GM wants to run a game about emancipating the slaves of a not-Rome nation of 10 million, where 30% are slaves

There's no reason you can't have an unskilled laborer slave caste and a skilled laborer freemen cast is there? I mean that was the norm wasn't it?

I guess you could argue that "slaves retard progress because people rely on them too much" but I don't think that's ever been really proven to be causative.

>The fact is, slavery is something that never stops making economic sense for unskilled labor.
>But slavery doesn't make economic sense.
>Do you have a single fact to back that up?
>I'll just say that slavery tends to be a poor economic strategy when you need skilled labor. For unskilled labor it works just fine.

Okay?

Interesting point. There'd be a certain balance to strike between training those skilled laborers to see themselves as better than the unskilled ones, but inferior to the ruling class. Slave psychology's very complex, and failing to take it into account means revolts one way or another.

Seconding this question

>a certain balance to strike between training those skilled laborers to see themselves as better than the unskilled ones, but inferior to the ruling class
it's called Middle Class

An actual slave, you have to feed, house and to some extent, take care of. With free people, you just have to pay them.

Technology just lessens the need to unskilled labor to some extent. Usually by making the costs to maintain the slave higher than you would need to pay some free person for the same work.

The question is, do your characters know enough to do all this advancement? It doesn't matter what you know it matters what they know.

As a GM I have had players do this. I have told them if they're going to use OOC knowledge they have to put away the electronics and recite how they're gonna do it. Just using the internet goes from mild cheating to silly levels of cheating.

It's difficult to speculate about stuff like that.

Hell, improvements in technology revitalized slavery in the american south, plantations were becoming less and less profitable, but with advancements in technology, slaves were suddenly much more efficient, and so you had a much greater profit margin per slave.

One of my player played a half-orc with 9 Intelligence that tried to replicate the production of gunpowder in the equivalent of the setting's Bronze Age. So yeah, I get where you're coming from.

The characters would need good reason to be aware of how and why these measures would work, otherwise the players are guilty of inserting their own economic and political knowledge.

>Technology just lessens the need to unskilled labor to some extent. Usually by making the costs to maintain the slave higher than you would need to pay some free person for the same work.

True, but technological progress does not lead linearly to less reliance on human labor. The cotton gin fueled a boom in the American slave trade, for instance. .

No the thing is most of people have a vague awareness of "salt peter, charcoal, sulfur" goes into gunpowder (a lot don't even have that), and nothing more.

Your player doesn't know how to make gunpowder or the processes to acquire what he needs in all likelihood.

Can we address the elephant in the room?

Why is the DM salty?

>and so you had a much greater profit margin per slave.

With a greatly reduced necessary workforce as well.

One of the things most people don't know about slavery in the American South is that by the time of the Civil War it was in its death-knell. Many great Southerners - who were members of the ruling Plantation class - saw the writing on the wall that vast numbers of slaves simply wasn't going to cut it in the long term with the advent of things like the Cotton Gin, and that eventually they were going to have to rethink their approach to slavery (Not abolish it, mind you - simply revise it). The days of hundreds of slaves working on massive plantations were numbered, and they knew it.

Problem was, how did they wean off of plantation slavery while still remaining in power and keeping Yankee fingers out of their pockets? They had no answer to that save rebellion and being able to restructure themselves on their own terms (which failed).

>Why is the DM salty?

I think we all know why.

>e characters would need good reason to be aware of how and why these measures would work
The problem is that it's hard to actually come up with these ideas without metagaming, sure you could say "well my wizard is smart and realized that explosions moved things, so he got the alchemist to make a non magical explosion" or some bullshit, but in the end it's always going to be real world -> table top since that's just the way knowledge like that flows. You can't really roleplay the nuances of reality that give birth to creative invention.

He was studying for a BSc in Chemistry. He pretty much recited the process on the spot when I challenged him and claimed that pretty much anyone could do that. And when I still said no, he said he'd try and make thermite instead because that's even easier.

We don't play with that guy anymore.

