Quote from: S'mon on December 19, 2022, 06:09:40 AM

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on December 19, 2022, 05:50:17 AM
Mirage Arcane can indeed harm: https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/988838034962436098?lang=en

I notice that some of the Twitter commenters point out that Crawford is just making shit up, as usual, without reference to the spell wording.

Crawford is a total moron. How he wormed his way to the top of D&D design remains a mystery.

So I think the idea that teleportation specifically would break the universe is wrong. In 3.5, Teleport is a 5th level spell, so you need a 9th level wizard to cast it, and it only moves a handful of people at best. There aren't supposed to be that many high-level casters in the world, even in 3.5, so the idea that whole armies would teleport onto their targets doesn't fly to me. He also assumes that teleportation would be cheap. If I was a wizard, and I knew that teleporting a merchant and his goods across country was going to save him a fortune in travel costs, I'd charge an amount not much cheaper than those assumed travel costs. Hell, I might still charge more, on the grounds that teleportation is also safer and faster than travelling. I also don't buy the premise that it would lead to the development of megacities in a medieval world. In real history people moved into cities more for economic opportunities than for defense, and if readily available magic did anything to the general world, it would crash the economy by invalidating much of the workforce.

looking at it more generally. There's two issues I think are suggested by this post:

One is the question of what the level-range of NPCs in the world is. The old-school attitude on this seems to be that the vast majority of NPCs are 0-level and adventurers are extremely rare. An elite soldier might be the equivalent of a 3rd or 4th level fighter, and even a small city might only have a handful of NPCs over 5th level in it. The advantage of this is that it makes sense for a more historically authentic setting, but the disadvantage is that it allows mid-to-high level PCs to run roughshod over the setting. The more new-school method is to have a world where adventurers or classed NPCs are common. A squad of city guards might be 4th level fighters and will probably have a wizard with them. There might be whole organizations devoted to managing and regulating adventurers as a profession. This is a logical response to the existence of PCs, but it can get equally silly. Players are going to ask why they're the ones saving everybody's bacon when the local shopkeeper is a 12th-level wizard.  It also leads to the kind of questions that posts like Tippy's are trying to address. Personally I use a hybrid approach. There's a fair few ranked characters scattered around my world, but the majority of them are fighters, barbarians, etc., and they're rarely above 6th or 7th level. (Of course it helps that I'm running a game where a 4th level fighter is still a credible threat to an 8th level sorcerer.)

The other issue is just how much the mere existence of magic should change the setting. As much as people want to scoff at this, I do think it's a detriment to the game if the way the setting works doesn't make sense. That said, it can be a bit of a trap to go down that path of taking the RAW to it's logical conclusions. You can easily wind up with a setting that's either so weird that players don't know how to act in it, or so advanced there's no more room for adventure. Personally, I think those kind of questions should be solved with internal lore reasons. Wizards don't rule the world because they're too arrogant and competitive to cooperate with each other. Dragons don't destroy entire regions because they sleep for decades at a time. Clerics don't get jobs in restaurants casting "create food and water" because that would be an insult to the power of their god.

My system's Rule 0 is "While we tried, we can't account for every possible rules mechanic interaction. When the rules appear to lead to nonsensical results, the GM is to rule as they think the rules are intended, not as they're written."

When RAW is "Use RAI" it shuts down most of the rules lawyers and any sort Tippyverse nonsense they intend to exploit.

The linked posts seem like they are following the written setting to some "logical" conclusion for fun.

Does this actually happen in game?

I couldn't read anymore of the original thread. I stopped where I got the premise was that the rules are basally the laws of nature of the Tippyverse.

I mean, I guess as a generality, the rules are.

I just can get over the fact that maybe it's a bit...much.

It's a nice thought exercise, but as a game world?

This is a good thread and I'm glad you even linked to the original discussions.  Many objections are brought up in those threads, and I never thought anyone really defended the main point against them.

There are some serious ramifications of high level magic and mid level magic that are not properly handled in most settings.  However, I don't think the resultant worlds are exactly as alien as these thought experiments lead us to believe.

I'm going to go a different tack than many of the responses here, and not simply assume that the "DM defines the world and he doesn't define it that way".  That's of course true, but in my judgment it misses the entire point of the thought experiment, which is, "do these rules yield a normal world by themselves, or is this something a DM must address to some degree to get a useful campaign world?"

