Science?

[The Pressman]

This has been on my mind for a while now, and here it is:

Science is a fixture of our modern world. What kind of classes, spells, mechanics, monsters, and features would you work into a world without losing the classic D&D environment? Someone had to make those water clocks.:smallamused:

[Gensh]

There's different ways in which you can go about doing it, but for it to not significantly change the classic setting, a lot of things have to either go out of their way to be unobtrusive or else not be prevalent among the general populace. Also, if you're the DM, you have to let your players know exactly how far you're going with the technology given. I once had an arena tournament where one of PC's opponent had a blunderbuss and a pair of flintlock pistols. The PC killed him, took the guns, then used up all the ammo. What he didn't take into account was that the man he killed was the inventor - when he asked me where to find more, I told him there was none in the whole world, and he was kind of miffed (I don't see why; he owned a city and probably could have got some inventors to try and make some).

One thing I have a tendency to do in order to avoid that is to reuse certain NPCs, like Cid from Final Fantasy. If they see person X, then they know that technology is at least to a certain point in the world. For example, if they see Jack, then they know that at the very least, there are art museums, libraries, advanced mathematics, and cheap zombie-based slave labor, just so long as they make sure that they don't get him caught by any churches and don't tell his wife that he's making death rays wands of enervation in his evil lair the basement.

[Roland St. Jude]

This seems to be a duplicate of a thread in RPG the forum. Locked.