How can society even function when you have things like wizards?

>A logical result of heinous abuse of standard D&D rules
It's not even logical, it blatantly ignores everything that doesn't fit their goal and assumes ideal conditions.

Because wizards aren't unlimited pools of power like you suggest.

My favorite explanation is that long lived races like elves spend hundreds of years perfecting even the simplest of spells with care and caution, so few even bother delving into high powered magics.

Humans are batshit crazy, and for every semi-powerful wizard, there are thousands upon thousands of smoldering craters where a human wizard once stood, because they experiment with little regard for safety. The ones that survive, then, don't go out of their way to tempt fate.

By them ruling over filthy muggles and using them to wage awesome magitek wars with each other, duh.

The same reason it can function despite there being things like dragons, demons and orcs; ITS A FUCKING FANTASY WORLD ASSHOLE

Because there's actually not that many high level characters running around. Maybe a max of 3-4 per setting in their full history have ever reached level 20 and beyond.

...

Depeing on how magic and magic users works it may be to rare to be make diffrence to everyone or can be actually part of every aspect of live and society where magic provide stuff what technology is (or will) provide to us.

For every wizard, there is an equal and opposite wizard. They balance each other out, in a manner of speaking.

Theres also the facet that most of the wizards tend to be kinda low levelled and neurotic. Learning magic means first learning how many things out there would love to eat you alive, in graphic detail. They don't tend to draw much attention after learning that, not until they become exceedingly powerful and thats pretty rare.

Like, PC wizard hitting level 12 would be a once in a millennia sort of thing, most wizards are way weaker.

Have you ever read Xianxia? Cultivators are basically highlevel wizards. They don't bother with mortals most of the time and might makes right.

What if I told you all other wizards in the setting don't get to look at a depository of every known spell to pick from when they start out?
PCs are special in that regard. Most other wizards are stuck with whatever spell they (crappily) design or overpay some richer wizard for a copy of featherfall.

The most powerful wizards stop caring about stuff in the world at large because they're too busy dealing with extraplanar concerns.

Plus, wizards are extra rare, or at least the ones that are powerful enough that they can really have an effect on the world. At best, otherwise, you get a bunch of goofy hedge wizards who can turn salt into gold (but only like a gram at a time).

Naruto.

It doesn't. All of D&D's settings mostly rely on magic users, Monarchs, or Deities, because they all extort something, present progress because of their pressing interests and intrigues, magic literally holds progress back and is maintained by a dead Goddess living in her Transvestite followers under the most Anti-anying Elf-infest Organisation ever to plague the planes.

At best, the strongest "Common mages" are up to level 15, and anything in the 20's is usually iconic, a deity or someone of importance.

Faerun, as it is now is literally Neverwinter Online tier, in that there's such a fucking concentration of factions, magic, and adventuring, that they've entered in an age where things will eventually border Spelljammer tier progress.

Meanwhile on Oerth, Murlynd's Influence brings about a 21st Century esque setting, and greatly reduces Deific fuckery on the plane, because the Deities no longer can fragment mortal opnion, worship and reception due to things being "Open".

Also OP, remember, Wizards don't know about the XP system, for all intents and purposes, all things earned from an active roleplay point of view are done through research, which translates in rules as VERY time-consuming activities, and you have age to consider, and what it means when the Wizard has High Int, this is a person who literally memorizes the metaphysical laws of his universe, in complex sentence structures to prepare incantations in his spellbook, that he completes when he actually casts the spell, the Spell preparation literally IS the spellcasting part, the stuff one does to cast is just finishing the spell outright, and it's a time-consuming process. Society functions because wizards are ALWAYS fucking busy out the ass with this shit, wizards don't have a fuckign all applicable guide to level 20 you know.

Truth of the matter is, that the majority of people here would NEVER be wizards, it's literally like Coding, except the code has such significance, it has to be memetically manually repeated, because executing a line of Code, immediately delete the whole thing from your memory, because this is how the weave works or some shit.

We'd all be Clerics and Wis-based classes, Especially Clerics, Waifufags could literally FLOOD the Upper and Lowers Planes with Deities they Make from their sheer faith and dedication to their Waifus, We'd have endless Touhou Jihad in the Blood war, and Not the Devils, Yugoloths, or Demons would know what the bloody fuck is going on when a level 20 cleric with Green hair, red eyes, and Domains never heard of before starts growing Flowers everywhere on the Abyss.

