I've come to an epiphany.

[atemu1234]

A major problem with high fantasy is that it always shows up as a static type of thing; technology does not advance, despite there being a real possibility for it. So between me and a sociology teacher, we begin a discussion about it.

So I theorized something; maybe there are two types of advancement; vertical and horizontal. Horizontal advancement doesn't advance technology quickly, but it advances it outwards; a society spreads as opposed to using its resources to better its technology.

Secondly, science as we know it wouldn't exist. All the laws of physics are easily ignored, so those wouldn't exist, removing the basis for a lot of modern theories. While things like steam engines could be created magically, they'd be clunkier than a wizard just casting fly.

[Killer Angel]

I've got another problem. Fantasy societies don't evolve. Centuries pass away, and the fluff remains the same: even magic don't evolve (we even have the paradox that ancient magic is often stronger than the actual one. As if a musket were more deadly then a FN SCAR-H Mk. 17)

[atemu1234]

I've got another problem. Fantasy societies don't evolve. Centuries pass away, and the fluff remains the same: even magic don't evolve (we even have the paradox that ancient magic is often stronger than the actual one. As if a musket were more deadly then a FN SCAR-H Mk. 17)

Magic is kind of fundamentally the same. Also, given the rarity of high-level casters, it makes sense on a certain level that odds are one died and was buried with his most powerful stuff. No one else could figure it out, and it remained untouched but known to be powerful.

Basically, ancient magic is more powerful because of its creator, not its age.

As to society... the flaw in this is that it can change; race-based society was flawed to begin with. I disregard it in most of my games. I mostly made this for my games and thought I should share it with the playground.

[Snowbluff]

Well, here are a few things.

You know the guy who would invent the assault rifle? He would be a wizard, and would rather spend his time doing wizardy things, which are easier and more fruitful for him. Magic would attract the greatest minds, which would greatly hinder the progress of the natural sciences.

The definition of high fantasy doesn't necessarily mean medieval. Star Wars could be considered high fantasy, for example.

If a society were to become prosperous under the hand of a mages, technological advancements would arise because the regular folks would be given time and opportunity to pursue endeavors outside their survival. This could mean people with no talent for magic could end up advancing technology.

[atemu1234]

Well, here are a few things.

You know the guy who would invent the assault rifle? He would be a wizard, and would rather spend his time doing wizardy things, which are easier and more fruitful for him. Magic would attract the greatest minds, which would greatly hinder the progress of the natural sciences.

The definition of high fantasy doesn't necessarily mean medieval. Star Wars could be considered high fantasy, for example.

If a society were to become prosperous under the hand of a mages, technological advancements would arise because the regular folks would be given time and opportunity to pursue endeavors outside their survival. This could mean people with no talent for magic could end up advancing technology.

Could not necessarily meaning do, I suppose.

After all, if you have the resources to make a rifle, why not just become a wizard? Because martial characters dealing 1d10 with a gun? Supposedly OP. Wizard doing 10d6 fire? Also comparatively OP.

[Psyren]

"Technology" means two things - making magic or magical effects available to the masses, and automation replacing or augmenting manual processes. Resetting magical traps accomplish both of these objectives, ergo they would be the most likely form of "technology."

Are you familiar with the Tippyverse? That's basically what magical technology would look like if you stuck to RAW and allowed a setting to advance (without deific interference.)

[AnonymousPepper]

I've sort of ignored the static nature of D&D societies. Just straight-up chucked them out. Because I find a lack of progress in a setting to be really kind of bunk too.

I found that this can be pretty easily justified if you force societies that have never come into contact with each other to start interacting on a meaningful level. In the game I run, with all of the 3.PF settings interacting directly with each other via Sigil, everything's slowly started to pick up steam and start advancing again. The explicit anti-gun bias of the Forgotten Realms has faded out with the introduction of reliable firearms from Golarion and their marvelous ability to, with proper training, render armor obsolete. Cheliax has acquired and improved airship technology from the gnomes of Zilargo on Eberron (with a little help from my PCs), setting off an arms race with its neighbors. House Kundarak's banking practices have taken everyone else's economies by storm - prompting some serious overhaul and reform in places like Waterdeep to remain competitive. Warforged are finding work everywhere, without near as much prejudice as they find in Khorvaire. The Magister of Mystra - who, reminder, gains XP for teaching - has made a killing teaching the old and powerful magic of the Forgotten Realms to figures in Oerth and elsewhere. The Red Wizards' constant aims to tech up and overrun their neighbors has led to a renaissance in the whole region to keep up. And the masses of Kender that nobody and I mean nobody likes, Mary Sue campaign setting descriptions be damned, have managed to find a well-respected place in the slave markets of Skullport as low-cost, totally expendable labor :smallamused:

It all makes sense, really. You can force a society out of stagnation by forcing it to interact with other societies that have things to offer it and be offered. Everyone has to change at least some of their ways and partially adapt or be left behind.

So that's what I chose to do, personally. I took the campaign settings, forced them into contact with each other, and sort of let reality take its course (although for entirely meta reasons, the Tippyverse didn't happen), and that's what happened. And I'm satisfied with the results.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

[Psyren]

It's not bunk if a more advanced society - like a pantheon - is keeping the mortal one that way with their own internecine politics. Since all* the published settings have one of those, their relative lack of progress actually does make sense.

*All except Eberron - but instead, they have a setting-wide Prophecy which ultimately fills a similar function.

[goto124]

You know the guy who would invent the assault rifle? He would be a wizard, and would rather spend his time doing wizardy things, which are easier and more fruitful for him. Magic would attract the greatest minds, which would greatly hinder the progress of the natural sciences.

Has anyone ever tried to make a fantasy society progress in a somewhat different fashion from real life, taking into consideration magic?

[AnonymousPepper]

It's not bunk if a more advanced society - like a pantheon - is keeping the mortal one that way with their own internecine politics. Since all* the published settings have one of those, their relative lack of progress actually does make sense.