Anyway-
In OSR D&D, many of the spells simply are written such that they are not reliable enough to describe a really broken world with.  Overall, AD&D games do have more broken high level things than any later versions, but it was not in practice a concern as the world builder would simply use creative interpretation even if they didn't want to make rulings, bannings, or house rules (all of which are fine).
3.0 introduced a writing style of clear black and white, with spells defined to much greater degrees.  High level spells still had plenty of broken conditions out of the box.  Initially this wasn't an issue, as everyone walked into 3.0 DMing it as they had 2.5 or prior- but that didn't last long, as 3.0 and 3.5 were complete systems, and they had different implications.

At which point we enter the tippyverse and similar thought experiments.  Basically, "describe a world where these things are real, and also that world should be worth playing in" is somewhat challenging using the black letter spells.  You can see the concern that everyone will be subject to mental domination carried out by some exponential process in the original thread, or similar.

The first and easiest way to way to solve the issue of a powerful wizard just literally wrecking everything or creating some exponential process that wipes out worlds, universes, or multiverses, is to simply have some gods stop it.  This is not deus ex machina, the gods literally are supposed to come out and do this- this is in many ways their jobs, and their existence and motivations practically guarantee that they will generally step in to prevent most of the awful stuff.  There's other ways as well, but that's honestly a good enough reason to block out all the absurdly dystopian results- the worlds in question are already under the influence of powerful alien presences who aren't interested in the world becoming some monomaniacal statue.

So moving on past that, we get to "do the high level spells break the normal assumptions of the game".  As written, they do to some degree.  Teleportation, which is pretty strictly defined to be reasonable for players, is generally too powerful without some mitigating factors that are not present in the rulebook.  High level spells have exploits that grant too many resources.  Infinite energy is possible if you directly interpret many magical items, etc.

These are all problems that a DM can and should consider.  If you set up a teleportation circle, there's probably some limit as to how many people can fit into it.  Transdimensional spaces probably shrink and eventually stop working if heavily abused.  If you're a powerful wizard, you probably need to go and maintain those things every once in awhile- and that would make these things not nearly as abusive.  Basically, as DM you should consider sanding off the sharp edges of spells with serious economic exploits, even if you don't write it into some houserules you'll be able to describe needing to maintain these things with some time and effort around the time the PCs interact with such spell effects.  That way an enterprising PC can still make some side cash if they come up with this kind of thing, while you are ready with answers as to why every wizard doesn't do this, or why the world wasn't always like this if there's a few hundred 11th level wizards at a time.

The broken spells, on the other hand, need more direct addressing.  5ed's Wish is abusive in entirely different directions than prior versions were, as the cost to casting it has been removed (only the creative wishes have a cost, a chance to lose the casting entirely).  Without "age 5 years" or "pay XP" or even "pay more gold than the spell could make" as a limiter (as earlier versions had), you have players using Wish to ignore restrictions on lower level spells such as simulacrum.  This makes simulacrum in 5ed about as abusive as clone could be in prior versions, and you really only have two options.
1- You nerf these spells.
2- Casting is so rare that no one has done these abuses before- if the PCs hit this level, they are probably in a group of 3-4 casters of that power level alive at that time, and the others have reasons not to do this.
Anything besides these two is pretty heavy handed, narratively.  If you go with the second case, the PCs will probably run into pushback should their exponential activities be discovered, and if not, well, they'll probably end up controlling as much of your world as they want.  This can be ok, and the world they may help you create may look entirely unlike a world where reasonably equal access to even high level magic is possible.

The final and much more minor point is that building castles isn't very interesting if half your potential invaders can fly, and some versions even feature a single castle turning huge sections of walls into mud with a few words.  The structure of a medieval style city would be pretty different with even occasional access to 3-5th level spells.  Later versions try address this (to some success), but generally assuming that castle builders are aware of these spells and have some kind of protection (that most experts would know about) is reasonable as well.

Or you can just throw up your hands, say "fuck it!", do away with all of the dumbfuckery of later rules, and go to a simpler ruleset.

You can also deal with a lot of by sheer rarity.

