here?

 

[s/LaSH]

It seems that the most important piece of technology is neither physical nor thaumaturgical, but mental. A detailed analysis of economy is easy to do today, but how many medieval rulers could do that calculation in their head? Even if they could, the commoners couldn't. Education has changed society so that it can make use of technical advances; before widespread education, even if you gave someone the means and plans to produce plasma rifles, you wouldn't change the world because that person would make them all himself and take six months a piece.

A medieval society isn't very effective at educating its populace. Wizards are probably rich nobles who can afford to support their habits. And what do rich nobles fear? People coming to kill them. So they build the perfect guards: Golems. And then when nobody comes to kill them, they decide they want an extension to their mansion and set the golem to build it. Alright, so this isn't an assured outcome, but it could account for the presence of golems in labour roles; after all, if you have this thing, why do you need to pay for labourers?

But that's neither here nor there. Of more interest to me is this idea of draining the populace of energy to power item creation. Most importantly, How many people are available as plebians? How much XP can you gather? It seems that one Nexus Tower provides a mimimum of 10,000XP per annum, which is a fair quantity; even the most expensive magic items I can find are not in excess of 100,000gp, and at 1/25th base cost in XP, that's only 4000 - enough for two items of near-artifact power per year, or literally hundreds of little +1 magic weapons or armours.

Over a period of ten years, therefore, a Nexus Tower running at minimal settings will be able to crank out perhaps 800 sets of magic weapon+armour, none of which will need upkeep. The military applications of this are stunning. The question is, Is the will to do this there? Has someone sat down and thought about it? Or is it just lost potential like so many uneducated societies?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Uneducated Societies

I'm a little uncomfortable with assuming the superiority of modern educational structures as the variable for distributing technology.
I would argue that our capital systems, cultural attitudes, and ability to design for ease of use are probably more important. Afterall, it takes a lot less knowledge for me to properly use nearly all the items of high technology in my house than for me to succesfully run a medieval peasant farm.

Certainly our mathematics are easier to use and capable of more flexible application and you could say the distinction is knowledge through practice vs. knowledge through theory, but...

My real point is that people in the middle ages were very aggressive entrepeneurs and creative engineers and artisans. Late medieval europe, prior to the plague and reformation, was filled with incredibly elaborate mills and foundrys. Cistercian Abbeys have been found with blast furnaces that weren't adopted by secular British institutions till centuries after the Henry shut down the Monastaries.

While this does seem to promote the idea that the restiveness of medieval society threatened technological growth, I would argue that it serves to prove that an individual high level mage would easily grasp the value of Nexus towers as a production tool and quickly build himself a small empire with them. Likely making himself a free city around which his foundries could work and produce for his own forces and sell inferior products to mercenary companies or national armies.

So yeah, I'd say it would be very likely that if someone could figure out how to build a nexus tower he would likely use it to its full potential.

The real question is how would enough learn of it to make it spread or why the local churches or strongmen wouldn't march in and take out such a morally questionable device. Why would anyone want to live near one in the first place?

Probably not a device that would catch on the middle ages without being able to show a potential for unrivalled profit. Would run like wildfire through an imperial Rome or China, however.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

But that's neither here nor there. Of more interest to me is this idea of draining the populace of energy to power item creation. Most importantly, How many people are available as plebians?

That varies depending on the city's size. In the "Flannish Cities" region, for example (which I view as the "core region" of Urbis), cities range from Hollowhill (213,416 people = minimum 21,341 XP) to Praxus (3,245,844 = minimum 324,584 XP).

How much XP can you gather? It seems that one Nexus Tower provides a mimimum of 10,000XP per annum, which is a fair quantity; even the most expensive magic items I can find are not in excess of 100,000gp, and at 1/25th base cost in XP, that's only 4000 - enough for two items of near-artifact power per year, or literally hundreds of little +1 magic weapons or armours.

Over a period of ten years, therefore, a Nexus Tower running at minimal settings will be able to crank out perhaps 800 sets of magic weapon+armour, none of which will need upkeep. The military applications of this are stunning. The question is, Is the will to do this there? Has someone sat down and thought about it? Or is it just lost potential like so many uneducated societies?

In my view, much of that energy will be spent on Epic Spells (creating new buildings, keeping the fields fertile, city defense, making the rulers pretty much immune to hostile spells...), and much of the remainder doesn't go to military applications. The sale of magic items created with the aid of Nexus Towers often represent a significant source of the city's income, and if they use all that for equipping their troops, they might not have enough money to pay them...

At least, that's my theory. But since I'm still developing the setting, I'd appreciate your input!

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Re: Uneducated Societies

The real question is how would enough learn of it to make it spread or why the local churches or strongmen wouldn't march in and take out such a morally questionable device.

Because they get to join the fun?

Seriously, as written there is nothing that prevents clerics from using Nexus Towers - they work for all spellcasters. And in practice, even most good-aligned realms use them, because those who don't have difficulties defending themselves effectively. The main difference is that they set the drain to "slight" even in the poorest sections of the city...

Why would anyone want to live near one in the first place?

Why do people today live in areas with no potable water, or in the vincity of garbage dumps or chemical plants with no pollution controls?

Because they have no choice, that's why. And given time, people can get used to almost anything.

In the Industrial Age, lots of people moved to cities where they - if they were "lucky" to get a job at all - worked at horrible conditions at wages that were barely adequate to cover their expenses. And they lived in cramped apartments that were usually so decrepit that they could collapse any day - often, they didn't even have decent stairs.

And the same is still true in most "Third World" nations today - and many "Second World" nations as well. Yet people keep on moving to the cities because there they have at least a snowball's chance in Hell of earning a living.

So getting people to live near Nexus Towers shouldn't be too difficult...

 

[s/LaSH]

Well, the more it's discussed the more apparent it is that a Nexus Tower really would change things - and probably into an elitist society. We're talking one person in charge of a hundred thousand life forces here, giving them incredible resources. That kind of power has rarely been seen in Earth's history; even in the days of grand empires the imperators had to secure at least some modicum of goodwill from their populace, but a Nexus Tower just sits there no matter what the people think.

The economics are an interesting issue, too. A good point about selling off magic items to pay for your magic-enhanced troops; that would pour maybe fifty minor magical items into an area of 100,000 people per year. So one item per 2000 heads. That wouldn't actually change things much... until you look at accretion over a hundred years, in which case you've got one item per twenty heads. Saturation is not a given, but it does create an environment of magic in known use.

And to jerk things back to the topic of the thread, I can't think of any technological device or scifi plot where something like this exists except The Matrix, and even then it's a tenuous connection - it doesn't sound like many people in Urbis are concerned for the happiness of the plebians, unlike the machine intelligences of the twenty-somethingth century. And there's no false reality.