This is of course, provided we don't die in the second of entering the D&D cosmlogy for a large expansive number of reasons, namely pertaining to the sheer amount of deadly non-plausible wildlife that if ever coded into a game, for say example TESIV oblivion, would result in an encounter every other second as a part of an effective simulation, even with things like active road patrols, people travelling, Caravans, factions etc... Trust me, NOWHERE would be safe.

Like-
Wanna sleep in D&D?
Dream Larvae/Demiplane of Nightmare/The Far Realm Leaking into the former causing them to manifest as even more warped organism versions of themselves in Far realm incursions that occur in certain locations/Tharizdun whispering to you/Large number of Freddy krueger Esque nasties out for you/The shitloads of Vampire types that exist.

Then, every inch of treehugger logic nature wants you dead/Risk of ending up in a feyzone/Risk bandits/Risk of horrible amalgamate magical creatures relased into the wild/

Then there's the weather.
Arcane storms, The Black rain, (literally a fucking weather effect that fucks Divine Spellcasters up the ass rendering them useless) Imagine the flora and fauna

In a setting where magic is common, people are going to have figured out ways to deal with it.

Any settlement larger than a hamlet would have significant anti-magic preparations of some sort, and even hamlets might have /something/ to protect them from roving sorcerers.

Assuming every town isn't totally covered with a null-magic field or something, the guard/militia would have /something/ to disable magic or deal with it somehow. If a mage goes rogue in the middle of town, a guard hucks a null-magic trinket o'er to 'em, then proceeds to stroll up and stab them in the face.

Alternatively, you could have some mutually assured destruction set up, where any naughty wizards quickly get put down by goodie-two-shoes wizards. Sure, a magic-user could wreck some shit before a force is drummed up to stop them, but a force will be drummed up by someone. If a mage wants to use magic for evil, they're going to try their best not to be noticed, hiding in a secret lair or what-have-you, because everyone is aware of the threat of an evil wizard. Hell, maybe even a deity would step in to put a mad-wizard down!

Basically, imagine any way that magic can fuck up society and invent some counter to it. Easy enough, especially since you can just use magic~

>X spell reagents include a chimera feather or black diamond wahey or some other faggotry.
>creature is hunted to extinction, mineral mined out.
>wizards can't cast x spell anymore.

alternatively discworld where wizards are old/demented/interested in their own shit/internal politics and so much so that they forgo most other things.

fpbp

I once found a Dresden Files SG-1 crossover that suggested nuclear reactors or Naquadah/Naquadria could be used in place of more traditional forms of sacrifice. This of course led to the Goa'ould conquering the galaxy as the next best thing to actual gods with zero-downside necromancy on tap, so I doubt there's a way to game-balance that.

Nobody but SJWs and fucking millennials even care about why, cuz you know, it's fucking fantasy! No sense of wonder....

That's why there's constant conflict.
Lots of power = larger power vacuums.

The society in my homebrew omniverse is kept within some semblance of sanity because of a beyond-godlike figure.

It keeps the world from utter destruction, and manipulates events to defeat anyone that tries to surpass godhood. No religion worships it, and no society has knowingly had any contact.

>inb4 self insert
Not every fantasy is wish-fulfillment.

If there are a great number of highly powerful wizards and they aren't bound in some way (like Gandalf, for example) then shit's basically fucked m8

In some settings killing too many mortals brings a calamity from the heavens.

Works fine.

A wizard wants nothing to do with society, or is deeply ingrained with it, supporting it's function.

I've been playing Morrowind and House Telvanni seems to cover this.
>wizards live for comically long times
>the only way to replace a wizard is therefore to murder them
>wizards also kill each other for secrets and artifacts
>this means leaders are sociopaths with huge mana pools incapable of, you know, leading
>all of their underlings have slightly smaller mana pools and are constantly trying to murder them
>magic users are fairly common, but other regions integrate them into the state instead of making them THE state
Until I joined their house I was confused while playing as to why they didn't control everything. It turns out they just want me to murder their friends.