*All except Eberron - but instead, they have a setting-wide Prophecy which ultimately fills a similar function.

I think in that sort of situation, conflicts with other pantheons - even between good-aligned deities (or deific entities, when looking at Eberron); sayyyy, the Undying Court and Pelor would NOT get along, for example, and would spend much time countering each others' influences - would also preoccupy many of them to the point of being less able to slow down (whether intentionally or unintentionally) progress in their own worlds. Ao and any unnamed counterparts he may have elsewhere would have his hands full keeping the peace.

[Grinner]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis

Also, pendell wrote an overview (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=18087901&postcount=46) of the conditions necessary to spark societal change as derived from Machiavelli's The Prince. That I found rather illuminating.

Edit:

Has anyone ever tried to make a fantasy society progress in a somewhat different fashion from real life, taking into consideration magic?

I think the Tippyverse sorta does that. I don't think Emperor Tippy ever actually posted the setting online, so it's hard to tell.

[AnonymousPepper]

Has anyone ever tried to make a fantasy society progress in a somewhat different fashion from real life, taking into consideration magic?

Eberron? Tippyverse?

[Psyren]

I think in that sort of situation, conflicts with other pantheons - even between good-aligned deities (or deific entities, when looking at Eberron); sayyyy, the Undying Court and Pelor would NOT get along, for example, and would spend much time countering each others' influences - would also preoccupy many of them to the point of being less able to slow down (whether intentionally or unintentionally) progress in their own worlds. Ao and any unnamed counterparts he may have elsewhere would have his hands full keeping the peace.

I meant within a single setting - Undying Court and Pelor are two different settings entirely, so what would happen if they both ran into each other is a matter for each individual DM to determine. But within Greyhawk or FR, say, we can say things like "well, the reason there aren't assault rifles yet is because Mystra/Boccob/Gond/Moradin don't want there to be, yet."

Also, whether Undying Court is even a real deity or just a philosophy/ideal given a name is a matter of debate as well.


Has anyone ever tried to make a fantasy society progress in a somewhat different fashion from real life, taking into consideration magic?

That's not easy to do (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MostWritersAreHuman) - even unconsciously, writers and designers will tend to come up with things based on the familiar.

[AnonymousPepper]

I meant within a single setting - Undying Court and Pelor are two different settings entirely, so what would happen if they both ran into each other is a matter for each individual DM to determine. But within Greyhawk or FR, say, we can say things like "well, the reason there aren't assault rifles yet is because Mystra/Boccob/Gond/Moradin don't want there to be, yet."

Also, whether Undying Court is even a real deity or just a philosophy/ideal given a name is a matter of debate as well.

Oh, my apologies. You were replying to me so I thought you were critiquing some of my ideas, which is entirely my bad.
I always did hate that about Gond though. Like, why? Why intentionally stifle innovation and progress? I'm specifically referring to his ban on firearms, but just in general, in what way could that sort of mindset possibly be beneficial to his subjects as a god of making stuff?

Well, as far as the Undying Court goes, my interpretation of it has always been that the court itself, as a sort of gestalt entity, is the god of sorts that grants spells and the like. Not any individual member, but their sort of collective power.

[Kalmageddon]

Eberron? Tippyverse?

As much as I like Eberron, it still fails on that level.
It has the aestethics of a more advanced society and technology but it functionally remains the same as, say, Greyhawk.
Consider the following points:
- All the states are still ruled by hereditary nobility.
- There is no industrialization. Everything is still being made by artisans, even when it's clear that they have the resources and the magitech to create magical factories. There is no division of labour.
- Magic is supposed to be commonplace and yet the prices for magical items remain the same, therefore making them every bit as impossibily expensive to the common folk as they are in any other setting.
- Even the magitech elements don't involve anything we could recongize as a technological improvement over more standard settings, for example the lightning train doesn't have any moving parts, it's just a set of carts pulled by an air elemental. The elemental airship is just a wooden ship being moved by a fire elemental. None of these two things require any innovations to be discovered when compared to Greyhawk or Faerun. In fact you could obtain the same results without bounding any elementals to anything and just creatively using some spells or enchanted items.
- More importantly, the weapons are all the same. There are no firearms or magical equivalent whatsoever. People are still beating eachother to death using sharpened sticks and tactis that should be outdated by a century or more. Magic is not being allowed to be a game changer even if it should be commonplace in the setting.

[sideswipe]

Magic is kind of fundamentally the same. Also, given the rarity of high-level casters, it makes sense on a certain level that odds are one died and was buried with his most powerful stuff. No one else could figure it out, and it remained untouched but known to be powerful.

Basically, ancient magic is more powerful because of its creator, not its age.

As to society... the flaw in this is that it can change; race-based society was flawed to begin with. I disregard it in most of my games. I mostly made this for my games and thought I should share it with the playground.

hmmm, i would partially agree with your first statement, what i would say instead is that if you think back to a time before spells really existed in their refined form you just had energies, so people would learn how to manipulate energy better and would understand core mechanics much more then some guy who just learns the refined version of said spell, which would have better understanding and therefore be a more powerful wizard?

once the pioneers start dying off you are just left with people sharing repeated information with less and less understanding of its core mechanics.

then again you will have people who would want to understand those core mechanics again and they are they rare wizards who make huge headway and design new spells. and that is how it does progress, but still usually slower.

[Psyren]

Oh, my apologies. You were replying to me so I thought you were critiquing some of my ideas, which is entirely my bad.
I always did hate that about Gond though. Like, why? Why intentionally stifle innovation and progress? I'm specifically referring to his ban on firearms, but just in general, in what way could that sort of mindset possibly be beneficial to his subjects as a god of making stuff?

Again, the Pantheon is a society. So it's possible that someone with another portfolio warned him against it, or even his boss. So maybe Oghma looked at the Scroll of Knowledge and said, no, they're not ready for this yet, simple firearms only, and Gond agreed.