>have to feed the workers
>have to keep them healthy to protect your investment in them (a strong, able-bodied field hand would rarely be cheap in any society)
>have to discipline them
>may have to deal with rebellions

It's actually a lot easier to just have them be tenant farmers and let them become debt-slaves rather than actually forcing them to be normal slaves. See: Reconstruction post-American Civil War, or the English landed gentry.

I don't. Is it because he jumped off the rails?

Because the DM can STILL hit a lot of those beats and eventually cause civil war, it will just be less Spartacus and more Abraham Lincoln

this, most 'free' roman citizens were tenant farmers anyway. Then, you also had a patron who helped you take care of shit like if you needed a loan or to repair your house and something, and in return you got out and voted for your patron and showed up at rallies.

People are much more amendable to being slaves if you make them think they're free. They'll even thank the man holding the chains.

see also: modern society

Eli Whitney tried that one, and see where it got him.

All of those are somewhat of a factor with employees, just to a lesser extent.

>Is it possible

No, unless the game somehow lets you be the political and cultural leaders of the nation that are also blessed with unmatched foresight and technological insight.

Your plan would be impossible and attempting it would make you enemies that would kill you before you managed to make a dent, if it didn't simply bankrupt you and leave you powerless to do anything to help anyone.

>gradually eliminating the need for slavery by advancing technology, engineering, agriculture, etc. to make slave labor less necessary by the decade

Remember how the cotton gin was supposed to do that? Remember how it didn't and led to Southern landowners buying more slaves because why process 10 times as much cotton with one slave when you could process 1000 times more cotton with a hundred?

Besides, nobody wants to have to be the one to operate the machines, so if you can buy a slave rather than having to hire someone for a wage, why wouldn't you?

Another way to do it, that might be slightly easier, would be to chip away at the military campaigns the slave-taking nation relies on for fresh slaves.

The lack of more slavegirl pictures in this thread disappoints me, but renews my faith in this board.

Well, no. An employee can be responsible for his own feeding, health, and well-being. You have to maintain discipline, but you can just fire someone and not worry about losing any monetary investment (at least if we're still talking unskilled labor).

They might rebel, but it would not be on isolated farm-to-farm bases like it was during the Antebellum American South.

Interestingly, one of the Southerners' arguments FOR slavery was that it was more "moral" than Northern wage-slavery in the factories. Of course, they liked to hype up their own shit and ignored the fact that they still owned these people and didn't let them leave even if they wanted to.

Pretty easy, get it down to low levels and then purge the last bit with an emancipation movement. Kind of like how the North was dealing with the South's slavery before Lincoln.

Alternatively found a religion and promote the shit out of loving your fellow man and how all should be treated equal and shit.

You provide the resources that a worker uses to support themselves, you need to be concerned about your worker's health and their ability to work (and also how contagious their illness might be), you might be right about just firing someone and as for rebellion, it can be a serious rebellion or it can be something such as striking.

Workers need to be looked after in some respect. You can't just employ and forget.

The problem with slavery is that outside of production of raw materials is actively detrimental to economic development because slaves don't reinvest wealth into their communities. This is a major part of the reason the American south remains an underdeveloped shithole. The tenant-farmer/prison labor system they developed to keep the fat cats fat fucked the region's ability to develop

For you, with love.

>Dealing with Not-Romans
What I remember of Spartacus and his lot is that it ended with mass crucifixion. Hell all the slave uprisings in Rome ended with Roman victory and I assume more crucifixion, I don't blame you for trying a different way around this.

Well yeah, but you don't need to administrate any of the worker's basic needs on your own. If you provide them with a reasonable wage they will create demand that will attract physicians to treat their illness, gorcerers to sell them food, clothes to sell them things to wear, construction companies that build their homes, ect.

This reduces your overhead and the complexity of the management problem. You don't have to get a doctor, just give a sick worker the day off and let them handle that.

It was allready a hellhole for most of the people living there, I wouldn't exactly say it disintegrated.