Like any other society with high investment, high production workers.

the mistake people make is that when they want more magic, they make it easier so it will make sense that people know it.

rather you should just increase the amount of people determined or insane enough to learn impossible things. this is an entirely different type of personality from a random dumbass who's just been granted power over the laws of nature. where most people's decision making process tends to involve the question of difficulty, wizards have more or less entirely banished it. why doesn't a wizard with apocalypse at his fingertips eventually decide to cause it? the answer is that he's no more likely to try than some less powerful wizard, because they don't accept the reality of what they can or can't do anyways.

when they do decide to cause something horrible, it tends to be in pointlessly specific ways since they don't care about what the 'logical' approach woiuld be.

And you get some Telvanni like Fyr who doesn't give a shit and hangs out with his daughters and some fat fuck

After you wizard long enough you realize it isn't about raising yourself above gods with power overwhelming, it's more about turning yourself into a loli and relaxing for the rest of time. Thus, the terrible society-disrupting wizards are avoided naturally.

>We'd have endless Touhou Jihad in the Blood war
I like it.

And yeah, we are probably too dumb for wizardry, maybe we would fits as clerics or in some cases as nutjob sorcerers.

Boring as shit, fuck off

Make powerful "order-keepers". Try to fuck things up, wizards more powerful than you will hunt you down.

But who keeps the order-keepers in order?

Themselves.
You could get funky with it and say they were magically wired to have little to no ambitions and goals besides keeping order.

There is no reason that efreeti would not rule the entire multiverse with a single subservient slave race they form an alliance with long before any mortal gets strong enough
Tippyverse is stupid shit

All-powerful status quo magic robots?

Exactly!

Install hard limits to magic.

Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. I

People don't have noses because they have a magic-sensitive organ in its place.

>post-apocalyptic wizard kingdom
>started strong, then devolved into a powerful tyranny as the government tried to damage control all the awful shit
>the resulting civil war left the whole country an unhospitable mess of conjured demons, golems, spirits, animated things, sentient weather, and skeleton hordes
>but also a trove of unclaimed magical treasures

Careful, GW might fine a lawsuit

...

So Dark Sun then

man, spoiler that zesty /pol/ porn, user.

Meanwhile on wizard Veeky Forums:
>How can society even function when you have things like natural philosophers?

The training to become a wizard is very slow and costly, thats because you need to get your mind and body used to focusing magical energy through them. This requires expensive ingredients which are purer and take your time to rest and do the exercises properly. Otherwise you might simply die or get magical powers at the cost of your sanity or getting deformities.

This leads to a society where wizards are rich old men with not enough time left to gain the necesary skills to get immortality, or "rogue" wizards who became mutants. Of course player characters are exception to both of this.

/thread

>Of course player characters are exception to both of this.

Try finding players who arent massive weebo faggots to play with. Maybe you find one or two but the rest will want their special snowflake half-demon elf

>special snowflake half-demon elf
That's funny since i'm playing my blood elf demon hunter alt in WoW right now

Acquire or become a competent GM

A few reasons really

Magic is Fucking Hard to learn and will take years of effort for basic cantrips and will cost you more gold then most
Commoners see in a year

you basically need to be a genius or you might as well give up before you start because no wizard is going to waste their time on teaching an idiot when they could be trying to learn the secrets of magic

Do you think you can stop at the local Spellmart and pick up a few scrolls and a spell book?

Dream on, a wizard's spells are their most closely guarded secrets you might as well be asking a dragon for a loan

Even if you some how got a scroll it'd probably be something like "Home r's Heated Bathwater" then anything usefull

And that's only becoming a wizard

if you want to learn the secrets of magic you can't just sit in a cave

you need Regents and their not going to come to you, Weird crystals and strange plants aren't something you find at the local market

And if you want to learn the secrets of magic sometime this century you need scrolls and spell books

I hope you like old tombs and abandoned wizard lairs filled with monsters and traps

And that's just materiel

you can't forget you rival wizards who want nothing more than to stab you in the back and take your secrets

...

>play Ermor
>get stacks of 10k+ 'scout' army

If I recall correctly, that is literally the setting of Pathfinder's City of Brass on the plane of fire. Efreeti rule and use slaves for wishes.

"lol git gud, scrub" -- Science

A good GM would use magic well.

Integrate that shit. Wizards are, 99% of the time, huge fucking nerds who work for magic at the cost of everything else. So Wizards may be viziers, and protectors of kings, but not kings themselves, because ruling would take away time from learning how to have no sense of right or wrong.

