The players are dumbfounded because the magocracy is good. They expected necromancer, slavery etc

Did nothing wrong.

Schweiz is LN, friend.

Nerds have a high population of percentage of pretentious douchebags with heads up asses as it is. If you give them world-warping powers, no shit people will be fucking suspicious of wizards.

Dragon Age is a fucking amazing example of "design by overly liberal committee" story telling, the game constantly beats you over the head about how the Mages aren't evil just misunderstood and how the Templars are the real monsters, then goes ahead and proves that Mages are in fact all fucking evil, Paladins were objectively correct(if anything they didn't go far enough) and then to add insult to injury directly punishes the player for siding with the only sane faction.

Reminder that Meredith had literally been poisoned by a chemical that caused her brain to turn to mush and was still correct about the Mages.

*population percentage

I'd reject the idea of inevitable corruption to begin with, but people assuming the church is automatically wrong is the result of post-1990's rpg and video game writing.

More interesting: government cracks down on mages, says they are an abomination, but really only sees them as a threat to their authority. Church shelters them from pogroms.

>litteraly only system focused around power trough knowledge
>litteraly having very smart people rule
>litteraly most fair system

Players are pieces of shit, fuck them.

Reminder one of the few examples of a good mage in the game is still channelling demon from the fade.

It's hilarious how Orsino goes all "My people can't sneeze without you calling blood magic" when every singl fucking mage in that fucking circle is a blood mage.

They try to pass the whole mage thing as if it was like being gay or black when it's more like being born with machine guns on your fingers. And those machine guns can be hacked.

Honestly, if it were the modern day, the Catholic Church or its equivalent would immediately order an in-house investigation into mages if they suddenly appeared, to determine the source of their powers and then determine how to act accordingly.

This. Wizards even ones not practicing "evil" magic are usually portrayed as amoral.

> Automatically assume that magic is based on knowledge
No, fuck yourself.
> Automatically assume that knowledge is good.
Do you even Kierkegaard?

>Honestly, if it were the modern day, the Catholic Church or its equivalent would immediately order an in-house investigation into mages if they suddenly appeared, to determine the source of their powers and then determine how to act accordingly.
What powerful organization wouldn't do this, though? And I'd trust the modern Catholic church to do it in a non-retarded fashion much more than I would trust the CIA to do the same.

It's not usually done because it doesn't lead anywhere. If the people in charge of society are well-meaning but powerless, they rely on other people (eg. the players) to help them sort things out. If those in charge are powerful but corrupt, there's a void to fill by people (eg. the players) capable of fighting back or fixing problems the government neglects. If society is run by a complex web of competing interest groups that are neither really good or bad, it's full of opportunities for adventurous types who get things done (eg. the players).

If the people in charge are both benevolent and powerful, they've probably go things pretty well covered, and don't need your help thanks. It's not impossible to work with, just limiting.

It's the same reason dystopian fiction is many times more common than utopian fiction.

>Mages are innocent!
>Well, I might have been harboring a blood mage serial killer this entire time.
>Also, collaborating with him.
>Also, a lot of my mages might be actually consorting with demons.
>Also, I am gonna meld my flesh with corpses and transform into a demonic Harvester.
>But my mages dindu nuffin, and you are wrong to investiage us.
FUCK Orsino.

It's absolutely fucking insane if you started with the Mage origin, your best friend is a blood mage, half the teachers are blood mages, 10 minutes into the first zone and all your problems are caused by another blood mage going out of control, then the game tries to convince you it's your fucking fault all theses people turned to blood magic, then handsomely rewards you and pretends like your a good guy for letting the blood mage responsible for the death of a entire village go.

This happens less than an hour into the game.

The only good wizards are the ones who don't hang out with other wizards. Otherwise they just circlejerk eachother into having no sense of right and wrong.

