Raise Dead: A nice big bone to the simulationists

[robertliguori]

You want unfriendly to history? Make a piece of wondrous architecture that casts Create Water at CL 1 continuously. It costs 250 gp. It provides 28,800 gallons of fresh, potable water every day. Forever. And it costs one-sixth as much as a suit of plate mail.

 

[Celebrim]

You want unfriendly to history? Make a piece of wondrous architecture that casts Create Water at CL 1 continuously. It costs 250 gp. It provides 28,800 gallons of fresh, potable water every day. Forever. And it costs one-sixth as much as a suit of plate mail.

Yes, any sort of matter creation magic can be problimatic if you aren't careful.

But I think you over estimate the value of such an item to anyone that isn't a desert dweller.

Twenty-eight thousand gallons is approximately 1 inch of rainfall on a single acre of land.

For a spring, it is a miniscule daily flow. Many springs have flows measures in the millions of gallons per day.

And there you start to get into the rub. Because over time a society could build thousands of these things, eventually producing flows sufficient for good size rivers. Where does all that water go?

Care must be taken on any matter creation spell lest the universe stop making sense. This is something even JK Rowlings (who is anything but a gamer, witness Quidditch) seemed to recognize even though she put very few limitations on her magic otherwise.

 

[Scrollreader]

I've always imagined that things like this were accounted for by the intersecting nature of the planes. if you introduce a billion extra gallons of water a second, then somewhere on the prime material plane, in the deepest part of the oceans, a portal will eventually form to the elemental plane of water, that sucks out about a billion gallons of water per second (maybe a permanant whirlpool forms above, that sounds awesome). I tend to think to have the planes 'self correct' at least in the long term, to maintain general stability, and keep my job as a DM easier. Not to say that you couldn't flood a vast plain, or make a lake, or whatever. But you're not going to flood the entire prime material plane. Just my two cents, as a DM, of course. It's somewhat harder to rationalize why iron is worth anything at all (given how easy it is to make walls of iron) in a world with high magic, or why people fear death, but I manage. Still, anything that reduces the default approach to world shanging magic to make my job as a DM, or my expectations as a player more reasonable, is a good thing, IMO. You can always houserule it if you want to change it, but making the default assumptions more clear is probably a good thing.

 

[robertliguori]

Yes, any sort of matter creation magic can be problimatic if you aren't careful.

But I think you over estimate the value of such an item to anyone that isn't a desert dweller.

Twenty-eight thousand gallons is approximately 1 inch of rainfall on a single acre of land.

For a spring, it is a miniscule daily flow. Many springs have flows measures in the millions of gallons per day.

And there you start to get into the rub. Because over time a society could build thousands of these things, eventually producing flows sufficient for good size rivers. Where does all that water go?

Care must be taken on any matter creation spell lest the universe stop making sense. This is something even JK Rowlings (who is anything but a gamer, witness Quidditch) seemed to recognize even though she put very few limitations on her magic otherwise.

Rainfall? **** rainfall. There's magic for that. Create Water is a nigh-perpetual source of water for drinking, cooking, and washing. It is no more cholera, no more fevers. It is one of the single greatest sources of infections and deaths in the pre-modern world eliminated, and, with a bit of piping and a gravity feed, can also be a source of power to turn water-wheels while providing running water. Track down an engineer and ask what would happen if we could set up constant water-purification plants that required no notable energy input for the equivalent real-world cost of five pounds of gold. Setting up these wells would save more lives than defeating any non-apocalyptic foe.

This is why I like simulationist gaming; instead of one person thinking "How might I make what is going on awesome?", you have everyone at the table doing so, throwing the full extent of their character's abilities at doing so, and end up with new and interesting awesome that you might not have considered.

 

[Mirtek]

Let's use a different piece of logic: if all you needed was a sword and armor, and you could go out and make fantastic amounts of money, why isn't everyone doing that? Why doesn't the entire population just get up and go treasure hunting? Why don't governments tax or seize discovered caches of treasure? Why don't dragons establish multinational corporations to multiply their assets?

Who says that they aren't doing exactly that?

Tried to be an adventurer should be a very common cause of death for young farm lads if a couple of successfull adventures can earn them more than 25 years working the soil.

That's why things like the Adventurer's Market make a lot of sense in D&D worlds (not only in the bigger cities but especialy in border hamlets).

Entire communities could be based around the adventurer season when each year countless groups of young fools use the last hamlet at the border of the adventurer zone as their base of operations for scouring the nearby mountain range for the big haul from the "lost ruins of XY". The whole hamlet's economy would be based around providing special adventuring services and for the adventurers it's just as difficult to keep their find secret from the other fortune seeker as it is making a find in the first place (imagine you're group finally discovered the entrance to the long lost tomb of king XY but since it was to late you returend to the basecamp to rest and prepare to enter tomorrow only to discover that somehow your disconvery wasn't as secret as you thought (mabye someone from annother party saw you discover the door) and 15 other groups have already entered)

Same thing about governments. Sure as hell they will tax you if they catch you just returning loaded with gold you found on their territory. Dragon Magazine once had an inspiring article about exactly this topic (from bribing, buying official licenses with fixed tax rate, to smuggling your haul secretly to making friends with positions of power in the government to avoid taxation).

Answer: That's not a fun game.

