Quote from: Will;809237Fair enough, but I hope you'd grant me that 'undead go around killing living things' isn't exactly a wildly out there assumption?

Granted, the easiest 'fix' is changing that assumption.

Even in AD&D undead arent locked in that pattern. Theres a few examples of undead generally just wanting to hang out at their haunting grounds and can be talked out of combat. Or even undead teachers.

5e though hardcodes into some undead an "urge" to slay the living. But right out the gate modules are ignoring that and allowing for negotiating and talking with things rather than just have them as mindless killing machines.

Quote from: Omega;809218Detect Invisibility is availible at the same level as Invisibility. The psychopath wizard is going to need it too as any good aligned wizard will be sending Invisible stalkers after him 24/7. Possibly several in tandem if they get really pissed off. Mass invisibility is now availible and the killer wizard will have to deal with that too just to figure out where anyone is. And we havent even gotten out of the C part of BECMI. Dont you feel stupid... yeah, you do.

I'm not sure which game or edition you're talking about, but in my experience, Detect Invisibility spells are only useful if you already know that an invisible creature is near. They last minutes to hours and will only detect within a particular area or perhaps line-of-sight. Likewise, Invisible Stalkers aren't useful unless you have a target to direct them at.

The problem with assassins is that you don't know who they are, or where and when they will strike. While the OP was phrased poorly, I think there is an underlying truth to this.

To put a little more context to this, imagine an expanding kingdom in a fantasy world - like England conquering Ireland, or Egypt conquering Nubia. Now there are a bunch of loyal Irish or Nubian adventurers who resent the conqueror. How do you protect the leaders of the conquest, without knowing where, when, or who they will strike at? As I said, most RPG magic systems support a small band of attackers much better than they support a large group of defenders. You need full-time mages casting detection spells all the time around each of your targets, which spreads your power very thin - whereas the rebels will concentrate their forces to strike where you have the least defenses.

Quote from: jhkim;809280The problem with assassins is that you don't know who they are, or where and when they will strike. While the OP was phrased poorly, I think there is an underlying truth to this.

The problem with that idea is that there are counters to assassins too with the right prep. Detect alignment, detect poison, cure poison, etc. If we followed the OPs warped logic then in a D&D setting no one is ever assassinated because the assassin is always detected or thwarted every time.

Instead what you will get is a middle ground which isnt too far off from the various D&D settings.

Quote from: jhkim;809140While I don't agree with much of the OP's points, I would say that they are attempts at logical consequences to the world from having magic and monsters.

Quote from: rawma;809147The original post presented this only as stuff to mock, not stuff to explain.

Quote from: jhkim;809155Quite possibly. I'm not really interested in the intent of the poster. I just think that the consequences of these fantasy features is an interesting topic, and I'd prefer to discuss that.

The topic was poisoned by the original post. A different approach might have led to an interesting discussion.

Quote from: Will;809237Fair enough, but I hope you'd grant me that 'undead go around killing living things' isn't exactly a wildly out there assumption?

Granted, the easiest 'fix' is changing that assumption.

I totally buy that assumption, but it doesn't take much to see that it isn't enough.

Undead are clearly irrational, the vast majority of them.

Ghouls, for instance, obviously go around killing things, but it's hardly a stretch to think their hunger keeps them from being particularly clever at it.

Shadows, wraiths, and spectres totally hate life...but all a pretty vulnerable to dozens of villages chucking holy water (hey, remember when that was a thing?). Even if such vulnerability isn't an issue, I don't think I've ever seen "free roaming" such creatures, only stuck in tombs or under the (shaky at times) control of something more powerful.

Even if they were free roaming, and even if scads fo holy water wasn't around, who says spectres have to be rational enough to come up with a flawless plan for world domination? It's not like any game world (or at least one I'm aware of) has any examples of "the great spectre who cured cancer" or otherwise did anything particularly relevant...it's quite possible they can't plan longer than the next sunrise, not with any coherent thought.

Quote from: Doom;809384I totally buy that assumption, but it doesn't take much to see that it isn't enough.

Undead are clearly irrational, the vast majority of them.