>Implying knowledge of magic correlates to knowledge in other fields
>Implying a nation run by turboautists with a singular focus would be anything other than a train wreck
>In a world where magic is inherited, literally not the most fair system
>In a world where magic is learned, still not the most fair system, as those with the most magical power can (and likely would) censor any knowledge that would be relevant to coming close to them, thus shifting from meritocracy to dictatorship alarmingly fast

>letting the blood mage responsible for the death of a entire village go.
Actually, he's not responsible for anything. Connor is.

He's literally responsible for everything, Jowan poisoned Connor's father.

Yeah, but he was told to do it by Loghain - a war hero and overall a great guy with 100% approval rating (at the time), who told him that Eamon is a bad guy, and he's gonna be a hero.

INT=/=WIS

He's responsible for poisoning Arl Eamon and making a terrible situation a lot worse. Seriously, mages are trouble. Fuck them.
The Leliana as Divine ending is just salt in the fucking wounds.

>This is why apprentice wizards from the academy are sent out into the world
>Not simply to learn more but to learn how to deal with non-wizards
>Dickass or dumbass wizards culled in large part by adventuring trials

Vivienne is the only good thing in Inquisition. A conservative role model, who is a good character despite the writers trying every trick in the book to make her a caricature.
No wonder 90% of the fandom hates her.

>The majority of surviving wizards didn't dumpstat both WIS and CHA

>Character is a atheist in a setting where the gods aren't just objectively real but non-believers get sent to a place worse than hell and everybody knows this

And due to the lazy developers, you encounter hundreds of hostile blood mages in Kirkwall. Hundreds.
It would be correct to assume that non-blood mages are the EXCEPTION to the rule.

This is the case in 2e D&D's lore, however no one other than Jazarian knows the truth about Asmodeus, and that he's actually a cosmic dragon god named Ahriman who eats the souls of the faithless.

I always wondered why Jazarian doesn't come right out with this information to the other Good deities. It would solve a ton of problems.

GDC talk in a couple of years times: How a poorly written CRPG turned a entire generation of gamers into conservatives

I can appreciate Vivienne objectives but hate her guts as person. I prefer to give the mages a chance to rule and police themselves before helping her in any way.

You know, i rather like Cassandra. She's moderate but recognizes that mages need to be controlled. Or maybe i'm forgetting stuff, that game wasn't good enough for me to play it again.

The Descent was good tho.

To her credit, at least I didn't have the burning desire to toss her out of the Inquisition on her ass. Unlike Sera. She was less than worthless. She was an active detriment.

Cassandra is a top-notch waifu.

I've always been a fan of the Jehovah's Witnesses theory, Gary being a very religious and conservative knew what made religions tick, later D&D authors all came from the same atheist white liberal background and didn't understand what made Greyhawk's religious aspect so believable, Dragonlance is similar with the Hickman's being Mormons.

Then you take a look at Monte Cook attempts at religion and mysticism and they feel so fake.

>Biodrones will call this "Character development"

Dude, day 1 vs day 366 on every job I've ever worked.

>DMing

I don't think we'll soon see the day where game devs stop allowing lifelong atheists to write gods and religion in their settings.

>this image looks like an ass shitting, if you squint your eyes.
But yeah, I GMed a game where a Lich (who in our setting just means ice magic + necromancy) ruled a portion of the kingdom in a benevolent fashion.
he was also a dog, from a previous campaign

>Undead socialism
Dropped. The societal impact of skeleton automation would be anything but positive.

I fail to see how. It's the educated man's duty to seize the men of production.

Given that all undead, especially intelligent undead, derive their existence from the Negative Energy Plane, they literally cannot feel any compulsion to help others or work towards the benefit of anyone other than themselves.

The negative impact of unemployment far outweighs the positive impact of basic income, unless your the sole exporter of food in the world and the undead require near-constant maintenance your going to have a lot of bored, depressed and stressed out people loitering about. And no "Everybody will become artists" isn't a viable argument.

In the previous campaign the dog-lich was our pet wolf we found halfway through the quest. In an accident involving us giving the dog the robes and wand of a lich we had beaten, and then meeting a powerful wizard who needed our help.
In our setting (homebrew system) Lich's are just wizards who mastered ice magic in order to better preserve their revived corpses.Since the brain is mostly intact, rather than bumbling idiots, Fresh Lich Zombies are almost indestinguishable from before being killed

Then there's no downside to undeath.
You've made a world in which every wizard would want to live forever as an immortal ice lich because they'll be able to keep their humanity and not have to die.