Warlocks come about from pacts with mostly evil entities, so they would stay in the underbellies of society. Any Warlock aiming to become big would be hunted down quick.

Sorcerers, though, that's a tricky one, since those assholes just get magic for free. They would be big movers and shakers.

As true as many of those statements are its hard to call it /pol/ porn when it can be dismissed by anybody simply because of who it came from.

Magic is subtle. It is the functions that remain unseen. A mysterious circus of miracles. It is the craft of fools and madmen.

In essence, it is a plot device and should be treated as such, even in the hands of players.

Unless you're running some weaboo high power this isn't even my final form just wait until my ultimate jutsu bankai digivolution number 13 caster shell super crystal tiara bullshit.

In that case the function of society is irrelevant to casters. To them, society simply is. It's just an anthill in the garden, and they might happen to know the names of a couple of ants.

Everyone is a wizard. For every irresponsible spell, there are 50 counterspells.

>How can society even function when you have things like wizards?

Depends a lot on how magic is introduced to the setting.

If it's something the setting always had, you'd probably end up with a society much different than ours. You'd likely have a caste system (magic users and non-magic users being kept apart) or high regulations on magic (magic users either being on the top or bottom depending on how rare they are, if magic is teachable, and how powerful it is).If magic is sufficiently powerful you might have most wizards just popping off to another realm or frantically pursuing those first few ranks in life extension magic so they can live forever before they get too old.

If magic is something introduced later on in a setting, through a god(dess) or magical items, then you can create chaos. Society is built upon power structures and now you've added a random modifier to the whole system. You'd likely see what happened after the technological revolution with WW1 and WW2. Powers polarizing and people fighting over resources that were never valued before. Side flexing their newfound power until one takes over and installs their value system OR two sides reach a stalemate and keep to themselves.

Chemists and Nuclear Scientists don't have the ability to literally level cities by speaking a few words. Virologists, maybe, but even that's a stretch. If there was one level 20 wizard in a world full of otherwise mid-level stuff, the world wouldn't stand a chance. The wizard gates in a shitton of outsiders to serve him, retreats into his personal demiplane, and then demands that everyone surrender or he will kill them all.

The actual reason is a combination of A) Other wizards, and B) Not having time for politics and shit.

>Kill yourself irl because scripting Ermor is soul-crushing
>Saoluthi will just snap reality over his knee again anyway, killing the server and making you do the scripting again, trapping you in an eternal Ermorian scripting-suicide loop, a fate so horrible that Satan himself would shake his head and drink himself into a coma

So...what you're saying is that the real question we should be asking is: How can society even function when you have things like sorcerers?

Pretty easily considering they just spend time to themselves browsing wizchan.

>For every wizard, there is an equal and opposite wizard

My DM had something like this as a major event in one of his backstories. Some creatures that live in mirrors and replace people with opposite aligned copies of themselves for shits and giggles, who's names I can't recall but I believe were official setting stuff.

One of them targetted his up and coming Artificer when he was in the middle of creating his own realm, and made a copy of him.

Said Artificer was technically True Neutral. He was structured and orderly to a point where he wasn't Chaotic, but was wacky and had enough of a disregard for boundaries, basic human rights, and some laws of physics that he wasn't really Lawful either, so he was Neutral on account of not really fitting into the other two. As for good and evil, he was mostly neutral, but was just selfless enough to be leaning towards Good.

Since he's neutral with a touch of Good, they basically got a copy that was also neutral, but with a touch of Evil. Neither were far enough into Good/Evil to dislike each other, so they murderized the mirror guys and finished building their new plane of existence together, and had happy times creating and tormenting the citizens of it for their own personal amusement, and basically were best friends.

Although in the process of building a massive Clockwork Behemoth war machine, the pride and joy of their lives, they disagreed on whether it's clockwork components should run on clockwise or counterclockwise directions.

Thus began the century long Clock Wars, costing the lives of millions, ending with the Artificer finally throwing his copy into a volcano that he put there for just that reason.

Said conflict has absolutely no bearing on the setting aside from us having one fight with underground Clockwise Cultists, but it was a fun story to listen to in-character.