It's kinda like how Mystra can't deny magic to evil spellcasters even though this version of her is good-aligned. There are various rules in place to ensure a rough status quo. Things fluctuate just enough to need adventurers (or even larger groups, like the Harpers) from time to time, but never enough to revolutionize the setting and render any of those groups obsolete.



Well, as far as the Undying Court goes, my interpretation of it has always been that the court itself, as a sort of gestalt entity, is the god of sorts that grants spells and the like. Not any individual member, but their sort of collective power.

Yes, but do they grant spells because they actually have divine ranks et al., or do they "grant spells" because enough elves believe in the ideal of mummified ancestry as a divine force that praying to it causes them to get the spells themselves? That is the general conundrum with Eberron religions. It gets worse once you realize that paying lip service is more important than alignment there, so you can have a totally evil elf who still believes in mummifying his ancestors and the UC sends his new shipment of spells every morning, just like you can have evil clerics hiding in the Silver Flame - which may or may not be a shiny demon or something.

[Bronk]

I think the problem you're having is with the flavor of High Fantasy that's usually portrayed in DnD.

Most DnD settings are somewhat medieval, and capture the flavor of the Middle Ages or Dark Ages, where in most places, and especially in the portrayal we usually see in popular culture, the highest form of learning was studying ancient Greek philosophers and Roman technology, while living in a country that's just a fraction of an old, much grander empire whose time was seen as the Golden Age.

It's basically a post apocalyptic scenario where the grand countries and all the greatest heroes are in the distant past, their stories, technologies and resources are lost to time and the ravages of war, and the world is in a perpetual state of catch-up. This comes up in a lot of fiction, and ends up in our major DnD settings because of it. Of course, then everything gets a magical overlay.

These tropes are pretty deep, and show up anywhere from Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, where you have a pretty steep power decline between the first, second and third ages, to Indiana Jones, where the only remaining powerful artifacts are ancient magic tablets, rocks, cups (both good and cursed!) and whatever they should have used in the fourth one instead of aliens.

That isn't just for magic either... Fighting styles are made and lost, Kung Fu traditions passed down, and so on.

So, you have Greyhawk and Faerun both set in a 'modern' world in the shadow of great fallen magical empires, with most people living as farmers or whatnot while society mostly subsists on the dregs of magic that adventurer's find in ancient vaults and tombs. Eberron seems more modern, it's still living in the shadow of the fallen giant empire (of giants), and people live under the thumbs of the vast dragon empire. In Athas, they broke civilization and the regular, good kind of magic doesn't work anymore. And so on. All the best stuff has already been done before, and the new stuff isn't as good.

This makes a lot of sense game-wise... Adventuring is fun, and you don't have to have your magical characters invent new spells as you go along. However, you can proabably get around this by running your own setting where everything is shiny and new, and treating advancing spellcasting levels as advancing magic as a whole. Of course, unless your magic user is the most powerful in the land, they would still find themselves playing catch-up to government agencies and powerful existing covens or something. Plus, you'd have to either have no access to immortal beings or have them all be illiterate or something.

[Psyren]

^ That's an excellent point - you can in fact have the PCs be the ones on the bleeding edge of magical theory and technological advancement if you wish. Just because, say, 9th-level spells and great wyrm dragons are a thing in the game system, does not mean they have to exist in the world until your PCs invent or engineer them.

You do have to handle it carefully though, because if the PCs are the ones with the best toys, it becomes a bit difficult to challenge them and the campaign can end up drawing to a close quickly.

[Segev]

Something that often gets forgotten by DMs and some fantasy writers is that the original stories wherein "ancient magic" is so enormously powerful are, in fact, post-apocalyptic settings. Not "after modern 21st century man blew himself up" apocalyptic, but "fall of Rome" apocalyptic. There is an assumption that, like the medieval times Fantasy typically romanticises, there was a great and advanced empire in the past which is now fallen and gone, but its relics are still there. Maybe there are even enclaves which have preserved some of that knowledge. Atlantis is hidden under the waves, or Rome itself is "lost" but really in hiding, hoarding its knowlege and power after their empire was taken from them.

If you look at more ancient inspirations than medieval, you see signs that the "greatness of the past" is coupled with a greater "roughness." It isn't that magic of old was more powerful, but that there were more terrors, more great beasts and literal gods walking amongst men, and thus the few heroes WERE greater, for they had beasts they'd tamed or divine or monstrous parentage. But the world was rougher, less civilized, and things were worse for most people.

The "lost time of the gods" is not necessarily a fallen time, but a consequence of those heroes taming the world for Man. And Man as a whole is better off, his empires greater now than in the past, even if some of the wonder is gone. (Even that, though, is not entirely the case; the wonder has just changed, as the frontiers have moved.)


We've re-entered some of that in our modern era, as we ARE in the rising (though at risk of taking a bad turn right now) empire of man. Our modern civilization is greater than Greece or Rome or Egypt or Persia of old ever were. But if we fell, and things...slipped...again, the reputation of the vast wealth and technological power and incredible learning of our era would be viewed, again, as a sort of "great power of a lost age." At least until things recovered once more.




To conclude, I don't think it's so much that fantasy settings don't advance (though there are those whose histories indicate they do not), so much as fantasy is almost always set in a medieval-like time, and the gameplay or story takes place then and there.

Those which have thousands of years of history of unchanging tech are not well thought-out. Even worse when the geopolitics also don't change. But it's also possible that this is an in-setting artifact of poor historical understanding. People tend to assume things have always been as they know them, unless they have reason to think otherwise.

Add in the stability given by longer-lived races' older generations refusing to adapt with the times (and the fact that the idea that youth > age is a very modern concept; used to be that elders were very highly respected and youths heeded even as adults, even if they grumbled about it), and that could create more of the stagnation.

[Buufreak]

If I may get a little citation happy...