Ghouls, for instance, obviously go around killing things, but it's hardly a stretch to think their hunger keeps them from being particularly clever at it.

Shadows, wraiths, and spectres totally hate life...but all a pretty vulnerable to dozens of villages chucking holy water (hey, remember when that was a thing?). Even if such vulnerability isn't an issue, I don't think I've ever seen "free roaming" such creatures, only stuck in tombs or under the (shaky at times) control of something more powerful.

Even if they were free roaming, and even if scads fo holy water wasn't around, who says spectres have to be rational enough to come up with a flawless plan for world domination? It's not like any game world (or at least one I'm aware of) has any examples of "the great spectre who cured cancer" or otherwise did anything particularly relevant...it's quite possible they can't plan longer than the next sunrise, not with any coherent thought.

But we accept that mindless zombies can conquer the world but not that mindful spectres who can do all the stuff zombies can do but quicker, are immune to normal weapons and can walk through walls..... All they need is a reason mate...

Quote from: jibbajibba;809387But we accept that mindless zombies can conquer the world but not that mindful spectres who can do all the stuff zombies can do but quicker, are immune to normal weapons and can walk through walls..... All they need is a reason mate...

If your setting premise is zombies conquer the world, then we buy into that premise or we go play a different game.

If your setting premise is spectres take over the world, then we buy into that premise or we go play a different game.

If your setting premise is, I just can't think of a single reason why spectres haven't taken over the world, oh woe is me D&D must be broken, then you are a whiny unimaginative poser and we should all go play a different game.

By way of a thought experiment ....


I have been worried of late about how to reconcile my setting with what appear to be som inherent inconsistencies that emerge if you run D&D by RAW.
In particular ...

1) In D&D (various rule sets) a spectre can only be hit by magical weapons, it is close to invisible, it can fly faster than a running horse, it can kill any normal human with a single touch (double energy drain) and the victims rise the next night as new spectres. There are a number of other monster types that also have the ability to reproduce easily(vampires, lycanthropes etc) and overpower mundane populations.
Given the existence of these creatures, the generally accepted mundane nature (ie no classes) of the majority of the population how do explain over a long timeline that such creatures haven't risen to a dominant position, like Zombies in World War Z or "Vampires" in I am Legend.



2) In a world where magic is real and palpable. Where there are flying enemies, dragons that breathe fire from the heavens and so forth should we look to alter the standard "castle" design. Would it make more sense for fortifications in such as world to be underground. This of course gives an added benefit as it justifies the entire "dungeon" premise of underground complexes.
If we don't think the standard castle concept would change would there be design alterations? What about ritual type magic that might protect fortifications? Are there any good examples of the latter?


3) Most fantasy worlds are populated by intelligent powerful creatures, from Gith to Dragons, from Giants to Drow. With the existence of such creatures should we re-examine the reasons why Human populations dominate the game world. If they are not the smartest, toughest, fastest breeding, longest lived or have access to the most powerful tech/magic what do you use in your settings to justify the Humanocentric nature of the world?

4) Given the various different elements ar work from real gods to magic to monsters, how do you modify the typical village in your games. Do you tend to make them larger (for safety) with a palisade and a nightwatchman? Do you just follow the standard dozen house and an inn if so how do you place that in the wider context of your setting, do you have local militia policing the area for tribes of orcs and goblins for example and if so how do they react to armed PCs passing through town?

5) In your settings how do you handle large bodies of men, armies and so on. The game emerged from Wargames so these are part of its base DNA but in a world where a relatively low level wizard can destroy a small army with a well deployed gas cloud or handful of fireballs do you look to change military structures. The Black company books are a good example of a setting where there is magic so the Mercenary companies employ it as much as they can. If magic is more easy to come by, as it is presented in the generation of spell-using PCs in D&D then what is to stop a king financing a bunch of militant wizards much as a modern day military hires and trains scientists to create weapons. In modern war tech triumphs bodies everytime wouldn't this be even more true in a  world with Scry, Port , Fry, Mass invisibility and Invisible Stalkers.

