Could peoples' misery be used as a fuel for something in generic dnd settings?
Yes, capitalism.
Certainly. There are rules for it: Liquid Pain, in the Book of Vile Darkness. Useful stuff.
>>47503241
I've always liked the idea of joy and unhappiness being to separate sorces of magic, but not actually tied to the general concept of good and evil. Joy is more potent, but with a shorter fuse. Unhappiness is stable, but not as powerful as joy. One man could abuse joy by selling drugs. Another man could walk among the poor and do what he can to help, relying on their state to give him strength so that he can go from shithole to shithole helping while slowly growing in power.
OP here.
I got this idea of a man skulking at night to houses with children who have cancer and leaving his dreamcatcher-like effigies there to catch the bad vibes and perhaps use them for something.
>>47503275
It's also rather expensive, which makes it one of the most lucrative ways to make money in the game to any characters that know how to harvest it and have a steady supply of victims.
Use warhammerish stuff: emotion is Immaterium fuel, emotion can be used to fuel something else, but can mess with ye brains.
>>47503241
angst
>>47503256
>tips fedora
>>47503472
Not quite the same but in the first season of True Detectives the primary villain would return to where he abducted his victims to leave stick and vine dreamcatchers. The victims had real bad ends.
>>47503479
Derpy RPG economic right there, if you can make lots of it, the value should not be high foe niche items. Even with skill and production barriers, resale of excess, and non-perishable exotic items between consumers limit sale values. For example, the first douche bag that ended up not needing his dose can sell it for less than you sold it to him. There is now a less expensive dose of the same thing you have to compete against in the market.
So your get rich plan maybe effective in the short term, which might be all you need to be fair, but I would not plan to make it long term. At least that is how we play things in our groups when someone tries to break economics with magic.
>>47503241
It's how corporations work IRL, I don't see why not.
>>47503241
Denizens of the Underdark use the terror of children to keep the lights on, apparently.
>>47503241
Nope, it's impossible
>>47503977
The problem with mass harvesting liquid pain is that the spell for it takes a day to cast, and the magic item for it is so expensive it would take half a year (or nearly a full year if you didn't craft it) to pay for itself. Its a decent source of money if you have the downtime and nothing else to do, but if you really want to crank it out on an industrial scale you need to abuse demiplanes and/or repeating magic traps.
I think the big obstacle isn't resale, but the base price and the fact that its just a drug. Most people wouldn't want to buy this shit by the barrel even if they could afford it, and anyone that did would probably set up their own pain farms.
>>47503256
Wait 'till you see Communism sonny-boy. Protip, not everybody gets a spiffy hat like this one.
>>47503241
It's a little known fact that humanoid misery is what generates mana. It's why gods and wizards haven't just wiped out peasants and replaced them with warforged or golems.
>>47503241
You can use it to feed the GM.
>>47504891
>Authoritarian communism is the only alternative to capitalism.
>Authoritarian communism isn't just state capitalism with leftist rhetoric.
>>47505780
>I just recently got in to politics and think Bernie can save this county
You have the free market on one side and you have an unfree market on the other side.
You have the fruits of your own labor on one side and on the other you have your fruits taken to give to another.
>>47504784
The other issue is that you can only get doses of liquid pain equal to a creature's Con score before they expire, so you have to constantly pull in new stock.
People will figure it out eventually.
Stand up comedy
>>47506032
And if I tell you I'm okay with that, so long as I also get the fruits of someone else's labour?
>>47506032
Only stupid mofos go for stupid simplifications.