>As true as many of those statements are

Simple, wizards stay hidden and don't mess with shit. When they are low level, they die too easy. When they are middle level, they study so much to actually get to the final heights of power that they are antisocial and avoid everyone. When they are high level, they are fucking with other realms of reality and the creatures and power contained within them and leave society to the simpler minds, warriors. They also occasionally come out to fuck over a religion that is getting too big for it's britches. Usually by arming some no name farmboy, with a reason for vengeance, and then doing stuff in the background to distract and assist. Then ascending back to other planes when the big shit starts going down. So he doesn't get smacked by a god or some such.

Basically, but the fucking GM thinking for a bit.

>we currently live in a world where a few people can glass the planet, or own billions of dollars

Same principle.

Consolidate magical education into a single academy and force students to learn morality and ethics before evocation.

Also, have Lawful-Good wizard mafia check up on graduates, killing evil ones on sight.

I can't believe I know exactly what Hentai that comes from, and I gotta say, it's pretty good, though very, very /d/.

The Order-Keepers of the Order-Keepers, that's who!

>The society in my homebrew omniverse is kept within some semblance of sanity because of a beyond-godlike figure.
>It keeps the world from utter destruction, and manipulates events to defeat anyone that tries to surpass godhood. No religion worships it, and no society has knowingly had any contact.

You should design a villain who spent his entire waking life trying to contact this omni-being. He eventually succeeds, but only in causing himself to go mad at the realization of everything. A big existential crisis, because why even fucking bother?

I mean this reaches to comic book levels of bull-shit; thinking back on that Chaos War event.

Sorcerers are rare enough that you needn't worry, and the enterprising wild magic sorcerers are just as likely to explode as to make it past 20

Wizards are confined to a continent to the east. Rarely, one travels to the mainland.

All credit for the actions it takes, whether "good" or "bad", are assumed to be caused by the known gods/demons/whatever.

It might make you happy to know that there's a devout priest who becomes somewhat villainous in his pursuit of discovering the truth. He's only a cameo character, but still a bit too complicated to explain his story concisely.

I'm thankful for the interest. I'll consider your idea.

My setting has a Wizard god. He also happens to be the "evil" god.

He's only kept in check because there's 3 other gods. 2 are good, and one is neutral and does their best to keep the peace. The neutral is the most powerful, so none of them try anything.

The two good gods don't ally up at all because they hate each other almost as much as they hate evil, so as long as the evil god doesn't do anything that would force them ally up, they'll spend most of their time fighting each other.

Because you also have things like clerics, druids, and sorcerers.

Welcome to M.A.D.

that's philosophers

Read anima lore.

The answer is genocide.

There are bigger fish than wizards. They're kept in check.

In my homebrew i've put a ancient aboleth who is manipulating society in to a sort of inquistion against all types of casters (the people thinks they are all necromancers) an in this way only a few 1st or 2nd level spellcaster can develop, becuase a more powerful wizard would be instanly killed by some inquisitor or by the population.

i should also mention that my party is currently running away from the law because we have a 8th level cleric in the group.

How the fuck does a society that bans magic survive magic users who fight against them?

There is just too much of an incentive to study magic to ban it successfully.

If anyone shows any kind of magic abilty they are executed by an inquisitor (there's one in any village more big than an hamlet), so they cannot become threatening.

In the end any wizrd of 3rd level can be killed by a little group of soldiers, and cleric are nearly impossible due to the general lack of faith, and even then there are continuos persecution againts suspected wizard and witch hunt are frequent

Right, and these people are never corrupt or just hit with a charm spell?

>We'd all be Clerics and Wis-based classes, Especially Clerics, Waifufags could literally FLOOD the Upper and Lowers Planes with Deities they Make from their sheer faith and dedication to their Waifus, We'd have endless Touhou Jihad in the Blood war, and Not the Devils, Yugoloths, or Demons would know what the bloody fuck is going on when a level 20 cleric with Green hair, red eyes, and Domains never heard of before starts growing Flowers everywhere on the Abyss.

That's fucking fantastic. This seems so obvious now that you've said it. Imagine Kek striking down Dat Boi with his divine fury. The future of the gods is the living incarnation of shit posting.

Here is how a society with wizards would function.

1. Wizard achieves a high level of political power.

2. Wizard picks a successor, trains them.

3. Successor kills Wizard (GOTO 1) or Wizard is overthrown by muggles and friends.

Source: Star Wars

Make everyone a wizard.
Peace maintained through the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Does not work since they will simply shoot each other with magic bolts when they found out being an uncaring rude asshole net your zero friends who cared about you.