>outside of production of raw materials
>This is a major part of the reason the American south remains an underdeveloped shithole

Didn't know cotton wasn't a raw material.

NUKE THIS FUCKING THREAD REEEEEEEE

I don't think you can call it a victory when you manage to kill a quarter of a million of your own slaves and workers after two and a half years of them raiding, sacking and ruining towns and the countryside.

Rome 'won' the servile wars, but they were absurdly expensive.

But user, slaves are a means of production, it is no different than the robots in a factory not spending their wealth, ultimately other ways of spending within the community have to be encouraged.

Technically some countries practiced slavery without it being integral (late Ottoman empire and most of ancient Egypt for example). But yes slave states are by definition ones that rely on slavery, but not all countries that practice slavery are slave states.

I'd like to add to this by saying that slavery is only economic as a byproduct of conquest in early times, when you end up with a lot of dispossessed and hostile people. People have long gestation and growth times, so it's uneconomic to grow your own.

This.

>we're going to advance technology

Fuck off. Technological advance is an iterative process that requires a buildup of social and material conditions.

There are few things I fucking hate more as a gamer than players pulling this shit.

not really.
there is nothing stoping someone form inventing a carding machine, or a slater mill in roman times. execpt for the fact that investing in machines is more expensive than investing in slaves.

dan carlin talks about how several acedemics have determined that the reason the romans/greeks did not undergo the industrial revolution is because of slavery.

you are not da vinci.

Using the fore knowledge of day far ahead is meta metagaming. When prototyping and drafting, You have no idea how your product will fail oh so horrible. so looking to the future for the right answers is on par with That Guys look in the monster manual

>See modern society

Just to mention a fun fact. The Clinton and Kennedy families were slave owning plantage gentry from the south.
Now they manipulate the "freed" black people to their own goals.

There are ways around religious resistance tho.

Was coal in common use in Roman times? Because IIRC the big reason why you got an industrial revolution was coal and coke becoming available as fuel and dropping the price of iron and steel.

China I think used coal in Roman times, but that was it.

>you are not da vinci.

Who is to say my character ISN'T The Da Vinic of his setting?

Weasel words. Which academics, when, in what papers, what exactly did they claim?

Also slavery existed at the time due to the material conditions of the time; if they didn't have slaves working those farms, they wouldn't have had the necessary food surplus to support any substantial class of aristocracy, and thus fewer (if any) educated intellectuals; progress likely would have stagnated, as subsistence farming doesn't leave a lot of room for science.

The DM. Play a fucking adventurer and stop being a faggot.

Also even if you were, most of Da Vinci's inventions amounted to nothing and didn't spur wide social changes.

This is what I was gonna say. He intended to reduce the amount of slaves in the south. It bit him in the ass.

He did essentially invent replaceable parts for guns for the north though. So he kinda redeemed himself.

I imagine he wanted you to go full viva la revolution! Not fucking Macroeconomics.

Remember seeing in a book where a person banned slavery by introducing indenture.
Said every slave had to be paid a pittance which goes towards their buying price, and no more than half can be taken as 'rent' for tools or living costs.

Slave owner goes
>And what if I refuse?

Tribune says
>Then I'll go outside and make an army out of all of your slaves. They'll be paid a pittance, not half of which can be taken as rent for weapons and armor, and they'll take this land out of your dead hands.

Not sure it's as feasible as it sounds though.
Humans generally prefer to live without freedom rather than die with.

GM could have solved this with the slave holders being unreasonably adamant about keeping their lifestyle, up to and including a massive bloody civil war and infiltration into government to ensure that their gravy train is flowing.

For most of the world, sure, it was logical to eliminate it, but people can be stubborn and love the idea of lording over people's lives and considering them livestock if they can get away with it.

The issue isn't whether or not you'll be able to advance technology it's whether or not you'll be able to advance the culture itself. Furthermore, you'll have to invent more then just a few things to make slavery obsolete. Advances like the cotton gin only made slavery grow because it made farming more lucrative but still required people to do the manual labor. It's only once farming becomes mechanized that slaves will start to decline in significant numbers. Since your characters won't have access to your accumulated knowledge they probably won't even be able to invent the things necessary for modern agriculture.