It reminds me of Twilight vampires, who can just drink animal blood and lose literally nothing, even their capacity for good, as well as gain superpowers in the deal.

Vivienne is an unpopular bitch because she's an extremely fortunate individual who was brought up in a very sedate and lax Circle which had a sane leadership and she was afforded tremendous freedom and resources as a result of her position, but she assumes that life is basically the same for all the other mages in other circles as it is for her, and they're all getting upset over nothing. Basically she won the lottery and can't understand that others aren't so lucky. Her perspective is incredibly flawed.

Mages are dangerous people but they become exponentially more dangerous when you concentrate them into a small area and make them stressed and panicky. It's like collecting all your plutonium together in one place and then hitting it repeatedly, then being surprised when it goes critical. Organisations to help train young mages are good and warriors who are trained to deal with mages are useful, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

They seem to accept anarchies and plutocracies without so much paranoia tough. I blame conspirationists, honestly - all the illuminati bullshit is the default assumptions for wizards.

I imagine that a full-on necrocracy has a number of solutions to the "having too many living citizen" problem.

As for a more moderate magocracy, the skeleton may not be used for everything. After all, there's only so much that a soulless automaton can do that a living person can't do better. I guess undead workforce would be limited to the really dangerous jobs, at least until some asshole decides to invent mass produced intelligent undead.

>Preserve themselves in ice magic
>Significant heat starts to thaw them
>Liches fear warmth more than anything, as warmth brings a loss to both their immortality and their humanity
>Lich-Hunter groups hold torches near people to scout for them
>Liches prefer dark, dank lairs with poor lighting because they have darkvision, and anything else could be dangerous

>but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
Tell that to the people who were there when Tevinter committed mass-slaughter of their own slaves to fuel blood magic and sought to conquer everyone else to do just the same to them.
That's what happens when you give a people who are essentially incapable of being deposed ultimate governmental power. The Templars and the Circle system, even with its occasional abuses, is a blessing from On High in comparison.

Or just far-Northern regions.

Our system is designed with comedic interactions in mind, and we came up with the weakness that Lich bound revivals are just like putting meat in a freezer, if you keep it out for too long, it will start to rot regardless.
There is also the fact that, the hardest part of reviving is geting a soul to put in the body, and while it is easy to be evil and just steal someone's soul, benevolent lich's try to get the deceased's soul, which is realy hard.

the reason our dog manages to use necromancy so easily, is because,since he has a higher conection to nature than most wizards, he can grab a new soul from nature's soul dispenser.
>the BBEG of that campaign was a plain ol' Dragon in a volcano
>if he died there, it would be hard, not to say impossible to revive
>The Viking party leader still managed to be resurected fully, via godly intervention, in exchange for not going to !Valhalla

>black and white setting

Into the trash.

Black and White settings are not a bad thing. There's nothing wrong with NobleBright.

Gray and Gray settings are old and boring now.

Just because everything is automated doesn't mean you can't work if you want. Just deactivate the zombie or whatever and do your thing.

I feel really dumb. I can't believe I drank the mage Kool-aid so hard for all my time in Thedas. I played mage my first playthrough of eachgame as a mage and now I'm horrified with what I wrought on the world. Mages destroyed kirkwall. And they lead to the most fucked up shit. Inquisition is even the fault of mages. Vivienne, Dorian, and Solas are all assholes and ruined, will ruin, or are ruining everything.

If it were the CIA, MI-6, KGB, or any other government spy organization, if expect them to goto any new mage with a boatload of cash and go, "tell us how to do magic too or we hire you to become a spy for us or else we kill you. The cash is just an incentive to join us and keep living."

What happened to my waifu?

