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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 2912998" data-attributes="member: 18280">Your sense of human nature and my sense of human nature are obviously very different.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> 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</blockquote>

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