There are plenty more examples, from monestries not needing to grow food because of low level clerical magic to the top rulers being replaced with Dopplegangers as part of a global plot, where I am having trouble trying to fit the implications of the game world into a logical setting. I know I can just hand wave it but I am trying to be logical. I look at something like Disc World and I can see how a modern mind can create a lot of social changes and that is a world where magic is sparse and very tightly controlled.

Welcome any comments.

If the OP had been more like this... same questions different tone, would we have seem the same viseral responses and ad hominen attacks ?

Quote from: jibbajibba;809398If the OP had been more like this... same questions different tone, would we have seem the same viseral responses and ad hominen attacks ?

I don't know if you've noticed the pattern, but new posters to this site never start a thread like that.  Instead they come here, take a shit, and then start the Hog Waller.

1) Has been answered multiple ways multiple times ad nauseum. Read the thread.

2) Runequest/Glorantha has good ritual magic. Power of the rituals is based in part on the number of users. One problem is that D&D is mostly written from the perspective of what rules a GM needs to run a game for players who are a party of adventurers. It isn't focused on a game where the players are rulers who are defending themselves and their people from wandering gangs of murder hobos. If it had been written from that perspective it would undoubtably have included defensive rituals or spells to foil those sorts of threats.

One should thoughtfully consider whether the world had enough dragons flying about to render castles (which were ubiquitous in medieval times, really in lots of places those rockpiles were like 1 hex apart or less) obsolete. If there are a lot of dragons then there is some fiction where that is kind of a trope. IIR, Pern (McCafferty) and a few other books, I think maybe, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhere (H. Beam Piper) had deep caverns underground to protect people from various natural disasters. Castles as the entrance to caverns could be a solution.

3) Most fantasy worlds of my experience where the nonhumans are the most powerful are humanocentric. Glorantha is a good example. Dragons dominate the setting, not humans. Dragons obliterated one of the most powerful human Empires and exterminated all human life in the central part of the game world.

I suspect one reason humanocentric is popular in D&D is that the expectation is it is easier and more popular for players to run humans and the game is set up to run a game for players who are a party of mostly human adventurers.

4) Frequently people differentiate between the wild lands where there be monsters and the civilized (often human centric) lands where monsters are kept in check by gods, clerics, wizards, or whatnot. In the wild lands I would expect that villages and inns would be fortified in the ways that the various border regions on earth were.

5) Back when I ran D&D I assumed spell users were pretty rare which is analogous to the way Glen Cook treats spell users. They are very rare in the Black Company and Dread Empire stories - though the ones we do see have power on the order of D&D fireball tossing wizards or worse. One thing that Cook cleverly does (that D&D didn't do well) is that his wizards can screen their side defensively. So long as both sides have roughly equal magical power it mostly gets cancelled with the occassional spell splashing through with the effect of modern artillery on a formation of troops. Not surprisingly we see the troops using entrenchments to get some protection from the blasting spells. Personally I'd do something like that if I wanted wizards to be part of the battlefield. Note that Chainmail assumed wizards were artillery and they were rare - like one, two, or no magic users per side in a Chainmail Fantasy army.

6) (I added this one.) Most likely you are over thinking the whole thing.

QuoteIf the OP had been more like this... same questions different tone, would we have seem the same viseral responses and ad hominen attacks ?

Probably not until we reached the point where it was clear that the OP didn't want to change his premises. He loved his premises. At that point (and we quickly got there):

   If you break it. You fix it.

Quote from: jibbajibba;809398I have been worried of late about how to reconcile my setting with what appear to be som inherent inconsistencies that emerge if you run D&D by RAW.

why?

Quote1) a spectre /Edit for Length/ There are a number of other monster types that also have the ability to reproduce easily(vampires, lycanthropes etc) and overpower mundane populations.
ed mundane nature (ie no classes) of the majority of the population how do explain over a long timeline that such creatures haven't risen to a dominant position,

This has been covered several times, but I'll repeat myself with some addendums, because reasons.