>you are not da vinci.

bitch I have 20 fucking INT

that's on par with, like, archdevils and shit

also way smarter than me IRL or my DM or anyone else in my group

I'm Da Vinci and Merlin and Sherlock Holmes combined

>PCs can summon unicorns and throw fireballs but cant build a water frame
you are seriously demented

>propose a strategy of gradually eliminating the need for slavery by advancing technology, engineering, agriculture, etc. to make slave labor less necessary by the decade
No cowtits, this isn't an economic game. This is a game about dudes fighting dragons. If you want an economic game, go play monopoly.

I'm sorry, but that's just uncalled for. It's never okay to tell somebody to play monopoly.

Maybe if you had about 2-3 hundred years to throw around.

>the only thing keeping slave in checks were the non existence of water frames

Better not tell General Lee the bad news

>It's only once farming becomes mechanized that slaves will start to decline in significant numbers. Since your characters won't have access to your accumulated knowledge they probably won't even be able to invent the things necessary for modern agriculture.

My character is literally a fledgling demigod of technology, knowledge, and bureaucracy from not-modern day America though.

Godbound is a silly setting.

The cotton gin fueled slavery, it didn't compete with it. The gin separated cotton fibers from the seeds. Field hands gathered up the seed pods that you fed into the gin. Field labor didn't go away until the development of internal-combustion farm equipment (and to a significant degree, it still hasn't gone away, even in the US).

When the Confederacy died (and when President Johnson destroyed Reconstruction), they replaced the plantations with other institutions of slavery-by-other-names. Prison labor, sharecropping, and so on. The system continued well into the 20th century; and had slavery been allowed to legally continue (and not been destroyed by international abolitionism), it could have lasted just as long as sharecropping did.

>Better not tell General Lee the bad news
To be fair, America was fighting over slavery when most if not all of Europe and about half of Latin America had already abolished it. When Americans remember the Alamo, they must also remember that it was a government approving of slavery fighting against a government that had already abolished slavery.

America was simply backwards at the time. They probably didn't get the 1848 memo.

They can summon unicorns and throw fireballs if they have the right spells and meet the prerequisites of those spells. They need to follow the logic of the setting that allows someone to summon a unicorn for them to be able to summon a unicorn.

They need the right intellect and the right skills and the right circumstances and the right resources for them to even consider inventing something like a water frame. You don't just suddenly snap your fingers and invent a water frame out of thin air when you're a dumb ass adventurer with no previous experience in engineering.

And in the right system.

I am pretty sure that Haiti is the only successful recorded case in history of a mass slave rebellion. I think that the current socioeconomic state of the country is no coincidence.

>Slave
>But dressed prettily
>So I can show her around my other domus friends.
>And later not be repulsed by her in my bedchambers when I teach her how to be a woman

My cock is already hard.

To be clear, I am the OP.

The situation in the OP is our party, and I am an Artifice/Command/Knowledge-bonded Godbound from not-modern day America.

The plan is to pool together Dominion and celestial shards to build an etheric energy node.

The Romans and the Wasps both imported plenty of skilled labour as well.

Free people will fight the expansion of your negro-based plantation economy into what they Imagine as a future white and free nation, user.

>Aluminium
>easy

Toppest kek. Shit was so rare that Emperors would maybe posess two items fashioned from it.

>Kill 1/4 of your slaves, you still have 3/4 and they won't rebel in a good time
>let the1/4 free, the rest follows

Dunno about you, but it looks clear to me which one is the victory.

Even the atlantic trade was fed by war between african states. It was just more profitable for the africans to sell their captives instead of keeping them all.

Most other nations had no need for slaves and/or were not able to defend themselves from the brits and their hypocrite anti-slavery crusade.

>ect
kill yourself

It reduces your consumer base and makes production kind of a hassle depending on work conditions.
Plus you have to deal with revolts.