"Magic's just science that we don't understand yet." -Arthur C. Clarke

That is to say that D&D is only assuming magic was the progression instead of our machinery. I am almost certain they would just as easily look at our world and be amazed and confused, because they can't comprehend our mechanics and contraptions with their magic-orientated minds. Citing a bible scholar (specifically a doomsday kinda guy), revelations and its many destructive monsters that breathed fire and tore the sky with their sounds could easily be divination used to see today's tanks and flying machines.

[Honest Tiefling]

I also second the idea that people can and will lose technology quite easily due to losing the knowledge. Through, these are worlds where a magic spell can unleash a plague if you took the time to murder all of the clerics of an opposing faith, you have constant threat of being eaten by different races and people will not stop dabbling in infernal magic. You might have the issue that someone basically keeps hitting the reset button on civilization every so often and the scattered remenants of humanity (Elfity? Whatever) have to keep rebuilding things. This is why you get so many ruins, people with high intelligence or strength but no wisdom.

I mean, imagine if the Goths had access to storm of vengeance or gate. We probably would have a great deal more of Roman knowledge.

[GreyBlack]

A major problem with high fantasy is that it always shows up as a static type of thing; technology does not advance, despite there being a real possibility for it. So between me and a sociology teacher, we begin a discussion about it.

So I theorized something; maybe there are two types of advancement; vertical and horizontal. Horizontal advancement doesn't advance technology quickly, but it advances it outwards; a society spreads as opposed to using its resources to better its technology.

Secondly, science as we know it wouldn't exist. All the laws of physics are easily ignored, so those wouldn't exist, removing the basis for a lot of modern theories. While things like steam engines could be created magically, they'd be clunkier than a wizard just casting fly.

Did you try modeling magic as technology? If one were to model magic as technology for a world, then major advances would come in the forms of spell creation or new methodologies in spell-casting rather than new alloys or production ideas. Also consider that this technology for DND is only around, say, 1200s to 1500s levels of real techno-magical development and I'd say things aren't nearly as static as they seem. I could totally see someone making a magic-powered roller coaster, or developing wands for use with the mundanes, or even magically assisted factories by the 1700s/1800s. In saying that, this model would only allow magic to be advanced by sufficiently gifted and powerful spellcasters with the ability to tamper with the laws and figure out what was possible. Where the average inventor/industrialist might be a level 2-5 in our world, in DND/High Fantasy, you'd need someone of closer to 10th-15th level to even begin the sort of tampering necessary to invent new spells, leading to a slower progression of technology than in the real world.

[Hiro Protagonest]

Exalted does the whole magitech thing for The First Age, and even has a good excuse for why said ancient things are better than what's available today. Also, Autochthonia, a society built on the tenets of the Machine God (actually a primordial, but whatevs). Alchemicals, the exalted of Autochthonia, are basically magitech robots/cyborgs with human souls.

"Magic" is everywhere in the world of Exalted, because Essence is literally what Creation is made of. In the First Age, giant factory-cathedrals staffed by hundreds of techpriests made wondrous essence technology. A warstrider's (mecha) creation involved turning the tough-to-work magical materials into tiny, precise springs and sockets, and not allowing anyone unsanctified from the initial prayer at the beginning of its creation into the cathedral for the entirety of the years needed to build it (a cursed warstrider is the result of that rule being broken). Not sure if it's the same for Autochthonian warstriders, but I'd assume so. Power armor, essence cannons, repeating crossbows, and beamklaves (lightsabers!) all exist, and Alchemical charms are literally magitech artifacts that get installed into them in vats complexes (except for Flesh-and-Brass alchemicals, which banish their exaltation to Elsewhere for modification).

[Necroticplague]

I see gods being used as a reason things are static, but couldn't they also be a good source of progress? Assuming they know a lot about their portfolio, it seems like magic that lets you call them up for answers (which does exist) could be a big boon to human progress.

"Dear god of the harvest: why have our once-bountiful lands been producing so sparse a bounty recently?"
"Because you keep rowing the darn thing on the same ground year after year, and you're tilling way too much. You're basically draining all the nutrients from the soil. Try keeping all those byproducts you throw away, and keep them in a big box until they rot into compost, and changing what you grow every couple years."
"what the heck is a nutrient"
"Its what you get from eating. Plant need them too, and they get it from the soil."

[Psyren]

I see gods being used as a reason things are static, but couldn't they also be a good source of progress? Assuming they know a lot about their portfolio, it seems like magic that lets you call them up for answers (which does exist) could be a big boon to human progress.

"Dear god of the harvest: why have our once-bountiful lands been producing so sparse a bounty recently?"
"Because you keep rowing the darn thing on the same ground year after year, and you're tilling way too much. You're basically draining all the nutrients from the soil. Try keeping all those byproducts you throw away, and keep them in a big box until they rot into compost, and changing what you grow every couple years."
"what the heck is a nutrient"
"Its what you get from eating. Plant need them too, and they get it from the soil."

That's not true progress though, or at least it's only progress to a point. All you're doing there is handing over the reins of your civilization to them, not that they didn't already have their hands on those reins anyway. If you want to learn how to make firearms better and they don't think you're ready, your inquiries will be met with stony silence. If you proceed on your own, they can muck about with it in any number of ways. You'll advance, sure - but when they say and not before.

More importantly, the gods - at least, the good ones - defy Darwinism in many respects. If a culture has not learned the lesson you posted above in our world, on their own they'd die out. But Chauntea or Silvanus or Obad-hai is just as likely to intervene and send them visions, or appoint a Chosen or Cleric (or Druid!) to help them learn, or send a representative fey or something. They also send clerics to fight disease instead of letting them run their course, etc.

[jedipotter]

A major problem with high fantasy is that it always shows up as a static type of thing; technology does not advance, despite there being a real possibility for it. So between me and a sociology teacher, we begin a discussion about it.

This is not true. This is false. D&D is set in a time. If you set something in a time, then everything has not been invented yet. For example, most fantasy games take place ''before 1400'' or so to use Earth time. So a game set in ''before 1400'' does not have electricity, computers or space ships.