The Undead are generally understood to lack basic human motivations, though we can make at least one exception with regards to Liches (which, generally speaking, do NOT reproduce), for Ambition.  In a Vampire Dominant setting, contrasted to Vampires Exist settings, then Vampires do generally use their reproductive ability to 'take over the world', or at least attempt it.  Otherwise we can assume they are too focused on their hunger and, perhaps looking for the reincarnation of their long lost love to consider 'world conquest', preferring only to make a handful of minions at a time.  

This lack of normal human motivations can carry over to most monsters, including lycanthropes. Note that (and I'm not bothering to check this, so feel free to correct me) Werewolves and the sort don't turn their dead victims, they need to maul one of those 'classes peasants' just hard enough to infect him, but not kill him, making 'reproduction' iffy.   Traditional takes have were creatures thinking like animals while shapechanged, though I do not believe D&D has ever bothered to reinforce this. This would be an assumed limiter on their ambitious conquest plans, as your average were-critter prefers to run wild, hunt down and kill some chump, and call it a night. Surviving chumps simply repeat the cycle, but are exceedingly rare.

Finally: Never be too quick to dismiss vast hordes of 'no-class' people armed with pitchforks and torches.  Outright immunity to all attacks is not uncommon (a failing of the D&D framework, if you ask me), but quite often there are readily accessible alternatives. Weaknesses will be known to enough people to ensure that the 'anti-specter' mob comes with holy water (stolen from the temples if necessary... cheap bastard clerics!), while anti-vampire mobs will have no shortage of wood and fire, etc. *




2) In a world where magic is real and palpable. ./edit for length/
If we don't think the standard castle concept would change would there be design alterations? What about ritual type magic that might protect fortifications? Are there any good examples of the latter?

Not necessarily. Castles may not work against high level wizards, but one flying, invisible, teleporting mage on a battlefield is not enough to change the scope of war, any more than nuclear weapons eliminate conventional ground wars.  They may alter the political calculus necessary to declare war, but that's a separate matter.  

In order to change the face of war, or the defenses necessary for its waging, it isn't enough to introduce a new technology but to make it common.  It is generally accepted that mastering even first level wizardry takes years of effort and study, and a common assumption that it also requires some sort of extraordinary trait, generally hereditary.  This holds true for clerics to a lesser extent, as most priests of most religions are generally held to be non-spellcasting NPCs.

Quote3) Most fantasy worlds are populated by intelligent powerful creatures, from Gith to Dragons, from Giants to Drow. With the existence of such creatures should we re-examine the reasons why Human populations dominate the game world. If they are not the smartest, toughest, fastest breeding, longest lived or have access to the most powerful tech/magic what do you use in your settings to justify the Humanocentric nature of the world?

For most cases, Numbers. In a few cases there are also various weaknesses as well, such as the Drow being much less capable in bright light.  Gith, and we do not have a good source for Gith Demographics that I am aware of, prefer to live extra-planar, where humans are rare.  

In most D&D settings the primary competitor for humanity are the Orcs, as they are stronger and breed faster and are as, if not more, agressive, in which case its a tough fight with humanity having the advantage of tech (generally).  Goblins make a good alternative, though generally close to, or as smart, as humans they lack group cohesion (exception for Samurai Hobgoblins).  Most of the more powerful races (dragons, Giants, etc) simply lack the numbers to compete.

Quote4) Given the various different elements ar work from real gods to magic to monsters, how do you modify the typical village in your games. Do you tend to make them larger (for safety) with a palisade and a nightwatchman? Do you just follow the standard dozen house and an inn if so how do you place that in the wider context of your setting, do you have local militia policing the area for tribes of orcs and goblins for example and if so how do they react to armed PCs passing through town?

Why should these things modify a simple village?  Palisades are a given, historically.  Generally speaking I am not aware of one set method of portraying villages that is D&D specific, but rather GM specific, depending on any number of variables, not least of which is interest in creating internally consistent portrayals of the lives of unimportant NPCs...

Quote5) In your settings how do you handle large bodies of men, armies and so on. /Edit for Length/ In modern war tech triumphs bodies everytime wouldn't this be even more true in a  world with Scry, Port , Fry, Mass invisibility and Invisible Stalkers.