My setting presumes that 1st level PC's are basically 1-in-10,000 (the upper 1% of the 1%) exceptions from the norm. In a mighty metropolis of 50,000 people you might have 5 first level PCs.

6th level PC's are one-in-a-million (the upper 1% of PC-tier individuals)... In a kingdom of five million, you might find 5 people of this caliber.

11th level PC's are once-in-generation type individuals. There might be five on the whole planet right now.

15th level PC's are once-in-a-millennia figures. You would count yourself blessed to live at the same time as such champions because generations pass between ones like this turning up.

Sure... when literal Merlin shows up you have one person on the planet who can work magical shenanigans for his home kingdom... but the Tippyverse relies on a much greater logarithmic scale for the existence of high level casters than many settings natively will.

D&D settings and fiction aren't written with the rules in mind. This is why you see D&D fanfiction generally works like Tippyverse and is full of weird stuff that never appears in published settings. Some stories, like Order of the Stick, parody this. In a lot of GameLit/LitRPG, the characters in-universe will actually discuss the rules as if they live in a VR MMO. I don't like those kinds of stories.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 19, 2022, 12:55:03 PM
You can also deal with a lot of by sheer rarity.

My setting presumes that 1st level PC's are basically 1-in-10,000 (the upper 1% of the 1%) exceptions from the norm. In a mighty metropolis of 50,000 people you might have 5 first level PCs.

6th level PC's are one-in-a-million (the upper 1% of PC-tier individuals)... In a kingdom of five million, you might find 5 people of this caliber.

11th level PC's are once-in-generation type individuals. There might be five on the whole planet right now.

15th level PC's are once-in-a-millennia figures. You would count yourself blessed to live at the same time as such champions because generations pass between ones like this turning up.

Sure... when literal Merlin shows up you have one person on the planet who can work magical shenanigans for his home kingdom... but the Tippyverse relies on a much greater logarithmic scale for the existence of high level casters than many settings natively will.

Weren't there some official AD&D figures for this?

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on December 19, 2022, 01:23:40 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 19, 2022, 12:55:03 PM
You can also deal with a lot of by sheer rarity.

My setting presumes that 1st level PC's are basically 1-in-10,000 (the upper 1% of the 1%) exceptions from the norm. In a mighty metropolis of 50,000 people you might have 5 first level PCs.

6th level PC's are one-in-a-million (the upper 1% of PC-tier individuals)... In a kingdom of five million, you might find 5 people of this caliber.

11th level PC's are once-in-generation type individuals. There might be five on the whole planet right now.

15th level PC's are once-in-a-millennia figures. You would count yourself blessed to live at the same time as such champions because generations pass between ones like this turning up.

Sure... when literal Merlin shows up you have one person on the planet who can work magical shenanigans for his home kingdom... but the Tippyverse relies on a much greater logarithmic scale for the existence of high level casters than many settings natively will.

Weren't there some official AD&D figures for this?

Kind of. If you want an example of the cross section of humanity in a typical town or city in AD&D, you can use the "City/Town Encounters Matrix" on page 191 in the Dungeon Master's Guide. It contains random encounter tables, and not everyone is a zero-level nobody in it. Many of the listed encounters have NPCs with levels, and you can even possibly run into monsters during nighttime. It's not perfect, but it's useful.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 19, 2022, 12:55:03 PM
15th level PC's are once-in-a-millennia figures. You would count yourself blessed to live at the same time as such champions because generations pass between ones like this turning up.

This definitely avoids it for sure.  But do note that it does mean that the players, once they have achieved levels above 12, are going to be very hard to write challenges for.  Basically, if your campaigns end between levels 9 and 13 (as I believe most campaigns actually do), then this is totally feasible.  If your 17th level PC squad is the only one of those for 1500 years you don't have tippyverse concerns, but you do have "the PCs and maybe the forces opposed to them are the only forces with any importance in the entire universe".

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic on December 19, 2022, 01:23:40 PM
Weren't there some official AD&D figures for this?

I'm sure there were, and I also recall other sources (official and semi-official) giving their takes on this in later years.  But the short version is:  in most worlds with most rules you have enough high level casters to consider their impact, even if you don't end up with something as wild as the tippyverse, you would still expect the most egregiously disruptive economic things to happen to some degree, and in the other worlds and estimations neither the PCs nor the campaigns should be going much past 5th level spells ever.

