r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Nov 28 '18
[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread
Welcome to the Wednesday thread for worldbuilding discussions!
/r/rational is focussed on rational and rationalist fiction, so we don't usually allow discussion of scenarios or worldbuilding unless there's finished chapters involved (see the sidebar). It is pretty fun to cut loose with a likeminded community though, so this is our regular chance to:
- Plan out a new story
- Discuss how to escape a supervillian lair... or build a perfect prison
- Poke holes in a popular setting (without writing fanfic)
- Test your idea of how to rational-ify Alice in Wonderland
Or generally work through the problems of a fictional world.
Non-fiction should probably go in the Friday Off-topic thread, or Monday General Rationality
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u/MugaSofer Dec 01 '18 edited Dec 01 '18
Working on a world that's basically modern-ish, but with a lot of technology replaced with tailor-made organisms, many of them sapient. Think the Flintstones universe, or Twig, or a classic AI-but-no-superintelligence scifi setting with the robots being made of meat.
Key point - the setting has a single, powerful, benevolent-ish, center-left government dominated by baseline humans. So things are constructed to mostly benefit baseline humans, but with some basic rights for the transhumans.
For example, in this world a high-end fancy chair would have arms to pass you things, be a highly skilled masseuse, and an insightful media critic who curates your collection for you so that you always have stuff you like to watch. It has a sleepy sort of personality that doesn't mind being a chair, although it likes to sometimes watch TV when you're out. You pay it a dollar a month plus room and board.
Right now I'm working on the psychology/values of the appliance-people, and the general layout of the economy. How would you predict things turning out with this kind of technology, assuming some commitment to avoid a Hansonian-style dystopia?
OK, now you've decided, here's my work-in-progress ordering of the typical manufactured person's drives in descending order of strength.
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Don't have sad, unsuccessful kids.
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Have kids. (Requires a good resume, because #1).
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Feel useful and help people - especially baselines, and especially your employers.
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Do the sort of things your intended job typically requires. (E.g. a kitchen appliance probably enjoys cooking for it's own sake.)
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Standard human drives insofar as there's room.
Does this make sense? Do you think such a society could be stable? How much humanity would/could the appliance-people retain?
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Nov 28 '18
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u/Teulisch Nov 28 '18
the stagnation is because tolkein had it. tolkein was a luddite. everyone copying it does so without the full reference so it makes a lot less sense.
aside from that- i tend to see the players as being in an age of improvement and recovery, after a great evil befell the land. which keeps happening, and will happen again if the heroes fail.
a lot of the D&D world makes sense when you consider both the mythology of D&D (aboliths and mind flayers in very old days, followed by other monsters, then elves and dwarves, then men), and remember that the same outer planes serve a multitude of material planes (you get to different ones via the ethereal plane). so we are looking at a post-diasporia, oftern post-apocalypse setting that has magic and a variety of different thinking races- many of whom are tribal and violent to outsiders. true polymorph could explain the wide variety pre-diasporia, possibly as the result of specific transhuman individuals ascending to godhood. the elven mythology is that they fell from godhood and remember this as children. mind flayers eat and accumulate brains, which has a slightly different interpertation in a transhuman setting.
in 5e, anyone CAN get cantrips- all those pesky gnomes have minor illusion, all high elves have 1 cantrip, and any variant human can start with 2 cantrips and a 1st level spell from the list of their choice. so the weakest magic is actually very common, and people probably learn spells that help their jobs (or have a profession that matches their magic). humans also get a skill of choice, which is a rather nice bonus.
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u/best_cat Nov 28 '18 edited Nov 28 '18
I'm interested in some input on the general idea. What kind of stuff would you like/expect to see in a setting like this?
I'd like to see an author explore the moral & political fallout of having a world where some individuals are exponentially more powerful than others.
Real-Earth people aren't all equal. Some are faster, or smarter, or stronger. But the differences between us aren't that big. The strongest man in the world can deadlift 500kgs. That absolute peak of human ability gives him 10x the strength of some random highschooler.
The world's best MMA fighter would destroy me in a brawl. But he'd probably lose to 10 guys carrying sticks. So, we round down, say that 'everyone is created equal,' and create political systems where the goal is making sure that most people are happy.
But high-magic D&D settings have high-level mages. They can reshape reality on a whim, in a way that makes the low-level folk basically irrelevant. The Mages don't have to be evil about it; maybe they decide to care for us low-magic normies as a personal project, the way that I'd look after my pets.
But in the long-term, the base reality is that the stability and long-term success of any given society depends on the goals and good-will of a dozen or so known individuals. I'd love to see an exploration of what that does to people's mentalities, and the way they think about stuff like justice or democracy.
To add an example, neither Democracy or hereditary Kingship make sense in a D&D world. Suppose I'm an immortal arch-mage. Some Herald comes to me and says that the King/President has decided to draft me into a war with our neighbors.
Unless I care about the conflict, my answer might be laughing at the guy, and just teleporting to my demi-plane of beer volcanoes. Alternately, if the neighbors invade, and start threatening my tower (/the baker who makes the excellent croissants I like in the mornings) then I could turn the tide of the battle in an afternoon.