In the first part: Detailed analysis of quasi-mideval tactics and strategies is not a common feature of most D&D games, even those featuring large set-piece battles.  Most GM's and Players are not interested in the fact that placing your veteran soldiers on the left most column of your phalanx is important to keep the greener soldiers from shifting to the left, causing the unit to drift out of formation.   We can assume any number of things, such as the tendency of any given army to field as many mages/counter-magics as they can afford, with the various mages on each side mostly fighting each other instead of slaughtering the soldiery.

As for your second part. Lol.  Bodies tend to triumph over tech within a fairly wide margin of error. See Russia in WWII for a recent example of this.  The general expression for this phenomenon is "Quantity is a Quality of its own".

QuoteThere are plenty more examples, from monestries not needing to grow food because of low level clerical magic to the top rulers being replaced with Dopplegangers as part of a global plot, /Edit for Length/

The mere EXISTANCE of magic or various monsters does not necessitate vast changes to a setting.  The PREVALENCE of those magics/monstrosities might.  Beyond that: monasteries generally did a lot of things that had nothing to do with base survival. One assumes that boredom is not considered in and of itself a holy state of mind.  That said: you assume suffient high level casters constantly producing vast quantities of magical food and water to elminate the need for basic farming. An interesting idea to build a setting around, but generally not necessary simply because the spell exists.  One can presume that if clerics ever threaten the existance of farming there will be holy wars as the gods of agriculture begin both denying their own clerics that particular spell, and also demanding their followers stop clerics of other gods from casting it.

Ditto Dopplegangers.  The mere existance of a monster that can and does steal peoples identities does not necessitate vast measures to prevent them from taking over kingdoms. We can assume most kings are not regularly exposed to dopplegangers any more than they are routinely exposed to muggers, and for similar reasons.  Assuming sufficient threat there may be simple tests to keep potential dopplegangers away, but only a regular recurrance of doppleganger soveriegns would truly cause a major alteration in the setting, rather like choosing to run a 'zombie apocalypse' game alters a setting. You would be CHOOSING to run 'Doppleganger Apocalypse, the RPG.

QuoteWelcome any comments.

Well, here you go.

QuoteIf the OP had been more like this... same questions different tone, would we have seem the same viseral responses and ad hominen attacks ?

With the same questions he posted? Nah. They alone pretty much set the tone, based on their repeated use by a certain segment of...dare I say "lawncrappers"...

Speaking of Lycanthropes, I had a funny RAW idea from 3e while musing on ideas for conflicts between LG groups.

In it, there are natural lycanthropes (born that way, full control of shifting) and infected lycanthropes.

And then I had an inspiration...

Werebears are inherently LG. So you could have werebear paladins (holy panzerbjorn!)
Who... can make other people into werebears by biting them. Thus making them... LG... ! Ding!

So imagine a plague of LG paladin werebears seeking to unify the world by biting everyone.

Quote from: Will;809423Werebears are inherently LG. So you could have werebear paladins (holy panzerbjorn!)
Who... can make other people into werebears by biting them. Thus making them... LG... ! Ding!

So imagine a plague of LG paladin werebears seeking to unify the world by biting everyone.

That one has come up a few times before. Werebears saving the world by bearifying everyone they can lay paws on.

See my comment on the reverse of that. A helpful cleric going through a werewolf kingdom curing people.

Usually though infection in literature and even movies tends to be more often  accidental than deliberate.

Quote from: Omega;809445That one has come up a few times before. Werebears saving the world by bearifying everyone they can lay paws on.

Seriously? Huh! Cool.

Quote from: jibbajibba;809398I have been worried of late about how to reconcile my setting with what appear to be som inherent inconsistencies that emerge if you run D&D by RAW.

I think you're supposed to say "A friend of mine has been worried of late ...".

QuoteIf the OP had been more like this... same questions different tone, would we have seem the same viseral responses and ad hominen attacks ?

It would have gone better, but I expect that most of the same points would be made:

• It's your world, so it's up to you to make it how you want.
• You can always fall back on gods or other comparably powerful forces.
• The rules as written include other elements that are not consistent with your arguments; for example, specters cannot by RAW appear in numbers larger than, what, 12 - much less than the numbers of zombies in World War Z.