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Bugbear
2021-02-04, 09:19 PM
So, way back when, many years ago D&D was started as a fantasy game with the vague setting of Medieval Europe.

So through the '70's and '80's popular fantasy culture was dominated by Sword and Sorcery. The Tolkien books, of course. Also the works of Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance. Movies were full of sword and sorcery, as so was TV with shows like He-Man. A fan of this time sees a group of D&D characters with a barbarian with a big weapon, and a wizard with only a few spells...mostly to cast at a set time.

Sci-Fi got it's first big boost with Star Trek:The Next Generation towards the end of the '80's. And RPGs like Traveler and West End D6 Star Wars have their die hard fans, but they never much caught on big.

Into the '90's Sci Fi was on the rise. More Star Trek and Babylon 5. Independence Day. And right near the end: The Matrix. You also get the big rise of anime, and many other cartoons. The high magic shows like Hercules and Xena and Highlander. And video games with somewhat decent graphics.

Fans here loved lots more 'special effects', and characters that were magic.

Yet, D&D stayed very clearly in the setting of Medieval. Even Spelljammer was just a ship that flies...and does Medieval stuff.

2000 and the years that follow bring more Matrix, more special effects and even some popular blends of things like sci fi western, like Firefly. Anime, cartoons and video games vastly increased special effects.

And yet, D&D was still stuck in Medieval. Characters in D&D settings hunt for food and huddle around a fire for warmth. Magic gets a lot more flashy, but the setting stays dull.

By 2008 D&D had taken the turn to flashy lots of special effects for characters. But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

By 2014 D&D had toned it back down a lot, But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

And the last couple years have brought lost more special effects on TV shows and movies and video games. Even more so the whole rise of Super Heroes. Avengers Endgame is overflowing with CGI Spam. Many fans of D&D want to play characters like the super heroes in Endgame: covered in energy and blasting away.

So, why is D&D so stuck in Medieval? Is it still THAT popular? Was it ever? It seems a lot more people like settings that are anything else, but D&D does not change.

Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?

Tanarii
2021-02-04, 09:35 PM
Sci fi was huge long before D&D was born.

Lookup Dan Dare and Flash Gordon.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-02-04, 09:47 PM
Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?

Why should they? More modern =/= better. In fact, I much prefer my fantasy without magitech or modern stuff. Because modern stuff implies way too much about the nature of the world and constrains things terribly.

LordCdrMilitant
2021-02-04, 10:52 PM
D&D being largely medieval is why I don't actually count it among my favorite systems. I'm a sci-fi person, I'll take laser guns over swords and spaceships over medieval pseudoscience any day. My D&D campaigns have a tendency to quickly turn into sci-fi games in disguise anyway.

Jason
2021-02-04, 11:04 PM
D&D is still medieval/borderline reconnaissance because that's what it was to start with, and it works. Don't mess too much with a winning formula, or you'll end up with 4th edition.

OldTrees1
2021-02-05, 12:09 AM
Guns changed everything

Some of those ways negatively impact the ability to tell certain types of stories or do certain types of roleplaying. That is why D&D had to pick a default position (and create some optional content if it was worth the investment).

Mechalich
2021-02-05, 12:13 AM
The core D&D gameplay experience is adventuring. This is the act of wandering through the wilderness, finding some location abandoned or semi-abandoned by civilization, slaughtering every living thing larger than a kitten it contains, and then hauling off every article of value you possibly can without breaking your back.

This core gameplay loop generally plays better in a pre-industrial context than in a modern or futuristic one. Even in a space fantasy, like Star Wars, the idea of plundering the corpses of your fallen enemies just doesn't quite fit, and in true science fiction it rapidly transitions into war crime status. It also tends to become pointless. The crew of the Starship Enterprise might find value in stealing MacGuffins and rare pieces of machinery, but the weapons and corpses of their enemies provide them with nothing they do not already possess.

Likewise the sort of blatant disregard for the value of foreign cultures to both exist and to have cultural artifacts worth studying rather than ripping apart for conversion into raw bullion also plays much better in the era of swords and horses. Grave-robbing transitioned into archaeology about the time of the industrial revolution.