>It reduces your consumer base
For certain products yes, but open new job posibilities like whip manufacturer, masage afther whole day of whiping slaves, wrist compres, glove for your whip hand. Whiping seminars, and practice tutorials.

Why not go the shock therapy route? Assuming you are indifferent to the amorality of it, a magically engineered plague could cause a population crash amongst the slaves (I'm assuming that they have smaller more cramped housing, poorer access to food and medical care, and tiredness from overwork). Removing that class from society, and you can likely more easily get the slaveholders to accept gradual emancipation, since so many of them will be looking for labour solutions after they've lost their workforce.

>Paul! I thought you were a GEP gun

not really

the only thing that actually worked to end slavery is religion. The big no-slaves movements were decidedly motivated by thats-a-sin thoughts.

Contrary to what some people have said, highly educated slaves did exist and often were quite pricey (for example greek scholars as teachers for romes spoilt brats), so making educated slaves work the machinery is not too far fetched, provided they get more privileges/better living conditions then the common slaves.

The other thing to consider is that the economic calculation of slavery may be significantly altered in a society where magic exists. If all you need to do to ensure obedience is put a magic collar on someone (or a magic tattoo or brand or something), suddenly slavery becomes ex-treme-ly desirable. No need to worry about your chef poisoning you, your estate manager embezzling money, your footman selling secrets to other nobles, or your mistress sharing salacious rumors about your bedroom prowess.

There's also the question of economic penetration. If all slaves are owned by the nobility, it's easier to rally support among the lower classes against it. But if the town blacksmith and baker own a slave, it's a much harder sell. It's the difference between banning luxury cars and banning all cars, everywhere.

Finally, there's cultural penetration. Slavery was seen as a mark of great pride in ancient Rome because it demonstrated Roman dominance over the known world. If slaves in your society are seen as "others"--other races or from other countries--it will be harder to gain any support for them.

Yeah, how do you think it got wittled away here in teh US?

Slavery was on its way out the door pre civil war with the invention of the cotton gin. Same can be seen today in America, the low skilled jobs which are in effect the slave jobs are being done away with replaced by automated systems.

The problem always becomes, well what do you do with the slaves once they become useless? They have no skills and are only a drain on the system.

I kind of did something like that.

>be a druid hanging innawoods
>find some dead dude stabbed to shit
>deduce he's from the village nearby
>go there and get introduced to the rest of party
>take one back to retrieve corpse
>start actually studying, my character starts looking for defensive wounds and asking the GM questions that I think to ask because real life me is studying criminal justice, forensics, and my dad is a cop
>end up writing a backstory for my druid that his father was a mortician that also was the town coroner, took my character with him on some stuff
>fits well since I also took the anatomist trait when I made him

I know it was kind of post-justifying and the DM didn't even mention anything about "why would a druid be asking cop-like questions" but I felt it help flesh my character out a bit more.

Seeing how the Romans switched to an economy based on Freedman-dependants afterwards and reserved the worst jobs for people and slaves with a criminal records for good, I'd say that Spartacus was halfway successful.

>Humans generally prefer to live without freedom rather than die with.
Eh, they'd rather not risk their lifes for nothing, yes, but slaves were perfectly willing to take the risk whenever there was half a chance and some level of support.

>Slavery was on its way out the door pre civil war with the invention of the cotton gin.

The cotton gin actually increased the number of slaves.

>Same can be seen today in America, the low skilled jobs which are in effect the slave jobs are being done away with replaced by automated systems.

From what I gather, automated systems and AI are mainly there to attract stupid money and the actual day-to-day work's still being done in various tier of sweatshops, from those working for the clothing industry to those filtering murder and CP from Google and Facebook-results.

Bullshitting here but if you replace your entire unskilled worker base with unpaid slave labor that means the poor of your society become poverty stricken since the only jobs they could take are taken. And a lot of technology makes it more costly to have too many workers.

Just publicly flog people who engage in slavery. That should get the message across fast.

Yeah, just flog the richest people in town arbitrarily.