Well, with the later rules, I get the angst to a certain extent.  So many of those rules (especially spells and magic items) are made with the idea of "what sounds cool" instead of being done as a reaction to specific rulings to fit into a specific setting.  Heck, once you go kitchen sink, you don't even have the cover of a specific setting anymore. 

However, the answer to this is not to try to make the rules as physics.  It doesn't really work even in games that make a concentrated, serious effort to have rules as physics where possible. And those games have a strongly implied setting, too.  (All you get in that case is a good fake of that result, if you don't examine it too closely.)  Worse, chasing rules as physics is a leading cause of bad rules.  (If your campaign begins to show signs of implosion after 4 sessions, consider discontinuing, or see your doctor.)

Stack the problem of rules as physics on top of the problem of "use all the official rules, because waah!", and on top of GM not customizing to a setting--then yeah, you'll have problems.  If you repeatedly hit your thumb with a hammer on purpose, it will hurt, too.  The solution is the same in both cases:  Stop being stupid.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on December 19, 2022, 02:28:20 AM

1. Change the rules of DND themselves directly (make magic more restricted)?
2. Change the expression of DND's rules (make DND's rules not the actual representation of a fictional reality)

A little it of A, a little bit of B.

I generally prefer a bit lower-fantasy vibe than stock D&D these days - more akin to 1E/2E era, or even better something like Warhammer Fantasy. So right off the top, that solves some of the problem.

And then, yes, rules are not reality. People don't actually have stats, or hitpoints, or even skills as the game mechanics understand them*. Those are abstractions. Extrapolating outward from there, so is almost everything else. Spells in the book, for example, represent spells that PCs and those the PCs interact with have access to, if they live long enough - not necessarily what the world at large has access to.

*Yes, obviously, characters can be strong or weak, smart or stupid, they can know how to smith a sword or follow tracks, etc etc. But it's not mechanistic. Strength is the closest of anything to being able to be accurately represented by numbers, and even there it's really not, because for example, a person may be stronger in the arms and weaker in the legs than normal, or vis versa - a blacksmith, for example, might be able to express far greater strength in his arms than his arbitrary Strength 13 would suggest, but only be of average Strength 13 in his legs. Similarly, our blacksmith doesn't have "Craft(Blacksmithing) 10", he's going to have strengths and weaknesses. He might be able to produce identical results as another Craft(Blacksmithing) 10 smith, but he takes twice as long, because he's more of a perfectionist, and the other smith is better at just winging it. Or maybe he makes really good axes, and another smith makes really good swords. Things like that. Yeah, various games try to address this with things like skill focuses, or Skills & Power's "sub-attributes", but these are always just an imperfect patch. Again, extrapolate this out to reality as a whole. Numbers and rules are not meant to simulate all of reality, they're meant to provide rules with which to play a game and tell stories.

Quote from: Venka on December 19, 2022, 02:58:00 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 19, 2022, 12:55:03 PM
15th level PC's are once-in-a-millennia figures. You would count yourself blessed to live at the same time as such champions because generations pass between ones like this turning up.

This definitely avoids it for sure.  But do note that it does mean that the players, once they have achieved levels above 12, are going to be very hard to write challenges for.  Basically, if your campaigns end between levels 9 and 13 (as I believe most campaigns actually do), then this is totally feasible.  If your 17th level PC squad is the only one of those for 1500 years you don't have tippyverse concerns, but you do have "the PCs and maybe the forces opposed to them are the only forces with any importance in the entire universe".

The system I use hardcaps at level 15 for PCs and is expected to wrap up somewhere between level 11 and 15 (you can keep playing, you just won't get any stronger other than perhaps via finding an artifact or something). Using the standard leveling model you'll hit level 6 after about 15-20 sessions, level 11 after about 75-100 more (90-120 sessions total), but level 15 will take about 200 more after that.

In my experience, 300 sessions is an incredibly long time for any campaign to run... a weekly 1-2 year (50-100 sessions) or bi-weekly 3-5 year (120-ish) campaign seem far more typical of those who don't peter out in the first half-dozen sessions.