So I theorized something; maybe there are two types of advancement; vertical and horizontal. Horizontal advancement doesn't advance technology quickly, but it advances it outwards; a society spreads as opposed to using its resources to better its technology.

Technology advances. Even in fantasy.



Secondly, science as we know it wouldn't exist. All the laws of physics are easily ignored, so those wouldn't exist, removing the basis for a lot of modern theories. While things like steam engines could be created magically, they'd be clunkier than a wizard just casting fly.

I think science would exist. I don't like the view that magic is ''all weird and unknown'' so you don't study it. Magic is bound by the ''laws of reality'' just like everything else. And you can only ignore the laws of physics if they exist. And they would still exist. You can only alter the laws, if they exist.

I'm not sure why a machine needs to be clunky. The third or fourth generation ones would not be clunky. But you'd still need the steam engine as not everyone is a wizard that can cast fly. And even the wizard who can cast fly would still want to take a cruse on a steamboat somewhere.


I've got another problem. Fantasy societies don't evolve.

Well, you only get a 'snapshot' anyway.

So when you say ''technology does not advance in fantasy'', it like saying ''why don't they use P-90's in Civil War movies?''.

[Arbane]

Has anyone ever tried to make a fantasy society progress in a somewhat different fashion from real life, taking into consideration magic?

I've seen a few. Exalted's First Age was mentioned, and ISTR RuneQuest had the God Learners, whose efforts at (basically) munchkinizing the spirit world got EVERYONE else to unite to destroy them.

Also, Terry Pratchett's Discworld books have society advancing to a quasi-Renaissance through new inventions and social changes.


So when you say ''technology does not advance in fantasy'', it like saying ''why don't they use P-90's in Civil War movies?''.

No, this is "Why are they using the same weaponry now that they were in the Great War 1000 years ago?" (Which is pretty much the state in Star Wars, at least according to the Old Republic games.)

And someone on RPG.net had a good take on that: "The young hero knows the Dark Lord was killed with a steel longsword, since that's what they used in the plays he saw as a child. The elvish wizard who's guiding him knows the Dark Lord was killed with a bronze gladius, since that is how the tales she was told as a child had it The Dark Lord knows perfectly well he was killed by a hatchet with a blade of flint and a handle made from his own son's thighbone. AND HE WILL HAVE HIS REVENGE."

[Fitz10019]

Technology is magic that would work for everyone. This would undermine the value of wizardry. So, whenever an inventor tries to attract buyers or financiers, a wizard shows up and surreptitiously uses Mage Hand to ruin the demonstration.

The horizontal advancement idea is interesting. It explains why D&D worlds have a language called Common and real life doesn't. Esperanto notwithstanding.

[BowStreetRunner]

While there appear to be a few different ideas floating through the thread of this conversation, I would like to address the concept that in a high fantasy world where science and magic exist along side one another, science may not advance very rapidly or at all. This actually makes sense, as most scientific advancement throughout history did not come from a ruler assigning researchers to work on a particular innovation (sorry Civilization!!!), but rather due to necessity.

Animals overcome adversity through biological adaptation - they either evolve or die off. Sentient species can overcome adversity that would be biologically insurmountable through technological adaptation. In places where they were faced with little adversity, humans have been seen to maintain a fairly static level of technology for thousands of years. Areas where survival was a constant challenge led to the most dramatic technological advancements.

However, this occurred in a world with only two options for adaptation - biological (which usually results in small adaptations over many generations) or technological (which can result in much greater adaptions in a short period of time). If a third option were present - magical adaptations - that could cause scientific advancements to stagnate. Although alternative outcomes are certainly possible (periods of scientific advance leading to magical stagnation, competition between the two actually lead to regression in one or the other, cooperative and synergistic advancement between both simultaneously), the idea of magical options pushing scientific alternatives aside is certainly conceivable.

[Bronk]

I see gods being used as a reason things are static, but couldn't they also be a good source of progress? Assuming they know a lot about their portfolio, it seems like magic that lets you call them up for answers (which does exist) could be a big boon to human progress.

"Dear god of the harvest: why have our once-bountiful lands been producing so sparse a bounty recently?"
"Because you keep rowing the darn thing on the same ground year after year, and you're tilling way too much. You're basically draining all the nutrients from the soil. Try keeping all those byproducts you throw away, and keep them in a big box until they rot into compost, and changing what you grow every couple years."
"what the heck is a nutrient"
"Its what you get from eating. Plant need them too, and they get it from the soil."

I think that would be pretty cool. I think the opposite is true in Faerun though... I think the gods keep the tech level constant on purpose there. Unapproved inventions just wouldn't work. Also, even the good gods are kinda jerks... in 'Tymora's Luck', Chantea lets Lathandard blight the crops of entire nations while he tries to woo her!

[JoshuaZ]

I have a personal setting I ran my last campaign in where I purposely didn't do this. The timeline for the setting has specific points where society has changed (introduction of crops, development of new arts and technologies) along with occasional developments in magic. To make the D&D standard rules more or less consistent with this sort of thing I had to bump the tech level up for current time to around late 1500s in technology, which lead to some nice bits, like one of the PCs having family members who were involved in the nascent printing industry, and the main empire was dealing with the tension created by rising literacy rates. It can be done, but it takes a fair bit of work.

[Yahzi]

You know the guy who would invent the assault rifle? He would be a wizard
This. Technology is stifled because all the cool kids go into magic. After all, magic is a quicker and easier way to solve a problem, so it makes sense that a society would go down that path and cut itself off from technology which is slower and harder but ultimately more scalable. (This is the local maxima problem).

Second, technology tends to benefit everybody. The feudal rulers don't have any desire to do such a thing (or the idea that it is even possible).

Finally. in my world, hideous monsters show up and eat any society that makes too much progress (magical or otherwise). They are perfectly happy with the way things are right now.

But I have always had the same issues the OP did, so much so that I actually wrote a whole series about it. :D

[mvpmack]

I'm playing in a world where this is not true. It's not a published world, true, but the time where the players are playing is comparable to a typical D&D world.

To be honest, it simply doesn't matter unless you use the same world. Eberron is probably the biggest offender; because artificers exist, and artificers would create virtually any kind of magic-based technology, it makes no sense to think that Eberron won't have computers in a couple hundred years after the expected time period. They probably won't be computers like ours, of course; they'll probably use magic in some way to produce computing power, but the idea that they won't be able to produce something equivalent to computers in 200-300 years is pretty absurd.

Firearms, since we always come to that point, are almost certainly going to be invented. People invented siege engines, swords, plate armor and crossbows in D&D. Someone will invent firearms, and a gunpowder equivalent already exists. Someone will figure out smokeless powder (nitric acid is already in spell component pouches).

It will likely take more time; it is true that most of the supergeniuses in the world are inventing new magic instead. But saying that magic will completely eclipse technology is ignoring the possibilities both that some wizards might want to have mundane ways of threatening other wizards, and also that no non-spellcaster could ever have a high intelligence/Craft skill and a desire to make new tools.

Technology will almost certainly not mirror the real world's. But D&D has a real demand for things that can be solved by technology. Some of that will be solved by magic; for instance it's totally reasonable to have a series of devices that spawn unseen servants to work the fields and tend the animals, even if people dislike conjured food.

The presence of magic will limit the development of certain technologies, too. If teleportation circles are considered the standard for long distance travel, it's likely that aircraft technology will advance much more slowly and much differently. Vehicles operated by magic (such as mount or phantom steed) might eclipse the development of cars altogether -- or the use of fire magic might make internal combustion relatively unnecessary. Wizards and druids might discover environmental impact of fossil fuels much earlier and limit the propagation of such technologies on the basis of environmental concerns.

The point is though that in any sane D&D world, technology will advance. In the fantasy world I'm playing in, there is recorded history dating back for about a thousand years (that we're aware of), and it took centuries before people created things like feudalism, steel, and crossbows. The game takes place in a roughly Renaissance-era period, so the D&D flavor is preserved, but in a few centuries, things like democracy and fossil fuel (steam) power are likely to come to the table. In a few more will come radio and computers. That kind of thing is neat, but we (probably) won't be around to play in that setting. We might get an epilogue showing what kind of impact we made on the world in the end, though.

[SiuiS]

I've got another problem. Fantasy societies don't evolve. Centuries pass away, and the fluff remains the same: even magic don't evolve (we even have the paradox that ancient magic is often stronger than the actual one. As if a musket were more deadly then a FN SCAR-H Mk. 17)

This is incorrect. Most fantasy is post-apocalyptic. That is why ancient ruins, lost societies, wonders from beyond time, etc., exist. It isn't that a musket is better than a SAW, it's that after nuclear Armageddon and you've begun to claw back from the edge of extinction. Nuclear weapons are better and more mythically world shaping than your stone axe.

D&D is especially bad about this, giving you very little of the correct feel to the downfall of society and the fact that you're now in a slow upward pull, held in stasis by the terrible beasts unleashed on you by mighty wizards toying with physics and revealing the Xth dimension and the hubris of people who insist on less advancement, more going backwards to be those wizards (much as we still have people nowadays who glorify time and would rather have it back than have anything that's come since – or who deny calculus, astronomy and such because they came about in the "dark ages" and since the dark ages were the sucky after Rome era nothing good came from there).

Elves are rare and aloof because they rules the world for aeons and now humans do and they a re veritable cavemen squatting in trees. Dwarves are taciturn because their underspires stretched across continents and now it's all they can do to hold mountains, insividual mountains, against the underdark's threat. Common is all that remains of the great halfling empires that spread commerce and joy to all – common, and a static banking system so deeply ingrained in the minds of mortals that even dragons count their hoards by the GP. And now they have fallen, broken, and burnt, and the current societies try to build something new while standing in the footprints of giants.

Ask anyone nowadays if things are the same and they'll say yeah; I have the same problems my dad and granddad did. I can't get respect from my kids. I feel the man is keeping me down. Society is just as bad (or good!) as it ever was. Press harder and they'll admit the Internet is new and drastic, seat belts, what's up with those? And the reason you kids don't have any character is because you have to be inside by 5:30 instead of beating each other with sticks down by the creek without supervision.
Just because it looks like nothing changes doesn't mean nothing changes. It means the setting is big enough that it takes a while to disseminate.

[Yahzi]

Ask anyone nowadays if things are the same and they'll say yeah;
"An idle chatterer... says that people nowadays are much more wicked than they used to be;" Theophrastus, 300 B.C.

(Also, I completely agree with your analysis. Post-apocalyptic is the right feel; and everyone from the Greeks to the Middle Ages believed that they had descended from a golden age. Then the Renessance comes along and invents Progress.)

[Agent 451]

Yes, but do they grant spells because they actually have divine ranks et al., or do they "grant spells" because enough elves believe in the ideal of mummified ancestry as a divine force that praying to it causes them to get the spells themselves? That is the general conundrum with Eberron religions. It gets worse once you realize that paying lip service is more important than alignment there, so you can have a totally evil elf who still believes in mummifying his ancestors and the UC sends his new shipment of spells every morning, just like you can have evil clerics hiding in the Silver Flame - which may or may not be a shiny demon or something.

In Eberron it's straight up strength of faith or belief in an idea. Hell, even worshiping the Lord of Blades can grant divine spells according to Faiths of Eberron.

[LudicSavant]

I think a lot of people in this thread are making flimsy excuses for shoddy writing. The ideal solution, to me, is simple enough: Make your societies advance. Offer a sense of continuity from history. Note that this doesn't mean they can't be medieval or that lost ages can't be more advanced than the modern day, it just means that society shouldn't feel like it has been eternally stagnant. Some D&D settings *do* do this at least passingly well.