I think people would start to take offense when you're raising the bodies of their dead family members.
Plus, any lich would look at any difficult situation and start to think: "hmm, if I just quietly reduced the population by, say, 100, I would have 100 more undead workers. More food for the rest of the living population, and more laborers. So it's a win-win!"

That will be the absolute end of the "benevolent" necrocracy.

Two things.
One, many people automatically assume anything that's not a democracy/capitalistic oligarchy claiming to be a democracy is evil. If you really want to throw players for a loop, have a benevolent despot.
Second, Magocracy, much like religion, is basically founded by a bunch of people who agree one particular set of assumptions about the world is correct, and most players have an innate distrust of any such organization. It's much how the best way to surprise your players with a lawful good church is to have little or no corruption or secret evil agendas.

Magocracy has a distinct flavor of a religious government. Thus, many players who haven't stopped and devoted precious brain cells to fictional governments might subconsciously decide Magocracy=Allahu Akbar.

Bioware.

It has a lot more to do with faggot ass LEL WIZARDS NO SENSE OF RIGHT AND WRONG AMIRITE meme faggots on Veeky Forums than your psuedointellectual psuedopolitical armchair psychoanalysis. Thanks to them it's like saying you have a nation run by morally bankrupt mad scientists who take a special glee out of using their subjects as test subjects.

That and Dragon Age has a magocracy that's pants on head retarded Social Darwinism to such a high degree that it makes drow look sane, so your normie friends were probably expecting more of that. And lastly, heroes don't typically end up somewhere unless there's a conflict to be solved, it's just bad storytelling otherwise. And the most common conflict of any utopia is uncovering the hidden dystopia, so it's no surprise your players were expecting something genre conventional rather than something utterly boring that only serves to let you wank off to your precious little Mary Sue wizard colony.

Because people who know computer programming are so much smarter than those who don't.

You mean Merrill? She was so evil she kills everyone close to her for no reason.

The reason they distrust a mageocracy is that mages invariably would see non-mages as a contemptible underclass of weaklings. No amount of mandatory half-hearted ethics education will work in such a society to eliminate that (very correct) stigma against non-mages.

Needs make terrible leaders and typically sell out their own kind once they get so much as a whiff of potential pussy.

See: Google

Well, a lot of it is because it's 'This particular privileged group gets to have control of the country and no one else does' without having the 'Eh, it's historical' aspect of a kingdom.

That and the trait used to decide who gets to rule doesn't inherently line up with any ability to actually rule well.

Adding to this, it would be the same as if an upperclass of elves from LOTR decided to govern over an underclass of humans, complete with their super strength, immortality, and supernatural beauty.

How exactly do you think that would end up? Be honest. I predict blood and guillotines in short order.

Nerds, even

Every time I pass this image in catalog view I think it's an ass with a rectum.

The real reason people assume the church is always wrong is because the church claimed video games AND tabletop were the work of the devil, and would summon demons.

It's hard to side with someone so dumb.

dunno about tabletop but about videogames they are right. Videogames are breeding weak men

This is why I actually love Old Netherlands as a setting.

Wizards gain untold power as part of a Romantic style community. Slave based colony-cities are dominant as they spread out into inferior cultures.

Magical accomplishments become great enough that Wizards are no longer constrained by need for farms or laborers. They begin to go make sky cities outside of territories and set them up as personal property, living the libertarian dream.

Treated as evil and hubristic by writers even though they are now the only civilization not built on slavery and worker exploitation.

Evil for not allowing entire world to live on their utopia and mooch off of them.

You've said that about literally every media until every member of you that thought the media was new died, church.

