I've been thinking about D&D in general, and dreams of this particular online campaign in particular, like every day. I write down notes on random bits of paper spread around various locations as they occur to me...and then as I was thinking "I should really put all this stuff somewhere I could always get to it", the penny dropped.
Oh, you mean, I'm supposed to actually just put random thoughts up on _the blog_, instead of just thinking about them, losing track of them, _and_ letting what could be a vaguely interesting blog to as many as three other people fall into dusty abandonment.
So, my plan is _now_ to try to post to _this_ blog way more often (like daily), and to my other random blogs once a week. (I probably shouldn't make promises I can't keep, but if I don't make 'em, I _definitely_ won't keep 'em.)
So, some D&D thoughts of the day:
When you think about it, there are a lot of weird things about the supposed culture in D&D. I mean, the bits you get from the Players Handbook, your own background notions, and various fantasy sources is that you've got a sort of pseudo-medieval feudal thing going on, with pre-gunpowder technology, lots of peasants farming out a living, but lots of magic around that does all kinds of cool stuff, and lots of fantastic beasties like dragons and stuff.
Think of how some of the most common magic would have crazy effects on society. First of all, if you can talk to animals and they can talk back, isn't there something weird about eating them? I mean, sure they're not very bright, but it still seems cannibalistic. Besides, as Rebecca points out, as an even more common bit of magic, you can make food. Explain why all those peasants are farming again?
Heck, clerics can heal wounds and cure disease. I'm not even talking about raising the dead, which is a whole new kind of brain-twisting. Try to imagine the way the world would change if every disease, and nearly every injury, could be cured, instantly, by one in every few thousand people. Then think about the Middle Ages, only without the plague. It's like talking about Russia in the 20th century, only without the Communism.
Summary: The whole construction of D&D's fictional culture has fundamental distortions that are usually swept under the rug.
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3 comments:
Sure; the only saving grace is numbers.
Contrary to how it seems to adventurers, it must be the case that even mid-level NPCs are very rare and high-level ones incredibly rare. A 1st or 2nd level cleric or shaman can't heal very *many* people's injuries, can't cure diseases at all (CLW doesn't heal the plague!), and can't create food. Even a mid-level cleric has to pretty much do nothing but create food (using up all spells to that effect) to make any large dent.
To say nothing of the fact that these services would mostly be for *sale,* and peasants mostly lack gold to pay. So they farm, and they get sick, anyways...
Compared to medieval Europe, the populations given in the sourcebooks are *huge*-- I think partly to prevent a few high-level characters froms swamping the whole social order. Or maybe they take for granted that reproduction and life expectancy go up across the board thanks to magic-- and so the effects are already capitalized in the aggregate population figures.
(In the army/ warfare/ stronghold sourceboos they worry more about this stuff-- in case of a starvation siege, how many clerics of what level do you need to feed everybody; how does the ability to hire wizards to cast Permanency and Wall of Stone affect castle construction, etc.)
re: talking to animals-- good point; but the fact that we can talk doesn't ever seem to stop the dragons from eating *us.* (What? Have you met a dragon who *didn't* eat people?)
To say nothing of the fact that these services would mostly be for *sale,* and peasants mostly lack gold to pay. So they farm, and they get sick, anyways...
Right. Which, personally, I see as liable to cause peasant's revolts every few years.
In fact, I'm swinging a little bit the other way, now. As you say, cure disease is a pretty high-level spell, in the DMG's demographic scheme. So other than old age, diseases are liable to be the most common cause of death. But wait -- they're the most common causes of death _anyway_. So maybe throwing magic into the mix _wouldn't_ change life expectancy very much for the average person. Accounting for disease, maybe the human (non-PC, at least) average life expectancy ought to be ratcheted down to 45 or so.
Although swinging back again, I'd've thought that the biggest public health issues in ye olde land would be dysentery and infected wounds. Create water, Purify food and drink, and the various cure spells pretty much eliminate those.
Some demographic calculations will follow on the front page tomorrow. For now, I'll just say I've worked out conservative estimates for the cleric and related class breakdown for a population of 550,000, broken down as the DMG describes.
My statement about one in "every few thousand people" being able to cure any disease is a little overgenerous, but not by much. Actually, a little more than one in 10,000 people can cure disease.
(By comparison, modern doctor-patient ratios seem to be somewhere around 1-4 per 1000 in the US and Europe, are 1 per 22,000 in Ghana, and a crazy 1 per 170 in Cuba.)
But, as you know, a D&D cleric can't cure remotely as *many* people per day as a single modern doctor piggybacking on the wonders of a pharmaceutical industry that pumps out antibiotics by the billions.
Looking forward to the calculations...
Apropos of nothing, it amuses me that the blogger password I'm currently looking it begins with the four-letter sequence HAIG. As of now, he's in charge here...
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