Ignoring the Real World to Instead Learn to Cast Ninth Level Spells to Impress a Bunch of Wizards on an Internet Forum Whose Opinions’ Are Now Very Important to You for Some Reason

Would high-level wizards in a fantasy TTRPG setting – say tier three and tier four, in modern D&D parlance – rule kingdoms and nations, whether directly or indirectly? Would they concern themselves with affairs of state?

These and related questions came up in a recent discussion on the Alexandrian Discord. They got stuck in my brain, and a blog post is the only reliable way to pry them out.

The discussion concerned the degree to which powerful D&D characters – particularly wizards – either would or would not seek real-world status and power in a manner that would be familiar to us from historical examples in the pre-modern real world. Would developing infrastructure, taxing the populace, raising armies, and otherwise participating in statecraft matter to them? Or would such worldly concerns be irrelevant to their goals and interests? 

I am firmly in the latter camp; in my own games, a character wielding such powerful magic simply has better ways to achieve their goals. Some other high-level characters – fighters or paladins, for example – might (might…) choose this route. But not a wizard.

It was clear from the Discord discussion that worldbuilding assumptions underpinning this question varied greatly. For example, the more the material plane is the metaphysical “center of the universe,” the more plausible it is that a wizard would invest resources in controlling mundane elements of it. In a cosmology where only mortal souls on the material plane can worship gods, perhaps the conventional control exerted by temporal nations would matter to a wizard.

But in my own conception of how wizards work, they would have better ways to achieve their goals. They would isolate themselves in their wizard towers (or better yet, off-plane domiciles) and focus their work on research and exploration. They would have little time for the values and priorities of the humans of their world. And doing so would make them a target of rivals and enemies more than it would help them. 

I believe that governments in medium- and high-magic fantasy worlds would be even more susceptible to decapitation strikes than their real-world equivalents, so high-level characters would have a strong incentive to decrease their visibility, exposure, and entanglement with organizations and governing structures. Some of my earliest posts on this blog were an attempt to reason out how societies in this kind of world would differ from equivalent historical societies in the real world.

Next Week: Turning the Wizard Question Around to Better Understand Our World