The impossibility of Point of Light settings

[Ixal]

Points of Light as a setting idea always crops up from time to time and D&D 4E heavily advertised with it. But what always bugged me with that is how it ignores how much interconnected infrastructure (to avoid the term civilization) is required to achieve something like the default technological level in D&D.
Especially when you get to the extreme end of Points of Light where it is literally just one city surrounded by monsters.

Farmland
Medieval farming is inefficient, especially when you base it on European crops and thus do not have access to rice or potatoes. Most of the food grown is consumed by the farmer and his family with only a fraction reaching the market. So even in a city of 5.000 you would need at least twice that number of farmers in the surrounding lands to support it and all land around the city for several miles would be devoted to farms.
If that land is already dangerous and monster infested the city would starve.

And its not only food that needs to be farmed. Flax is a very important crop as you need it for textiles and also would take up large tracks of farmland

Animals
Animals are also needed to support a D&D level of technology. Not only as beast of burden to even allow all the products to be transported to the city, but also to supplement the food sources and, important for adventurers, as a source of leather and also other products like glue. And those animals also need land to graze on or even crop to be fed in the case of larger warhorses.

Wood
Nearly all energy demands are met by wood and especially for smelting this demand is huge.
For cooking and heating other resources can be used like manure or coal (if your point of light has access to coal) but as coal contains sulphur it is not suitable to make steel which the equipment of adventurers need (unless you coke it, but that is outside the D&D technology level). Even wood needed to be made into charcoal first which required even more wood.
One example of the amount of wood needed I found is that to equip one roman legion you needed 44 metric tons of iron which in turn required 600 tons of iron ore and 5100 tons of wood to make

Collections: Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II, Trees for Blooms

This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…

acoup.blog

So when your forests aren't safe no iron weapons for you.

Metals
The other required resource for iron smelting is of course iron ore. And you also need a lot of it as during smelting there is a big loss of mass. Luckily iron ore is rather widely available. Still, we are talking about a point of light. Some other metals would of course also be nice like brass. Bronze is hard to make as it is an alloy requiring two metals which not tend to appear in the same place.
And if you want to pay with gold and silver coins a source of gold and/or silver would be highly appreciated.

Stone
Want a stone wall? Or paved streets? Then you require a source of stone and a quarry there.

Chemicals
Often overlooked, even in medieval times people know some chemistry. For example tanning leather required several (smelly) chemical processes which caused those workshop to be located away from the city. That ranges from simple "chemicals" like sides to sulphuric acid to some rather exotic components like gallnut (the remains of insect larves incubating inside tree bark) to make ink which is rather important to wizards. Other required resources was gum arabic and and iron vitriol. Paper and parchment on the other hand are made by animal hides or out of flax (which also required chemicals).

And there are probably many other things I forgot like having access to tar when you want to have ships, etc.
The point is, medieval technology, and with it the technology in D&D, is already so complex that a point of light settlement can't support it, even if that point is the size of a kingdom.

 

[AOieiosle]

Watches a flumph barbarian decapitate a dragon in a 10'x10' room.

No that all seems like it tracks.

 

[Yora]

I think that's the whole point. Because the economy has shrunk to a scale where it can't normally support itself, salvaging high quality materials and tools from ruins is necessary for survival.

I think you could still have pretty advanced societies with a total population of 100,000 people, which don't even need to be a single city state. You could also have half a dozen towns with their own farming villages, with the various local specialized goods being exchanged over roads and rivers. Which would require heavy guarding, which is of course right on spot for a typical D&D environment.

It wouldn't be a 19th century society, but I think something like 11th century would be absolutely doable without seeming outright implausible.

 

[Aging Bard]

I hadn't heard of this concept. Now that I know what it is, I'd say the issues the OP raised are outside of what I'd want in a PoL campaign. I happen to like very believable settings, so highly settled area must by definition have few monsters in them. Remember in 1e you had fighters and clerics clearing territories of monsters and building strongholds. In such a setting, you have to travel to adventure sites and monsters.

