Annoying Plant Feast

Discussion on game mastering Earthdawn. May contain spoilers; caution is recommended!
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Spader
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Annoying Plant Feast

Postby Spader » Wed Aug 17, 2016 10:25 pm

In a world where a magic exist that creates food (lots of food) within a minute, how come there's no abuse of this magic?

I mean, every elementalists would become innkeeper. Or an elementalist could make a run for all the inns in Bartertown, make them food for a price. And farmers would stop farming and start studying elementalism.

As a GM I always have some hard feelings when my players enter a village and start feeding the whole village with dishes from the finest chef they met in the last year. I think about the farmers that work hard from dawn til dusk to grow and herd food and see this arrogant adventurer that obviously never lifted a shovel in his whole life making too much food that some goes to waste only with a few finger moves.

I won't say it's unbalanced. Just annoying sometimes.

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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby The Undying » Wed Aug 17, 2016 11:18 pm

First, I think a solid question a GM needs to answer is "how prevalent are Adepts in my ED universe?" It's a very complicated question, but it goes to the heart of your issue with the spell.

Here's a math-heavy potential solution to this question. I don't have the source handy, but there's an old RPG site that calculated out their estimate of the Barsaive population to be ~550,000. Assume that only 10% of those people are actual Adepts, anywhere from Initiates up, giving us 55,000 Adepts across the realm (personally, I like the idea of having Adepts be a bit rarer, but with the ubiquity of magic, lots of POTENTIAL Adepts or half-magic non-Adepts). Then, assume that there are 10 Disciplines with an even distribution across them; probably not a great assumption on the distribution, but we're keeping it simple, and we're now at 5,500 Adepts per Discipline. Finally, if you count DOWN from Circle 15 using Fibonacci sequence (the basis of all non-linear stuff in ED) to determine how many Adepts are at each Circle, you basically end up with ~1,000 Circle 3 or higher Elementalists. So, across ALL of Barsaive, there are only a thousand people who COULD cast this spell. Some Elementalists won't learn it, and many have little interest in setting up an inn just because they CAN mass produce food.

The next question I think is very relevant is "why would a Namegiver become an Adept"? I think a basic premise is that most/all Adepts strive for adventure/notoriety/power. In that thought, pretty much every Adept would be out causing trouble - either the good kind (busting up slavers, knocking horror heads, etc) or the bad kind (all glory to Vistriel!). If that's the case, then any Adept that settles down to set up shop is either a rarity among Adepts that has no interest in adventuring or has retired for some reason or another (age, injury, etc).

So, all in all, I don't think you practically need to worry about an ED where everybody and their uncle can just raise food out of the ground. Rest assured, farming and herding are very much an integral part of life in Barsaive, even if you bump up the percentage of Adepts in your universe.

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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby etherial » Thu Aug 18, 2016 9:12 am


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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby The Undying » Thu Aug 18, 2016 7:45 pm

1% seems to low to me, personally. If you go off my population/distribution estimates - which may not be correct in the first place - you're talking about ~5,500 total Adepts alive, with ~550 per Discipline.

Let's assume that most Adepts are noble, so maybe only 10% turn to a life of crime, bringing your bank of living Adept adversaries down to ~550 total, 55 per Discipline. In one published Parlainth adventure, the characters fight off I believe ~6 Adepts. That means that, in a single battle, the characters have defeated 1% of the entire population of evil Adepts. Worse, if you assume an uneven Circle distribution, with a heavier low Circle population, you're looking at a tiny pool of high Circle Adept adversaries. Probably not a big deal in a universe focusing on political intrigue or horrors, but it would notionally require sparing use of Adept adversaries.

Looking at the non-evil side, it could make advancement difficult as well, aside from Divine Intervention. If any Journeyman, or above, requires apprenticeship/approval of someone in their Discipline of the target Circle or higher, it almost becomes a quest in and of itself to identify who COULD serve the role, send out missives or otherwise contact candidates, and meet up for the occasion.

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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby Slimcreeper » Fri Aug 19, 2016 11:27 am

Back to Spader's point -

Totally right. It wouldn't surprise me that if an adept showed up and started pumping out plant feast that a mini civil war would erupt. On the other side, I imagine farmers _do_ study elemental magic, even if it isn't described in the book. And Questor magic, for that matter. The hinterlands are at risk of violence, but not starvation.

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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby Dale » Fri Aug 19, 2016 11:28 am

I was an elementalist in the last game I played in. Our early games we were working just to keep ourselves fed it seemed. Getting Plant Feast was a big deal for us. A couple of points to consider on the "feed the world" issues.

Our group quit buying rations on the assumption I would provide. Until I was captured and was MIA basically for a period of time. Could a village really pin their entire food supply on an individual who might die, who is most likely to be at the front of any confrontation to protect the village? There will always be a non-magical need for the farmers and the rest of the infrastructure.

I used to spend a bit of my downtime providing food to the poor. Until I started a food riot and damned near got myself killed. I think I ended up almost unconscious with multiple wounds. In hind sight it was great fun and funny. At the time is was crazy that a non-game related downtime activity caused a week long delay for me to heal.

I also had to eat horse oats so I could feed our mounts at one point.
Dale

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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby Spader » Fri Aug 19, 2016 2:39 pm


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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby The Undying » Fri Aug 19, 2016 9:33 pm

I think Plant Feast is getting a bit too much attention in this context.

I guess it really comes down to your ED universe. As written, the world of ED seems fairly self-sustaining: small towns can be completely isolated, producing their own food and goods, while large towns/cities that don't have an internal food production base rely on external production. The Scourge, and the resulting corruption of the land, has only made SOME areas uninhabitable, while the rest is pretty much business-as-usual from a planting and livestock point of view (dangers of monsters, scorchers, etc withstanding). A darker ED could definitely have food production problems on a wide-scale. However, spells like Nutritious Earth are essentially like industrial farming - doesn't require constant maintenance (year and a day) and makes a significant improvement in production.

Food riots I think are a localization problem, unrelated to a matter of production. A wealthy Adept could come to the poor area of town with wagons of food and a riot could break out, a generous farmer/merchant could do the same thing, all in the same way that an Elementalist casting Plant Feast could have the same results.

As for feeding mounts, remember that Plant Feast affect FLAVOR, it does not say anything about affecting the base composition of the plant matter. An argument could be made that altering 'flavor' basically alters all aspects other than the raw matter: scent is a part of flavor, text and heat are a part of flavor, etc, so a mount shouldn't refuse to eat something that is effectively straw (for a horse). However, I think it'd also be fair as a GM to say that's not the case, scent especially isn't actually affected, and mounts turn their nose up at it.

Which, again, kind brings back around to what I feel is the overemphasis of Plant Feast here. Imagine what is effectively a food brick product - thoroughly unappetizing looking, no super inviting scent or mixture of colors or radiant heat. It might have the shape of a hamburger, maybe with some color variation, but it looks like a hamburger in the way that you can walk outside, grab a bunch of detritus, and stack/shape it to look like a burger. If you're unfamiliar with the spell, you probably really have to psyche yourself up for that first mouthful, after which you realize how delicious it is. This is Plant Feast. I'm confident that most nobles/merchants/well-to-dos would rather have a suckling pig, dripping in its own juices, a perfect red apple wedged in its mouth, crisp vegetables of various shapes and sizes surrounding it, with airy brown and white loaves of bread on the side, along with a steaming bowl of broth with fresh seafood swirling within.

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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby Tattered Rags » Wed Aug 24, 2016 9:46 am


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Re: Annoying Plant Feast

Postby Telarus_KSC » Wed Aug 24, 2016 3:58 pm

"non-GMO" :clap:


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