Eberron was mentioned. Yes, Eberron doesn't have industrialization or anything like that (as one poster mentioned), but that doesn't matter; not all points in history had industrialization. What all points of recorded history do have is a sense of having been built on past events, and Eberron absolutely does have that. Airships didn't always exist. Warforged didn't always exist. The modern magic system didn't always exist, either.

Keith Baker has commented on what wizards were like in the distant past of Eberron. Every spell effectively required a higher spellcaster level, since every spell needed to be Silenced and Stilled. Somatic, Material, and Verbal components were invented later in order to make magic easier, and thus the number of artisans that could use magic was greatly increased. This is one of many examples of such events hidden away in Eberron's lore.

And really, there's no reason that you couldn't or shouldn't add a sense of technological continuity to every setting you use. As a general rule, the more your setting seems like it has emerged naturally from its history, the more immersive it will be.


In Eberron it's straight up strength of faith or belief in an idea.

Uhm, what? As far as I know, Eberron doesn't actually say this. The way I remember it, it says that certain sects claim that this is the case, and that other sects claim mutually exclusive things, and then lays out a bunch of scattered hints and possibilities about where divine magic might really be coming from (and some of the evidence suggests that belief has nothing important to do with it). You know, kind of like it does with "Where do warforged come from?" and "What's up with the Mournlands?" It's one of the things that is purposely not "straight up" told to you.

[jedipotter]

However, this occurred in a world with only two options for adaptation - biological (which usually results in small adaptations over many generations) or technological (which can result in much greater adaptions in a short period of time). If a third option were present - magical adaptations - that could cause scientific advancements to stagnate. Although alternative outcomes are certainly possible (periods of scientific advance leading to magical stagnation, competition between the two actually lead to regression in one or the other, cooperative and synergistic advancement between both simultaneously), the idea of magical options pushing scientific alternatives aside is certainly conceivable.

The problem with this is that your making ''magic'' some special, weird, strange, extra category. It's like saying ''you can use hard work and science'' or ''cheat with magic''. But I think it's wrong to put magic in a ''special category''. That second category should be-Invented Adaptations- and that is anything an intelligent creature does to adapt. It's not like a person says ''well do I want to think of a good scientific solution to my problem and invent some technology to solve the problem or do I just want to wave my hand around and use magic to fix it?''

Magic, is a part of a fantasy world, just like electromagnetic energy is part of the real world. Radio Waves have always existed, though no humans knew about them until the 19th century. Radioactivity was always there, but again humans did not know until the 19th century. Magic, just like science, has rules and laws. You can't summon a whale over someones head and have it crush them....the rule of magic says you can't do that. Same way physicals says you can't travel faster then light.

In a fantasy world, magic is just another tool. It's not a ''third way''. Magic does have it's limits, and it can't solve everything form every point of reference. If your a 10th level spellcaster, your stuck at that power level. Sure a wish can do what you need done...but you can't cast it. So you need to find another way....


This. Technology is stifled because all the cool kids go into magic. After all, magic is a quicker and easier way to solve a problem, so it makes sense that a society would go down that path and cut itself off from technology which is slower and harder but ultimately more scalable.

Though it does not work that way. No matter how cool you are, if your not good at magic, then you can't use it.

Take a group of kids, sure they all ''want'' to be arch mages....but do they all have the right stuff? No they don't. At least half the class will fail the simple stuff. That is kinda basic. And then you'd slowly weed out the others that can't handle it. And you have all the problems of ''real life too''. Magic is not easy, it's just another way of doing things.

Take a world where magic exists. Your a wizard that was taught how to create small fires, puddles of water and puffs of smoke. And that is all you can do. Now you want to make a 'boom stick' to kill people. And you can't just wave your fingers an do it. You don't know how. You have to sit down and study and experiment and try things out and so on.

[Psyren]

Keith Baker has commented on what wizards were like in the distant past of Eberron. Every spell effectively required a higher spellcaster level, since every spell needed to be Silenced and Stilled. Somatic, Material, and Verbal components were invented later in order to make magic easier, and thus the number of artisans that could use magic was greatly increased. This is one of many examples of such events hidden away in Eberron's lore.

Very good point, and this is a cool detail. But as I mentioned before, Eberron is perhaps even more restrictive than the others since there is a setting-wide Prophecy that dictates what will happen. Yeah, metagame-wise it could potentially say anything since nobody has all of it, but in-universe it is written down, even if nobody can read the whole thing yet.



Uhm, what? As far as I know, Eberron doesn't actually say this. The way I remember it, it says that certain sects claim that this is the case, and that other sects claim mutually exclusive things, and then lays out a bunch of scattered hints and possibilities about where divine magic might really be coming from (and some of the evidence suggests that belief has nothing important to do with it). You know, kind of like it does with "Where do warforged come from?" and "What's up with the Mournlands?" It's one of the things that is purposely not "straight up" told to you.

Yep, that.

[LudicSavant]

But as I mentioned before, Eberron is perhaps even more restrictive than the others since there is a setting-wide Prophecy that dictates what will happen.

I would note that the Prophecy is another one of those things that falls into the category of questions like "What's up with the Mournlands really?" I feel like you may be jumping to conclusions and claiming they're a restrictive part of the canon.

There's a setting-wide Prophecy that supposedly predicts (not determines) what will happen based on omens. And even if it's true, that's not any more fatalistic than the real world, where we totally can make accurate predictions about the future if we simply have enough data/omens. It would just mean that something is able to correlate these seemingly unrelated (to most observers) phenomena into a coherent picture that it can derive accurate predictions from.

Moreover, it's not actually clear that that's what the Prophecy is or what it does, and there are mutually exclusive interpretations of the Prophecy by various sects in the setting (such as the Chamber, the Undying Court, various dragon factions, the Inspired, etc), and even these are vague because the factions doing it are often the kinds that tend to silence (murder or otherwise do something horrible to) anyone who knows their secrets (the dragons in particular have razed entire civilizations multiple times for getting too close to some of their secrets). And there seems to be an awful lot of warring over "manipulating the Prophecy" going on for something that's truly fatalistic, let alone the fact that there doesn't seem to be any faction operating in Eberron that's working with perfect foresight.

