Back in 3.5 D&D, if you took a world to it's logical extreme you would end up with industrial societies powered by and ruled by spellcasters (most likely wizards).
Is this still true for 5th edition?
Back in 3.5 D&D...
Andrew Foster
Elijah Murphy
Forgotten Realms is technically this due to sheer clusterfuck, but in Greyhawk, Murlynd pretty much turned the world into Shadowrun and all the shitty conflict based deities are dead, with the only issue being eco-terrorists being left.
John Powell
Back in 3.5 you would end up with stone age societies squatting around self-sufficient wizard towers. Economy is the foundation and backbone of all development and D&D magic shits on it hard.
Colton Garcia
Wait, wasn't Murlynd a cowboy though, not a street samurai?
Alexander Cruz
Depends on how string the wizard is. If a country has 1 or 2 wizards with 9th level magic, they might not care enough to want to rule. Just sit in their wizard tower and study all day long since politics means less time for magical study.
If you have a sizable enough number of them it's more likely. Such as the city of Thay in forgotten realms that's run by a council of mages. 1 for each school of magic.
Alexander Diaz
>If a country has 1 or 2 wizards with 9th level magic.
If a PLANE or a GALAXY has a wizard with 9th level spells, they've basically got a living-god.
James Parker
in ravenloft it's not entirely feasible because domains pop up and dissapear constantly.
Noah Morris
Wizards would still have an effect on the local economy but not nearly as much as in 3.PF. Between the new version of Concentration and the lack of ability to make magical items without DM fiat the Wizards would have to be much more hands-on with it than in earlier editions.
You could, in essence, still have Merlin but you can't do the sort of MerlinCorp settings that used to be possible unless you were specifically building in that direction.
Henry Johnson
but the first wizard who give those cavemen industry and attacks the other wizards will conquer
Anthony Martin
The worst abuses a Wizard has in 5e are all 9th level stuff, rather than things low level wizards might be useful for making.
In addition, the big ones are True Polymorph abuse to turn people into artifacts or ancient dragons. Scary, but not quite as good on the macro level.Simulacrum and endless wishes would be the bigger threat, but since Wish is such a heavily GM fiat based thing, trying to abuse it on that scale is asking for trouble.
And honestly you should probably just ban those spells anyway to resolve a PC wizard trying to abuse them way early. Assuming you ever get to level 17
Nathaniel Thomas
Or the Simulacrum Singularity Engine. Takes a few weeks to get running but eventually you're wizard is producing a small army of wizards.
Hudson Martinez
No he won't, he'll lose because he spent time and resources giving inconsequential people something any other wizard can completely destroy in a day.
Ayden Davis
Taking 5e to its logical extreme would wizards ever really be a threat? I feel like NPC stat blocks never have 9th level spells, and the game seems to really discourage using PC levels for non-PCs
Nathan Stewart
he can mass produce wands of magic missile, nigga
Bentley Parker
You didn't play much 3.5, did you? Look at the Shield spell.
Colton Hall
No way of getting around that I guess!!!
Evan Moore
Germans had that same idea regarding tanks.
American industry won that one.
Eli King
Germans couldn't transmute lead into gold, redirect rivers, collapse mines, or flood markets with mass fabricated items. A single high level 3e wizard can irreversibly destroy a nation of any size without casting a single offensive spell.
Levi Lopez
Dispel Magic. Which is countered by Globe of Invulnerability or Contingency counter Dispel Magic. Which is countered by Greater Dispel or Spell Array counter Dispel Magic.
Especially as you reach past level 6, each level progressively throws more speedbumps that are solved only by magic or supernatural abilities that emulate the "correct" magic. D&D 3.5 is heavily gated in this manner, thus there's no point in investing in commoners. Hell, if you need extra sets of eyes, summoning and familiars usually do the trick.
Dylan Robinson
and if that wizard now has industry....
Angel Lee
>Is this still true for 5th edition?
No, bards are now the rulers of the world, on account of high charisma, expert skills and 9th level spellcasting.
Also creating magical items isn't really a thing anymore, so you can't really industrialize magic to the same degree.
Jackson Reyes
how high magic industrial could you get in 5.e then?
On a scale from 17th to early 19th century?