To me (after an admittedly short reading), the key question of a PoL setting is: why did your settlement rise again? I'd want a highly fantastic and even secret reason discovered over time. Your settlement is magically generating resources to keep your people alive, but that source is fading. So you set out into the world of danger, discovering ruins and perhaps the reason for the source of your settlement's magic. Perhaps even the reason settlements rise and fall. In other words, a fantastic setting, not a believable one.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

Great post, but I think the problem with this kind of analysis is really the discounting of magic. Spellcasters, even if they're fairly rare, will make a difference in how the world functions. Looking at Forge domain's ability to convert metal into other metal, you wouldn't need to worry about impurities - you put 100gp worth of just random crap metal on the altar and can convert it to a block of 100gp worth of steel. They would definitely have an interest in setting up trade/converting the people for profit, and would definitely take a trade secret approach to it, I'd assume.

I think it depends on how common or useful even low level magic is in someone's game. There are a lot of low level spells or even feats that can be 'game changing' - even if you don't have clerics in every village, even having someone with the Healer feat would make a huge difference in the survivability of a farmer who had a mishap in the field, which I would have to figure would be a concern even into our real Dust Bowl era.

YMMV

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

I hadn't heard of this concept. Now that I know what it is, I'd say the issues the OP raised are outside of what I'd want in a PoL campaign. I happen to like very believable settings, so highly settled area must by definition have few monsters in them. Remember in 1e you had fighters and clerics clearing territories of monsters and building strongholds. In such a setting, you have to travel to adventure sites and monsters.

To me (after an admittedly short reading), the key question of a PoL setting is: why did your settlement rise again? I'd want a highly fantastic and even secret reason discovered over time. Your settlement is magically generating resources to keep your people alive, but that source is fading. So you set out into the world of danger, discovering ruins and perhaps the reason for the source of your settlement's magic. Perhaps even the reason settlements rise and fall. In other words, a fantastic setting, not a believable one.

I think it was on an episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff - I don't remember the topic - but they talked about having a city built on the outskirts of a ruined dungeon, and one of the prime occupations was for villagers to 'mine' the dungeon of its useful stone walls, and take them back to the city and build the walls and buildings. You're always going to need adventurers to clear areas, or even just to protect the peons who are essentially quarrying a death trap.

 

[Aldarc]

So how would magic change all of the above?

Edit: Ninja'd by @Bayushi_seikuro.

 

[Aging Bard]

I think it was on an episode of Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff - I don't remember the topic - but they talked about having a city built on the outskirts of a ruined dungeon, and one of the prime occupations was for villagers to 'mine' the dungeon of its useful stone walls, and take them back to the city and build the walls and buildings. You're always going to need adventurers to clear areas, or even just to protect the peons who are essentially quarrying a death trap.

Great idea. If fact, add to it the older notion of a dungeon as a "living environment"--doors that won't open for PCs but will for monsters, doors that close by themselves, tricks and traps everywhere--and such a city could be infused with that spirit.

 

[Tonguez]

You seem to be forgetting Druid and Dwarfs

All your issues with crops and Animal welfare is hand waved away via Druids, if you go in for things like shape wood being able to turn living trees in to livable buildings then you could have an orchard that doubles as an apartment block.
Dwarfs with cavernous Mining Kingdoms under the mountains solves your supply of metals and similar.
Tanning and smelting is often overlooked but having foulburgs outside city walls is a good place to focus your adventurers, afterall even those wandering orc raiders occasionally need somewhere to trade/raid

 

[Eltab]

The Fall of the Roman Empire, the ensuing Dark Age, and the Rise of Charlemagne may help, at a high-level view. Presume even the peasants will fight rather than be eaten / whatever by monsters and you get a reason why "the tide is turning" when new supplies of extra monsters / barbarians / whatever stop arriving in the region.