This is one of the reasons why attempts to port the core gameplay of D&D into a futuristic context - like Spelljammer or Starfinder - tend to go very poorly (and yes, both of those settings have their fans, but neither can be considered anything like a success).

P. G. Macer
2021-02-05, 12:42 AM
So, way back when, many years ago D&D was started as a fantasy game with the vague setting of Medieval Europe.

So through the '70's and '80's popular fantasy culture was dominated by Sword and Sorcery. The Tolkien books, of course. Also the works of Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance. Movies were full of sword and sorcery, as so was TV with shows like He-Man. A fan of this time sees a group of D&D characters with a barbarian with a big weapon, and a wizard with only a few spells...mostly to cast at a set time.

Sci-Fi got it's first big boost with Star Trek:The Next Generation towards the end of the '80's. And RPGs like Traveler and West End D6 Star Wars have their die hard fans, but they never much caught on big.

Into the '90's Sci Fi was on the rise. More Star Trek and Babylon 5. Independence Day. And right near the end: The Matrix. You also get the big rise of anime, and many other cartoons. The high magic shows like Hercules and Xena and Highlander. And video games with somewhat decent graphics.

Fans here loved lots more 'special effects', and characters that were magic.

Yet, D&D stayed very clearly in the setting of Medieval. Even Spelljammer was just a ship that flies...and does Medieval stuff.

2000 and the years that follow bring more Matrix, more special effects and even some popular blends of things like sci fi western, like Firefly. Anime, cartoons and video games vastly increased special effects.

And yet, D&D was still stuck in Medieval. Characters in D&D settings hunt for food and huddle around a fire for warmth. Magic gets a lot more flashy, but the setting stays dull.

By 2008 D&D had taken the turn to flashy lots of special effects for characters. But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

By 2014 D&D had toned it back down a lot, But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

And the last couple years have brought lost more special effects on TV shows and movies and video games. Even more so the whole rise of Super Heroes. Avengers Endgame is overflowing with CGI Spam. Many fans of D&D want to play characters like the super heroes in Endgame: covered in energy and blasting away.

So, why is D&D so stuck in Medieval? Is it still THAT popular? Was it ever? It seems a lot more people like settings that are anything else, but D&D does not change.

Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?

Because if D&D went majority sci-fi or superhero, it wouldn’t be D&D anymore. You’re assuming that just because D&D was born at a time when heroic and sword-and-sorcery fantasy was immensely popular that D&D is a trend-chaser. While there are some notable examples, from the monk class being inspired by Kung-Fu (1972) and most infamously 4e trying to imitate MMORPGs such as WoW (The devs finally admitted to it a year or two ago), for the most part it is not.

I don’t have explicit data for this, but I strongly suspect that most people who play D&D play in a pseudo-medieval/Renaissance setting. The fantasy aesthetic is part of the appeal of the game for many, especially those who are aware of other TTRPGs yet choose to still play D&D; if they want a superhero game, they’ll just play something like Mutants and Masterminds. If they want soft sci-fi, they’ll play something like Starfinder or one of the Star Wars RPGs. Keeping the game mostly grounded in heroic fantasy is a deliberate design choice, even when the settings deviate from pseudo-medieval to dungeon-punk (Eberron), post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery (Dark Sun), Gothic horror (Ravenloft) or wacky space fantasy (Spelljammer).

If WotC or Hasbro decided to remake D&D as sci-fi, superhero, or even modern on-Earth fantasy, I suspect they would alienate a huge portion of their customer base and make a lot less money. 5e is a resounding commercial success, and stirring up the pot too much could kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Lacco
2021-02-05, 02:12 AM
Because it's Dungeons & Dragons. If you wanted to make a semi-modern version, it would be Basements and Tax Collectors. Or something like that. Sci-fi version? Planets & Starships.

That said: D&D is not medieval.

If you wanted to ask why many RPGs tend to be (almost predominantly) set in pseudo-medieval setting, that would be an interesting debate. Still, if you want different settings, try different RPGs.

D&D isn't the only one, neither the best one - and while many may oppose, many will state the same. It's just... the one with widest coverage, marketing and customer base.

Good luck trying out other games.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-05, 02:52 AM
Sci fi was huge long before D&D was born.

Lookup Dan Dare and Flash Gordon.

Also Doctor Who, Foundation, Quatermass, Star Trek, