Why is magocracy the best form of government?

Because you can count on one of your brightest trying to become God incarnate and ruining everything in the process: free post-apocalyptic setting.

Because the technocracy is factually better, reality deviant

I don't know why isn't every country in the real world a stratocracy?

Because the self-centred maniacs with the world breaking / reality altering powers are too tied up by the bureaucracy they created and mutally enforce to actually cause any problems.
Well, that and the twelve course lunches...

Oh wait, so you meant to add "in D&D".
That's actually an extremely narrow superlative; basically it means as long as it's this one type of game setting following literally this exactly and uniquely specific (absurdly so) system of magic then your words are true.
Then yes; in setting where D&D rules apply (as in only in D&D and nowhere else), then yes Magocrats would be skilled politicians if not necessarily morally grounded ones.

Admittedly that's like being the best government type based off of sitting atop of like of actual horseshit, but hey; everyone's gotta be in top of some god-awful standard, right?

You're a a poor illiterate fuck who thinks that "D&D=All Fantasy Settings", aren't you?
I'm not even mad, I actually feel bad for you because your point of view is so cripplingly narrow that it honestly probably detracts from large portions of your life that you would otherwise enjoy more fully.

Because it distracts high-level mages from their research, so they're less likely to release Cthulhu or something.

If you can reshape reality, why do you insist on being in charge? You already have all the perks of the job. All you'll get is the job itself.

Just have the king make "wizard" an official title of nobility and enjoy.

You have the stats, but do you have the skills? Diplomacy, Bluff and Perform, various forms of Knowledge, Sense Motive, possibly Intimidation. Maybe Disguise and Escape Artist if things go south.

Why would it in any way automatically be asumed to be "the best form of government"? Especially considering that mages tend to be fundamentally associated with a habit copious amounts of lifelong studies which would strongly suggest that they are much more suited as the aides and experts of any ruling class. The knowledge and wisdom a mage would tend to gather during a lifetime of magical practices and learning is also not at all the type you'd need to successfully rule a nation.
For that matter,what sort of "best" are you even refering to? That shit can mean a number of different and even mutually exclusive things. What is the goal/purpose of the government? Is it to maximize the safety of its citizens, to be the most well-oiled and smooth-running society, the society with the most freedom for its inhabitants or any of a number of other things?

>Magocrazy
>literally crazy wizards
No sense of right and wrong

Power doesn't ever go to those with the best ability to govern. It goes to those who are most adept at playing the system to acquire that power. In a world with magic, mages of all stripes have abilities that make them able to best play that game (whatever form it takes) or flip the table and change the rules if they're not satisfied with the outcome. So the only stable system is one where they're already in charge.

And I'm not just talking D&D. Reliable precognition, mind reading, mind control, and blessings/curses are unbelievably powerful in a political setting. Whether power is maintained by public persuasion, wealth, intrigue, or violence, mages have a huge advantage.

I'm saying "mage" here to mean magic-powered of all kinds, rather than one particular class in one particular rules system or setting.

Such a system already exists IRL. Most colleges and universities are governed by faculty of various kinds. You have to be an acclaimed scholar in your field (that is, reseach-active with lots of highly cited publications in premier journals) but while am administrator your research suffers.

So among the very top tier faculty, some stick purely to research. Some become pure administrators and put their work behind them. But many take a break, become a Dean for 5-10 years, and then go back into doing research.

Oh well it's all fine for those trumped up wankers in pointy hats, but for your average man on the street it's just like any other bloody government.
Sure, maybe when they get in power they'll install infinite clean fountains or install magic lions to guard the gates, but eventually one of the tower toffs will annoy some other wand-waver in their arcane pissing contests and before you know it they're hurling fireballs at each other from across.
Even if they give us proles defences, the strongest stuff will be on their tower, so they don't spill their ink when someone farts in the streets, so when the rain of killer frogs or acid mist rolls into town, it'll roll off straight off their mystic shield, onto Mrs Mavis' carrot patch and then what do we do? And that fountain's probably run out of spell power and the lions been cannibalised so that bloody staff shiner can turn the other prick's coffee into ogre piss or something.
So, when Chungo the Magnificent rides in with his boner potions or singing cutlery, you should tell them to piss off.

>So among the very top tier faculty, some stick purely to research. Some become pure administrators and put their work behind them. But many take a break, become a Dean for 5-10 years, and then go back into doing research.

And it's horrible, because you end up with people whose opinion is widely respected due to past achievements, yet have little idea what they are talking about due to having been out of the loop for a decade. And, since the administration is full of people with no education in management, it's often a clusterfuck there too.

A Magocracy is all about privilege. If you're not a user of magic, then you're essentially no more than a filthy plebeian.

A radical non-magical PC SJW movement will ensue as well.

I expect that radical non-magical movement to go about as well as the average medieval peasant revolt.

Resulting in the complete dissolution of the noble class, right?

More like resulting in a lot of dead people and going back to the status quo. Possibly under a new name if the revolt was extremely successful.

The magocratic equivalent might look like this. Anyone with magical ability above a certain level is "knighted" and given special social privileges and responsibilities. Like modern post-docs, they lift and carry and do most of the boring work of government for their master, as much as possible trying to beg/borrow/steal free time to continue their research.

Some of these plateau in power and become "adjuncts": functionaries with special privileges and very influential among the muggles, but looked down upon by other mages. Possibly some people like this drop out of the formal organization and so are wealthy or powerful informally but have no real standing in government other than being a recognized magus. What influence among other mages they have stems from all their power in the mortal world.

"Assistant professors" are the not-yet-tenured faculty who are on the tenure track in real life. In a magocracy, they have no real political power because they're throwing all their effort into improving their abilities. But they're up and comers so they have status among their fellow mages. Their immediate superiors often shield them from other mages who seek to offload some of the distractions of rule onto the junior faculty.

Full professors have tenure and (often inconvenient) responsibilities in the mortal world. They're actively researching and very powerful mystically, but also now can't escape the burdens of government. (Plus there's an in between layer of associates.)

Some of the most powerful mages top out at full professor (or setting appropriate title). They're happy to govern as little as possible and bask in the awe of their peers. If they want something, they can always trade favors with an administrator.

Just like a college campus, which is often mismanaged and obsessed with narrow political/theoretical issues of little practical value in daily life.

The point isn't that they'd do a good job. It's that they're powerful enough that they can take over and impose their own opinions about how to run things on everyone else. After a while it will seem natural and proper and the courtiers and philosophers and other nonmagical well-born suck-ups will wax lyrical about how right and proper this all is, and how boorish any muggle might be who dares try to upset the cozy arrangement.

There might be balanced and faction fights between them, but mages as a whole are too powerful for anyone else to wield real power and overturn them.

And since mages vary considerably in power, you'd have a system that's flexible enough to accommodate the fact that a very small number of powerful mages are more powerful than the rest put together.

This is why ministers were a thing, people that had no power to speak of beyond what the people actually in charge lent them, but with the know-how to run things properly according to the instruction they've been given.

A magocracy would likely run a large amount of minions with no magic ability (so, no official power) but trained to handly the boring but necessary stuff that comes with ruling. That or it would need an entire branch of the magic training dedicated to rulership.

Less. Imagine if an old aristocrat really was better than everyone else. Or if the king was mighty enough to beat an entire army single handedly. Plus read minds, predict the future, and cast a spell to make the leader of the muggle revolt secretly work for him instead.

Also, you misunderstand SJWs. They're not revolting against the aristocracy. They're enforcing the orthodoxy of the elite class. They pose as revolutionaries, but what kind of revolutionary wants the existing rulers to have even more power and privilege? They claim they resist the rule of billionaires, but they're largely funded by billionaires, and vote for the same politicians. And what's their main issue? Attacking ordinary people on Twitter or at work or on campus or on the street for violating rules of behavior and speech imposed by elites in politics, journalism, and academia. They may not be wrong, they may be fighting for a good cause, but they certainly aren't revolutionaries in any recognizable sense.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see what kind of mageocratic equivalent to SJWs would look like.

#notallnecromancers
#somewitcheshavepenises

>Why is magocracy the best form of government?
They can do no wrong, for they do not know what it is.

Good point! Ok, so sticking with the university analogy...