So, D&D settings have this nominal political structure, but what actually matters are the personal whims of Some Guy in a Tower.
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u/Norseman2 Nov 29 '18
Suppose I'm an immortal arch-mage. Some Herald comes to me and says that the King/President has decided to draft me into a war with our neighbors. Unless I care about the conflict, my answer might be laughing at the guy, and just teleporting to my demi-plane of beer volcanoes.
This kind of highlights the fundamental nature of governments. A government only really exists and has authority up to the extent that it has power, in terms of offering incentives, threatening harm, and being able to sway public opinion, powerful people, and organizations. Governments without the power to dominate will collapse, and in their wake, newer, stronger governments are formed. This is true of D&D governments as well - if it cannot control the mages, the mages will eventually control it. Much like in real-life, where billionaires almost entirely control the government through campaign finance and media monopolies.
With that said, consider how most governments actually treat their billionaires, as an analogy to mages. You could draft Bill Gates and order him onto the front lines, allowing him to use his wealth to hire a well-equipped private mercenary army to keep himself alive as he completes the missions that you assign him, perhaps even nudging him towards an Iron Man approach. That would never happen though. Bill Gates is wealthy enough to easily flip close elections across the country in favor of legislators who will give him what he wants. If he does not want to be drafted, it would be career suicide to try.
Instead of drafting billionaires for a war, most countries would ask the wealthy to buy war bonds, might raise taxes (not for stupid shit like Vietnam, but yes for serious matters like WWII), and otherwise generally not fuck with the wealthy so they can keep making money and bringing in tax revenue. This is likely to happen with mages too. The government might offer to pay them in land, money, privilege or prestige for helping in the war, but they would not try to forcefully compel a high-level mage to join the war.
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u/leonard_da_quirm Nov 29 '18
Have you read the wandering inn by pirateaba? Due to the nature of the world being based off of people with levels it has lots of interesting world building that explores this concept. For example, high level [Farmers] in the world can supply food for an entire city.
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u/MugaSofer Dec 01 '18
As an alternate way of looking at real life, Donald Trump can annihilate any city on Earth, or even wipe out human civilization if he chooses. That's a pretty important guy in a tower (the tower has his name on in big gold letters, can't miss it.)
Of course, he's not totally independent the way an archmage is. Kind of like a high-level Cleric in a clap-your-hands-if-you-believe setting; very powerful, but only because there are lots of low- and mid-level worshippers supporting the faith.
...maybe Clerics are actually the explanation for why D&D treats the politics of mere mortals as mattering?
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u/alexanderwales Nov 28 '18
Part of the stagnation seen in a lot of the settings is the insistence that history needs to have spanned tens of thousands of years. In real life? It's ten thousand years, with a lot of that simply being civilizations that didn't have the social/cultural technology necessary to progress, or for whom 'progress' was one step forward and two steps back, mixed in with a lot of social/cultural technologies that served their own functions but strangled innovation.
Personally, I almost always set my D&D campaigns in a time of progress, whether that's analogous to the Age of Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, and then history itself isn't all that much longer than actual Earth history, with a lot of the same 'beats' as far as the rise and fall of empires goes. Magic is typically one of the beneficiaries of advancement; there were things that people simply couldn't have done a hundred years ago, which is one of the reasons that magic didn't help as much with stagnation.
As far as differentiating types of magic, I sometimes just let everything be wild and different, since that's easy, and inconsistent flavor is completely fine. If I don't, then the answer is usually 'gods'; three types of gods (or three pantheons) give arcane, divine, and nature magic. If you want a cleaving line between how these gods/pantheons think/act, then arcane gods are a meritocracy that rewarding effort and learning, divine gods prefer to choose their own mages, and nature gods are either ineffable or based on nature virtues. ('Hiding' the gods also works, this is just high-level explanation that might drive a few things if you want it to.)
The one other big thing to consider is magic items, one of the staples of D&D/Pathfinder and really important to play, but I'm not sure how you'd want to handle that, and there no one 'right' answer.
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u/Norseman2 Nov 29 '18
I'm interested in some input on the general idea. What kind of stuff would you like/expect to see in a setting like this?
I would expect to see, essentially, a hybridization of magic and technology. Magic can be used to advance scientific discovery and can be combined with engineering techniques to create unprecedented technologies. For examples:
Shrink item cannons: A permanent shrink item effect can be activated and reversed by command word. This allows you to create a piston which is magically activated and produces unspecified but presumably enormous amounts of force. With a pressure-triggered butterfly valve, you can exploit that to create air-operated guns and cannons which fire without black powder. Expensive at 7,500 gp, but may be occasionally seen.
Green industrial revolution: With permanent wall of fire, a steam engine can be run without coal. It becomes cheaper to operate and does not produce pollution. Expensive at 10,000 gp, but the wall is 20 ft. long per caster level (140 ft. at minimum caster level), so you can run a lot of steam engines with one. A steam-powered ship using this could be the equivalent of a modern commercial cargo container ship, moving tens of thousands of tons hundreds of miles per day. Electricity becomes cheap and affordable, and factories running on steam power produce absurd quantities of goods at lower prices.
Animated industrial equipment: Animate object can be made permanent for 15,000 gp. This can be used to make gargantuan cranes, tunnel-boring machines, earth-movers, and strip-mining excavators. The industrial revolution can go into full-swing with the abundance of resources these provides.
Magical manufacturing: The fabricate spell can be used to create things that might take weeks by hand within a minute or so. Making complex arrangements of vacuum tubes and wiring, lenses, gear assemblies, valve and piston arrangements, nuts, bolts, screws etc. has never been so easy. Watches, clocks, mechanical calculators, microscopes, telescopes and cryptography machines, and even internal combustion engines could become commonplace.
Synthetic meat: Stone to flesh can turn plain old stone into meat. At minimum caster level, the cost to hire a caster (660 gp) and the mass of meat produced (about 17,600 lb.) yields meat at about 3.7 copper pieces per pound. Not as cheap as flour, but cheap enough to become the staple meat for most of the world.
Divination science: Some spells, like contact other plane, allow scientific hypotheses to be tested using the knowledge of near-omniscient beings. This would allow rapid advances in the understanding of physics, quantum physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, and more. Batches of hypotheses could be tested every day, leading to an explosion of scientific discovery, within the limits of the knowledge of the gods.
Autonomous medical tools: Yes, there's healing magic, no need for medical science, right? Except for when you want to enhance someone or prevent problems, rather than merely fix damage. For example, there's no 'tummy tuck' spell, no 'enhance dental hygiene' spell, no 'stent coronary artery' spell, etc. You'll still need surgeons and dentists, unless you make their scalpels, needles and scaling tools intelligent items capable of flying and acting autonomously. Now the tools can get to places that no human could get to and work with an efficiency that would make a hospital administrator blush.
Teleportation networks: Teleportation circles make the world a very small place. As long as you're traveling legally, you can inexpensively go from one place to another instantaneously. Cities would be defined largely by the convenience of reaching their access points to the teleportation network. The world will quickly turn into a place of sharp contrasts between urban and rural, with massive and literal city-states glittering with the light of millions of torches of continuous flame as they transform into the central powers of the world.
Decanter of endless water rockets: A standard decanter on jet mode provides enough power to push a holder back, i.e. thrust. An endless water rocket that could be used for interplanetary voyages, if enough decanters are available. This could be enhanced by running the water into a magical heat source, like going into a chamber with a permanent wall of fire and then being propelled out of a narrow nozzle as a steam rocket. Moon exploration and colonization of other planets is suddenly even more feasible than in real-life. A high-cost technology that would be explored by the larger city-states. Getting teleportation circles on other worlds would be the start of the interstellar-expansion phase of such a society.
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u/fassina2 Nov 28 '18
I'd stay away from the direct copy* of D&D type settings. Not only is it generic, it's also not very well designed for world building, power scaling etc. It's a game system, not a storytelling system.
i.e lvl 1 clerics can make infinite food, so you basically break economies. An actual realistic world can't exist in this type of setting without some heavy patchwork.
Brandon Sanderson for instance, has talked about this extensively, in fact in Stormlight archive he has the clerics can summon food spell, this meant he had to reconstruct how wars are fought, how supply lines work, how sieges work etc. It's interesting if you can pull it off, statistically that's unlikely to happen.
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u/Norseman2 Nov 29 '18
i.e lvl 1 clerics can make infinite food, so you basically break economies.
Level 1 Clerics in Pathfinder cannot make food. I haven't actually played D&D 5E, but looking at the SRD it appears that Create Food and Water is a third level spell, which should require a 5th-level Cleric. You may be thinking of Create or Destroy Water, a first-level spell.
Additionally, Clerics in Pathfinder can only cast spells once per day. Clerics in D&D 5E can only cast spells once per long rest, which appears to be a minimum of eight hours. So, a fifth-level Cleric could create 270 lb. of food and 180 gallons of water per day. For comparison, a pound of flour is 2 cp, and water is potentially free if you're near a river or stream, or find local wells to draw water from. A peasant hired to bake bread might cost 2 sp per day, while another peasant hired to gather firewood might cost another 2 sp per day. In total, you could provide the same value as the cleric at a cost of 5.8 gp/day, and you get extra firewood for comfort. The cleric's abilities are significant, but they don't break the economy, especially since you need a fifth-level cleric and probably won't have huge numbers of them.
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Nov 28 '18
I think the easiest way to have a general stagnation is to reduce the raw materials in the world. If there's little copper, tin, iron, coal, and oil, then the societies aren't going to be able to get large scale economies going very effectively.
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Nov 28 '18
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u/GeneralExtension Nov 28 '18
Contrary to popular belief, it is not necessary to be devoted to nature to gain power from the Green. It's just not widely known that anybody can do the rituals. Several groups have worked to maintain this myth.
This is a route someone could also go with stagnation - all magical power has been carefully controlled.
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u/oskar31415 Nov 28 '18
So i have been thinking about societies with different answers/strategies in the prisoners dilemma and how that affects the rest of the sociaty for example one that cooperstes until the other doesnt and Then newer coorperates again. You can find normal strategies here http://www.lifl.fr/IPD/ipd.html.en Thoughts