Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 3861007" data-attributes="member: 2268">One funny thing about those "standard assumptions" is that they don't tend towards this whole "very high magic" setting that somehow is painted in this thread (as well as those about magic shops and other weird things). Lets take a look at the lowest real [Death] effect I could find...Slay Living (which, incidentally, needs a touch attack before the subject has to make his save-or-die roll, at least in my 3.0 PHB. Hmmm..)A 5th level spell needs a 9th level cleric to cast. You will find a 9th level cleric- with a 17% probability in a Large Town with 2001 - 5000 inhabitants (Roll a 6 on 1d6+3 on the Highest Level Locals chart in the DMG).- or higher with a 66% probability in a Small City with 5001 - 12,000 inhabitants (roll 3-6 on that chart), or two 9th+ level clerics with a 44% probability (roll 3-6 on that chart twice).- or higher with a 100% probability in a Large City with 12,001 - 25,000 inhabitants (+9 community modifier means you will get at least 3 10th - 15th level clerics, none of which generates another 9th level cleric beneath him, though).- or higher with a 100% probability in a Metropolis with 25,000+ inhabitants. The +12 on the community modifier means four clerics of 13th - 18th level, a 17% chance one of those creates two more 9th level clerics, a 3% chance that two of them generate two 9th level clerics each, and no chance at all that 3 or 4 of them generate two 9th level clerics each.Now I agree that the numbers of each settlement type available depend on the setting in question, but this all doesn't really paint a picture to me that the world is crawling with clerics that can send a character to his death with a snap. From what I see of the deities, at lest 1/3rd of those clerics wouldn't have ANY good in-game excuse for actually preparing Death spells. So the "basic assumption" that there is random death carousing in D&D after the PCs hit 9th level is a bit stretched, from my point of view. Also, it somehow does show that being able to cast some death effect spell does signify the caster as something special and worthy of notice by other powers.That leaves us with all the BBEG clerics and wizards who have to be high enough level to do all that killing on the spot. Sadly, there are no demographical numbers for those in the DMG, so any number would be pulled from thin air...but looking at the basic assumption of the default world make-up, I dare say it's not geared towards hundreds of 9th level baddies crawling out of the woodwork all of a sudden either just to "randomly save-or-die" the characters to death. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification