Jeff Jenkins's page

Is this spell abusive?

Say a caster, at 14th level, makes a sim of his "any creature." His creature is a 28th level wizard. So the wizard sim is 14th. He then makes a sim of a 28th level Druid-sim is 14th. The Druid goes off, finds a nice volcanic ridge, casts commune with nature, finds all the minerals, goes and gets all the rubies and comes back. The Wizard sim uses those rubies to make another wizard sim. Who makes a druid sim. etc... Starting with one wizard sim, and assuming one druid can supply one casting per day of Simulacrum, there would be an exponential explosion in the number of sims...ie, 1 on day 1, 2 on day 2, 4 on day 3 etc... It gets into the millions within 2 months, and the original caster then takes over the world.
There are other ways than druidic mining to get the required rubies...simming an earth elemental, xorn, or just lots and lots of miners. Regardless, sims can generate wealth, sims can create sims, so there will be an exponential growth.

There is a somewhat annoying logical progression with crafted items in both 3.0 and 3.5 that may want to addressed in 3.75.

1.It is not terribly costly to create an item that creates food and water once per round indefinately.
2. It is not terribly costly to create an item that will cure disease in the same manner.

This means that any society that wants healthy and well fed people will ensure that these items are available.

This means that there will be a population boom of epic proportions...the modern industrial revolution doesn't hold a candle to almost free food and perfect health care. Add in items that create walls of stone for roads, disintigration for tunnels/excavation, rock to mud etc...and there will no longer be an even remotely feudal system left, which is where D&D is set.

Any nation that does not invest in crafted items, especially food and disease ones, will quickly be crushed by the overwhelming numbers of neighboring nations; elves will be especially vulnerable since it takes so long for elves to mature into adults...

I realize this is a little silly, but if a D.M. is running a game that emphasizes politics and how nations interact, the D.M. would be remiss in not looking for ways in which those nations could use spells or items to create a more powerful nation; that is what we do with technology after all. Creating these items, however, irrevocably changes the game...pretty hard to have an adventure in the wilderness when there is no wilderness left(an adventure theme that is rather appropriate given the current state of our world, but still...)

Yours in nerdyness,
Jeff