Do not be shit mage who make world worse.
Be proud and noble fighting man, or less proud and noble stabbing man.
Do not be shit race that vomit magic, make a bunch of demons infest country, then stands back with hands up shouting DINDU NUFFIN. Be proud and noble dwarf. Dwarf man fights most, Dwarf man is biggest hero, Dwarf man suffer most.
Elf man whine about forest and mistreatment. Qunari man whine that nobody understands them. Human man whine about goyim not buying enough, and muh glory.
Dwarf man fight awful monster underground, uphill, both way, die in ditch, and never get recognize. Family is sad, then man's son goes to do same. Then son die, and sister step up to take place. Then grandsons. Many many hundred dwarf man die so Elf man and Human man can shit bed above ground. Many many Dwarf man die hoping Elf man and Human man grow up and save world, but never do. Dwarf man die sad. Dwarf man die knowing son and daughter die soon because human man and elf man not get shit together. Dwarf man knows this before is dead, and deals with Elf man and Human man. Dwarf man not punch Elf man and Human man for inevitable death of son and daughter. Dwarf man just smile. Make joke. Drink away existential grief. Pretend to get drunk and fall down, cheeki-breeki time, yes?
But Dwarf man cry inside. Dwarf man cry because men laughing at him kill Dwarf man's son and daughter by being dumbass. Dwarf man cries because son and daughter die while Elf and Human set own homes on fire and summon demon, then fight eachother for setting own home on fire. Dwarf man cry because Human man not want to let single shekel go to help Dwarf man save world. Dwarf man cry because Elf man not indignify self with work to help Dwarf man save world.
Dwarf man cry. Dwarf man sob, Dwarf man curse heavens, Dwarf man have no hope. But Dwarf man cry only on inside. Outside, Dwarf man pretend everything is happy.

Dwarf man suffers most.

Are you memeing that watching TV isn't retarded as fuck? The church was right about both videogames and television. They both rot their brain. But videogames is the biggest evil of the two, since television in moderation is harmless. But videogames are never harmless.

Explain, please.

>55246013
Take your horseshit to /v/, I'm sure that'll net you plenty of (you)s.

See, this is why people think you're retarded. You have so much unfounded fear of books, and television, and video games, and tabletop, and literally everything.
You're a panicky nut who desperately looking for excuses as to why things are bad who can only be taken seriously by panicky nuts desperately looking for excuses as to why things are bad.

Read about dopamine. Then think about what you are doing while playing videogames (you are doing nothing at all)

Here are first couple links from google.
gamertherapist.com/2013/08/25/dopey-about-dopamine-video-games-drugs-addiction-2/
psychologytoday.com/blog/the-compass-pleasure/201110/video-games-can-activate-the-brains-pleasure-circuits-0
learning-theories.com/dopamine-games-motivation.html

When I learned this I stopped playing videogames altogether and came to Veeky Forums for life. I don't repent anything.

>I stopped doing nothing and am proud to say I am now doing nothing

play pretend consumes no time at all, don't tell me you are a bad GM and can't improvise.

>FUN THINGS GIVE YOU FUN CHEMICAL YOU GUYS
>IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD HUMANITY IS DOOMED TO STUPIDS
Holy shit.

>The real reason people assume the church is always wrong is because the church claimed video games AND tabletop were the work of the devil, and would summon demons.

That wasn't really a Catholic thing IIRC.

>Playing pretend consumes no time at all
No, you still have to do sessions, and bitch on Veeky Forums about how all hobbies but yours are bad because they produce fun chemicals in the brain.

Despite your hobby being equally lardsome and producing equal fun chemicals in the brain.

I don't know why people think the thing they like is somehow magically different.

Accomplishment chemical =/= fun chemical

>when the brainlet tries to make an argument
You have been playing too many videogames lol

>I am so smart for getting my chemicals from doing nothing!
>So much smarter than those guys who get those chemicals from doing nothing!
Entertainment mediums were a mistake breeding weak men.

>you still have to do sessions,
Social interaction with friends. Actually healthy and improves your charisma.
>bitch
You are the only one bitching. I literally just said "the church was right about videogames" and then made a 2 second google about it when asked about it. You are the one bitching and going on an atheist crusade.

Not all entertainment is bad. If you think meeting up with your friends and socializing in fantasy land is the same than being alone in the dark playing videogames all day.

Then you are just too stupid to engage in a conversation with me or anyone else on this board.

And you are literally still bitching about media you don't like being badwrong. You have not stopped bitching this entire time.

And now you're telling me you are wasting time in a literal circlejerk instead of doing actual work.