A major theme in Eberron (and the genre it emulates) is that you're not supposed to take a lot of these sorts of claims at face value, since the narrators are unreliable (note how much of the canon is "these guys say" or "one possibility may be" rather than "it's totally this way"). It's also a very intentional move on Keith's part to make it so that the DM can invent their own vast conspiracies about fundamental nature of the world for the PCs to uncover, and so that he can make up a new one every campaign.

[SiuiS]

I think a lot of people in this thread are making flimsy excuses for shoddy writing.

I think this is a misunderstanding. A Rulebook setting isn't a game; it's a starting point. Establishing the background feel of something is indeed important, but progress does not show up in one game ever. Even in modern games; play a set of WoD mortals, and then play again five years later. Everyone has guns and phones and cars, but technology hasn't progressed. Because rules wise it doesn't need to. That advancement comes from the players.

If a lack of setting advancement is an actual problem, it's not one the books can ever fix. It has to come from the people using them. Those people need to understand what the tools they're working with really are. Establishing the post apocalyptic history of D&D and other fantasy across the last forty five, fifty years isn't a flimsy excuse. It's establishing first principles.

Games are only static if they are played that way. That is an issue but it's not an issue with fantasy (this extends to fantasy stories as well). There are many hints and insinuations that get passed by because they just. Don't. Matter. It's not important for the game system from which we derive the fiction we enjoy, just like the ins and outs of magic and it's dangers are there and hinted at, but not important to the mechanics and so relegated to "fluff", which the 3e era taught us wasn't actually important.

[Psyren]

Not to mention that when they DO try and officially advance a setting, it breaks the base and fans who dislike the changes get pissed.

@Ludic: The Prophecy is somewhat mutable, sure, but it's still a reason writers can ultimately point to for the status quo being static or just slow.

[LudicSavant]

@Ludic: The Prophecy is somewhat mutable, sure, but it's still a reason writers can ultimately point to for the status quo being static or just slow.

The status quo has never been static in Eberron, though. At least, it wasn't in 3.5e (Disclaimer: I haven't followed the retcons in 4e). There is a clear progression of events, cultural interactions, and technological advancements.

[Blackhawk748]

Wall of Good Stuff

I agree with the Post-Apocalyptic stance, since DnD is effectively Medieval-ish Europe you are usually playing in a time akin to the Dark Ages. So that really cool Empire they keep talking about? Ya that was Rome. Or Greece depending on where you are.

[jedipotter]

Games are only static if they are played that way. That is an issue but it's not an issue with fantasy (this extends to fantasy stories as well).

Default D&D has always been set in a post-Apocalypse world. And most D&D settings are set there as well, but not all of them.

And in fantasy in general there are tons and tons of ''Techo-Magic'' stories and settings. Like Star Wars, ''why build a super weapon to blow up planets when you can choke a single person at a time....''

[SiuiS]

Not to mention that when they DO try and officially advance a setting, it breaks the base and fans who dislike the changes get pissed.

@Ludic: The Prophecy is somewhat mutable, sure, but it's still a reason writers can ultimately point to for the status quo being static or just slow.

Aye. In fact, I'm one of those: few things are as frustrating as the progression of the metagame. You have to keep up or your character falls behind. Nothing sucks like being the guy with a musket when wagon mounted Gatling guns are rolled out a few months later.


I agree with the Post-Apocalyptic stance, since DnD is effectively Medieval-ish Europe you are usually playing in a time akin to the Dark Ages. So that really cool Empire they keep talking about? Ya that was Rome. Or Greece depending on where you are.

Not even just Rome. D&D is the dark ages after Rome, and Rome was the first society to succeed after world war three ended with a pissed off Canada nuking the US and going on a rampage, mutating people into elves and dwarves and trolls.

Think Conan! That's not an assault rifle. It's a fire lance of the ancient hyperzephyrians.

[Hiro Protagonest]

Not even just Rome. D&D is the dark ages after Rome, and Rome was the first society to succeed after world war three ended with a pissed off Canada nuking the US and going on a rampage, mutating people into elves and dwarves and trolls.

"I do not know what tools will be used to fight world war three, but world war four will be fought with fireballs and lightning."

:smalltongue:

[SiuiS]

Default D&D has always been set in a post-Apocalypse world. And most D&D settings are set there as well, but not all of them.

And in fantasy in general there are tons and tons of ''Techo-Magic'' stories and settings. Like Star Wars, ''why build a super weapon to blow up planets when you can choke a single person at a time....''

Yes. But how well that is conveyed is up for dispute.

And what? That's backwards. Being able to kill one guy at a time isn't relevant on the scale of nations that Star Wars represents.

[Blackhawk748]

Not even just Rome. D&D is the dark ages after Rome, and Rome was the first society to succeed after world war three ended with a pissed off Canada nuking the US and going on a rampage, mutating people into elves and dwarves and trolls.

Think Conan! That's not an assault rifle. It's a fire lance of the ancient hyperzephyrians.

Oh ya, forgot to include the Pre-Apocalypse before the most recent one. :smalltongue:

[jedipotter]

Yes. But how well that is conveyed is up for dispute.



I'd say it's not conveyed well at all. Core D&D just kinda says ''like historical Earth'' vaguely, and then never brings it up again.

It's kinda odd. The Walking Dead is a great modern example. But not in the time frame of the show, but picture the Walking Dead world of 2100. In this world, most of the masses of zombies have been cleared away. But with world population like 1/1000 th of what it was in 2010, there are few cities. The vast majority of the world was just left to crumble and decay and fall into ruins. The cities of 2100 are nothing like the ones of 2010, they are far more primitive. The city might have limited electricity and running water...but not too much else. Tons of knowledge was lost, or at least is unknown. Few in 2100 know even the basics of things like electricity. This would be the ''D&D world'' that the characters adventure into....