Has D&D become too...D&Dish?
- Thread starter JohnSnow
- Start date
Raven Crowking
First Post
SSquirrel said:
Your sense of human nature and my sense of human nature are obviously very different.
Those wizards making your houses presumably worked hard to be able to cast those spells. Who organizes them, and who pays them? Likewise the clerics. Does their religion make them the soupkitchen of the world, or do they demand something for their good services? What happens to the people who make their living off the land? With these clerics feeding everyone, don't the farmers discover that they're making less money? Or none? Even though it might be better for everyone in the long term, it would be worse for a lot of people in the short term, and there would be an uprising.
To be even more cynical, wouldn't curing everyone of Devil Rot prevent me from making even more money selling palliatives? And, if my primary belief is that we should eschew the things of material existence and concentrate on worship and the afterlife (as the Roman Catholic Church taught in the Middle Ages, and still teaches to a degree), what would my motive be to improve the things of this world?
What you are suggesting, in effect, is that people with power will share that power for money, as opposed to using that power to extort money. From the simplest labor negotiation to international politics, I would suggest that history teaches the opposite. Those with power use their power to extort cheaper labor, skim off the top of the results of labor, and generally increase their power. Where they invest, they invest in such a way that it does not compromise their power base (unless they are foolish, which obviously does happen). People with power do not often willingly dilute their power.
A simple example can be found by examining the PCs in your own campaign world. Often enough, they might have a wonderful brilliant idea for generating money outside the dungeon, but how often are these ideas implimented? And, if they are, do the logical results follow?
If I have two Vorpal swords, and I am fighting a constant battle against the Orcs of Bloody Hollow, and I know that the orcs raid the town of Pitiful Defense thrice daily, I could give one of those vorpal blades to the town. But then, when the orcs trash the town and take the blade, I end up hoist on my own petard. So I don't do it. I don't want that power in hands I cannot control.
Similarly, if I go out of my way to create a situation where I have many powerful spellcasters operating in the area I live in, how long will it be before I work for them, instead of the other way around?
RC
Raven Crowking
First Post
Numion said:Yup, and on days of higher ice cream consumption drowning deaths are also up. Damned if I would feed ice cream to my children
Raven Crowking
First Post
As for Continual Light, a good analogue would be the light bulb. Even though invented a good deal earlier, the light bulb didn't make any significant inroads against gas lighting until after the Chicago World's Fair, which was lit by electricity not because of the efficiency, but in order to show off American invention.
Directly following the World's Fair, of course, the advantages of cheap electric lighting became obvious -- to factory owners. Electric light meant shift work. Time that normally belonged to the family became time that belonged to the employer. Because shift work meant more people employed, unemployment went down....and with it wages. Suddenly, you had to work more in order to get what you got before.
Follow the history of the light bulb with your Continual Light devises, and I'd agree that you've made a world that reacts like the real world. Simply claim that mages work for the benefit of all, and I gotta kinda sorta disagree.
RC
Directly following the World's Fair, of course, the advantages of cheap electric lighting became obvious -- to factory owners. Electric light meant shift work. Time that normally belonged to the family became time that belonged to the employer. Because shift work meant more people employed, unemployment went down....and with it wages. Suddenly, you had to work more in order to get what you got before.
Follow the history of the light bulb with your Continual Light devises, and I'd agree that you've made a world that reacts like the real world. Simply claim that mages work for the benefit of all, and I gotta kinda sorta disagree.
RC
Raven Crowking said:
Technically, a representative sample is, by definition, representative of the population. There are many ways to get a sample that is not representative, but if it is representative, you're good to go.
Of course, one never knows with absolute certainty that the sample was representative, unless the sample includes the whole population. But there are decent ways to estimate the error. And no statistician worth the name ever says the work provides certainty.
True, but WotC was (and still is) the only interested entity with the resources to manage even a decent attempt at finding a representative sample. They may not know the truth, but they have the stuff for the best guesses.
Hussar
Legend
Well, the purchase and sale of magic items is most certainly historically accurate. Look at the vast amount of money that was made by certain groups in the Middle Ages pedalling relics. To the point where some relics were so holy that touching the relic to another item made that item holy as well.
Now, change that a bit, from holy to magical and you have groups making themselves fantastically wealthy in the buying, selling and trading of items. Items robbed from ancient civilizations no less as well.
Now, as far as continual light goes, I see it this way. The ruler of a city goes to the priesthood and says, "Hey, you see that really sweet hill overlooking the bay? Wouldn't your new temple look great up there? Wouldn't it also be great if all the streets leading to that temple were lit up nice and bright at night?"
Poof, instant lighting for my city.
Now, change that a bit, from holy to magical and you have groups making themselves fantastically wealthy in the buying, selling and trading of items. Items robbed from ancient civilizations no less as well.
Now, as far as continual light goes, I see it this way. The ruler of a city goes to the priesthood and says, "Hey, you see that really sweet hill overlooking the bay? Wouldn't your new temple look great up there? Wouldn't it also be great if all the streets leading to that temple were lit up nice and bright at night?"
Poof, instant lighting for my city.
Victim
First Post
Raven Crowking said:
The problem is that Continual Light isn't exactly new development by default. If the spell was invented recently - and long lived races like elves might have strange definitions of recently, then, yeah, it doesn't follow that it will fully be applied. But most DnD settings have stuff that's been around millenia. Since Continual Light has been around ages, those changes should have started happening ages ago.
You could argue that, like Archimede's inventions, some spells or items were underutilized for long periods of time because of cheaper alternatives. But that would apply very much on a case by case basis. Considering the fire hazards of mundane lights, I think that it'd be hard to find cheaper substitutes for magic lighting.
Mages don't need to be working for the benefit of all; they just need to work for themselves. The early arcane entreprenuers could probably make a killing selling (or even better, leasing, since the spells are permanent) magic lights.