Elijah Brooks
Maybe 18th? You could have Continuous Flame used for street lights and lamps to function as early electrical lighting. Mass transit like trains could be accomplished by using Fire Elementals rather than coal or wood, or perhaps just air elementals blowing into sails. Sending spells can fill the role of telegraphs.
Xavier Reyes
>Back in 3.5 D&D, if you took a world to it's logical extreme you would end up with industrial societies powered by and ruled by spellcasters (most likely wizards).
Don't be retarded. On Page 137 of the 3.5E DMG, we have the definition that a "Metropolis" is a city of 25,000 or more. 2 pages later, we see that a Metropolis has 4 rolls at +12 for "high ranking NPCs". That means that a city of 25,000 or more has a (1-3/4^4) probability, or around a 68% chance that there's at least each of:
1 level 16 wizard
1 level 16 sorcerer
1 level 18 Cleric
1 level 18 Druid
1 Level 18 Adept
forum.nwnights.ru
Those are seriously high level spellcasters, each of which, with enough time and preparation, capable of severely disrputing a civilization, at least on a local scale.
At least according to Wiki, circa 1400, we have around 25 cities that big in Europe alone by 1400, which is more or less at the "Default" level of DND social and technological development.
en.wikipedia.org
In addition to the PCS, and whatever weird recluses are out there, we have dozens of people any one of which can wreck a major city. Taking DnD 3.5 to its logical extreme is Mad Max.
William Brown
>Mad Max
Maybe if all of those casters happen to be Chaotic or Evil and either really hate cities or are really greedy.
The proper way this works out is for the likely good or lawful cleric to use the tithes to make resetting traps of create food and water, cure disease, and cure light wounds. Now the entire populace is well fedd and healthy, and the city doesnt need its outside fields so it can just full urbanize and have all those people work on trades and crafts or learn magic themselves.
Grayson Green
never understood why there would be high level adepts and warriors. By the time you become a lv3 adept or warrior you should start getting wizard/fighter levels
Joshua Walker
You don't need all of those casters to be evil, you just need a few of them to want to do so before civilization is irretrievably wrecked. It's a lot easier to tear down than it is to build up.
Add in that you have lots of motivations that even a non CE sort might want to wreck his homeland for whatever reason, and we're left with an enormously unstable civilizatation where there's really no way to handle an out of control high level spellcaster except hope that another one of similar level is around and prepared to take him down.
Because nothing gets around the fact that it takes about 16-17 years to get an adult human (longer for longer lived races) and about 5 seconds to kill one.
Jacob Campbell
>logical extreme
Show your work.
Brandon Watson
At least personally, I've always thought of them as someone picking up magic or fighting with some sort of poor but still extant education. Consider the difference between a Marian legionaire and the citizen's militia it replaced for the difference of fighter vs warrior. Someone in Scipio's army that won at Zama has a lot of field experience, but has never been really officially trained beyond whatever small bit the Iunores did so they weren't completely rank amateurs. He's probably a high level warrior, not a fighter of even low level. He's refined a basic set of skills that he learned, but for whatever reason hasn't likely attempted to stretch beyond them to attain "True" fighterness".
Similar analogy for the Adepts vs Wizards. A high level adept probably has never fully sytematized magical study. He's done some study, he's not a sorcerer, probably an apprenticeship to the last adept in town, but there's some nonsense thrown in with actualy effective magical technique, and a lot of it is just trial and error magic. He's done it a long time, amassed a good deal of power, so he can wipe out a low level wizard, but he doesn't have the knowledge or the technique of self reflection in the same degree.
Benjamin Smith
Every throng of commoners that an enemy wizard has to spell away is a free round of casting for the peasantmancer. Think of investing in them as lowly spells that only manifest weeks or months later. Even the shittiest commoner hits on a 20 and chops away at stoneskin, removes a mirror image, threatens a summon, or deals the damage when your spell brings down the enemy's defenses.
Lincoln Young
sooner or later it becomes Napoleonic warfare with magical staffs (and bayonets)
Lincoln Rogers
It seems like no one who asks this ever thinks about what it would actually be like to play a high level wizard and roleplay through, without handwavy downtime bullshit, trying to make this happen. It wouldn't be that easy and it would be incredibly tedious.
Matthew Cooper
>it would be incredibly tedious.
Yeah, that's why it never happens outside of arguing on forums and Tibetan Sandpainting Boards.