I strongly disagree: That is a very fun game

 

[MichaelK]

Rainfall? **** rainfall. There's magic for that. Create Water is a nigh-perpetual source of water for drinking, cooking, and washing. It is no more cholera, no more fevers. It is one of the single greatest sources of infections and deaths in the pre-modern world eliminated,

This is a detail I include in the campaign settings I create. I think a lower rate of infant mortality and a near-modern level of health and lifespan make a game much more enjoyable than the grim reality of medieval life.

 

[Clawhound]

When I set forth my "why don't people do these other things..." examples, the point was not to say they were bad. My point was to show that there are many logical implications that we leave sitting on the table because to follow every logical implication in every direct leaves us with something that looks like nothing that we wanted.

In playing a setting, the DM sets forth a feel or an ideal of how the setting works. There are some things that he will allow, and there are some things that his internal sense of his game won't allow, no matter what the logic. There are some directions that the players see that they can go, but others that the players refuse to go because that direction does not fit their idea of the game that they are playing.

The advantage of a system where all directions are possible is that all directions are possible. However, not all directions are equally desirable.

For instance, I may choose to including Vikings in my 3e game. Naturally, by looking at what is optimal for my nature warriors, my Vikings should all go in the direction of druid/bears with tripping wolf companions because that would be the most optimal path for them to take. Yet, if they do that, I no longer have the Vikings that I wanted in the first place. Which do I choose? Do I choose the guys with axes or the guys with claws? There's no right answer there, but for any game, one is a better answer than the other. The unfavored answer will be left on the table. That unfavored answer may be possible for the players, but the game world won't follow it. The DM may make up a fluff reason to explain it, but the answer comes down to DM fiat.

Raise Dead works the exact same way. How it acts in the game is ultimately not an exercise in logic, but a decision by the DM about how the game world will act. The fiat may be overt or covert, but the answer is still DM fiat. Once that decision is made, then logic follows.

 

[Delta]

I'm a historical military buff, so fireball's presense causes me more psychological grief than 'raise dead'.

In general, I share your grief, but I've found solutions for this one that personally make me pretty comfortable. Granted that fireballs look a lot like cannon-fire on a battlefield (per Gygax in Chainmail):

(1) Mass troops tactics really did survive the existence of cannon for hundreds of years, depending on how you count it. At least from 12th Century through Civil War to WWI. I figure it's also the analog to Greek Fire in ancient times.
(2) Wizards are less mass-producible than firearms. They have to personally put themselves on the front line at great personal risk. That allows the campaign to say that they're too rare or too disagreeable to regularly appear on battlefields, or in numbers.
(3) There are also some magical counters that can be emphasized to greater or lesser extents, like Counterspelling or a rod of flame extinguishing.
(4) In addition, it's possible that fireball is not so common a spell as to be in every wizard's spellbook.

I find that wizard-spell problems can generally be massaged by tweaking the frequency of wizards or the particular spell in the campaign. It's a much more cutting problem for cleric-spells where (a) every known church in the world is full of clerics, (b) every cleric has access to every possible spell, and (c) the spell is generally applied within a safe sanctuary, at no risk to the cleric in question.

As time goes on, clerics bug me more and more in comparison to any other class.

 

[Mirtek]

(b) every cleric has access to every possible spell, and (c) the spell is generally applied within a safe sanctuary, at no risk to the cleric in question.

d) while every cleric theoretically is able to access every possible spell he still needs to request it from his deity who can simply deny the spell

 

[Celebrim]

Rainfall? **** rainfall. There's magic for that. Create Water is a nigh-perpetual source of water for drinking, cooking, and washing. It is no more cholera, no more fevers.

Not really. The problem is that a source of water isn't enough. You also have to have a water distribution system. Cholera epidemics have broken out in the third world that had access to clean drinking water because the buckets being used to bring the water from the spigot to the homes were tainted with residue from cleaning up after other sufferers.

Besides which, disease is a literal malevolent spirit in my campaign world. It doesn't have to obey physical laws. A disease spirit could possess your magical fountain and then it would produce diseased water. In fact, it very likely would be possessed by a disease spirit because being artificial, it has no natural water spirit to defend it. So, you build a magical fountain, and the first thing you learn is that upkeep of that fountain involves reutinely hallowing it to keep evil spirits away.

Cholera is particularly bad, because Chorlera in its incarnation as 'the Red Death' is one of the seven greater disease spirits in the service of the Elder God Morgul, Lord of Rot. If Cholera really wanted to inhabit your magical fountain, driving it out would require heroes of the highest order (probably not less than 18th level).

It is one of the single greatest sources of infections and deaths in the pre-modern world eliminated, and, with a bit of piping and a gravity feed, can also be a source of power to turn water-wheels while providing running water. Track down an engineer and ask what would happen if we could set up constant water-purification plants that required no notable energy input for the equivalent real-world cost of five pounds of gold. Setting up these wells would save more lives than defeating any non-apocalyptic foe.

That's what you get for hiring an engineer to do a wizard's work.

I always warn my players, before you do anything that sounds new or cool, do some research to figure out why your obvious idea hasn't been tried before. Sartha has a 30,000 year written history. It's highly unlikely you are the first to try anything. History is littered with the corpses of young wizards that thought they had a great idea. And that's if they were lucky.