Some mages go into administration. That means working full time or almost full time ruling the realm: judging legal disputes, helping the military, working as a diplomat and/or spy, managing the bureaucracy, and supporting commerce and the trades. Working for them are staffs composed of a mix of professionals and washouts from magical training with a spell or two but no real power. The administrators (the equivalent of non-academic deans) are personally very powerful. Some do a little research on the side but most have to concentrate on rulership full time. Most spend five to ten years and then go back to their scholarship. Some end up administering forever.

Administrators come from the ranks of full professors. So they have considerable personal power and status. Especially since the only mages more powerful than them are not interested in ruling.

Of course, a lifetime of arcane study leaves them ill suited for rulership. Divinations of various sorts helps, as does their native intelligence. But mostly they lean heavily on their staffs and bureaucrats.

Since the bureaucracy is so powerful and open to non mages, it's the best chance at power and privilege for a mundane. It's often a parking place for the relatives of mages. Wealthy mundanes sometimes pay huge sums to have their kids "conditionally accepted" to mage schools despite not having the Gift so they can wash out into the almost-nobility.

Nope. Didn't even think of D&D while making the opening post.
You should stop trying to fit in so hard

I'm not saying paste modern political crap into a magocracy. I'm saying figure out the ideology and philosophy of mages in their own setting. Then take those issues and have mundanes who barely understand the concepts go on witch hunts against other mundanes for "black magic diabolism" or something because the peasant says or does something very ordinary and harmless which can be presented as reminiscent of something that in a mage might be associated with diabolism. Or at least look like it.

So you have literal witch hunts by people crusading in the name of supporting witchcraft.

Or pick some other philosophical point of mysticism. The more removed from real life and the more obscure even for mages, the better. Or find some thaumatological dispute and decide that one side is not just wrong but Evil, and then inflate the whole thing into a grand social conspiracy that requires hypervigilance against everyday acts by ordinary people.

Like in physics, there was a dispute between string theory and hypergravity once upon a time. Now imagine some fanatic who decides that string theory is EVIL. And leads mobs of followers to attack people for using shoelaces because those are dogwhistles that show support for String-ist causes. They lobby to tear down power lines and make the use of packing tape for packages mandatory. They demand that string theorists be fired or worse. They march to have a hypergravity theorist punished after saying things that suggest secret String-ist sympathies.

Those attributes (maybe not with those names) are associated with magical power in a large variety of settings and systems.

Depending on the system there may even not be those skills, just Stats as those skills.

But within D&D, depends on which one. In 3.PF I agree with you, but in 5e the DCs are so low that you don't necessarily need proficiency.

>mfw you realize magocracy is a means to stop the wizards from destroying all and installing them in Government is a means of distracting them.

It isn't.
Real wizards of success focus on their studies, not at some plebian shit like ruling.
Real wizard of success have low tier servants named "kings" that tend to boring stuff like governance and collection of research materials, so they may focus on important - magical studies.

Shit tier wizards do peasants job of ruling and are constantly loosing time and power on it.
They are bad as they do not study enough.

Magocracy leads to shit wizards and so magocracy is bad.

"Independent" kingdom/kingdoms that pay magic university for their "assistance, council and not rapeing them with Edvard's tentacles of forced penetration" are they way.
Ruling is for plebs. Tue wizards research, study and grow in power.

And what it's a sorcerer-based government?

South American military junta, but with more hookers and blow

>Real wizards

No True wizard fallacy

It's not. What does some faggot who wears a bathrobe all day know of the common man's problems?

What can the common man do when bath-rob dude can control the weather, create firestorms, become invisible, rise or destroy walls and castles, etc?
If Wizards want the government, they will have the government

'sup

Fuck you and your temple.

Im down for this.

Old, terrible gods who grants blessing on whims? They're no better than sorcerers, really. It's not a matter of belief, but servitude. Besides, there are a lot of gods to choose between.

CHA is a dumpstat for wizards and INT is a dumpstat for most every other caster

Based

Someone has only played 5e. In previous editions, Int was as necessary as Dex and Con.

Strength is the dump stat for wizards, anyway, regardless of edition.

I don't want a king who could die tripping on their own robes and breaking their frail body.

If punchwizards were the leaders, with squishy wizard courts, that could work

>And what it's a sorcerer-based government?
Failure.

That's called being an elf.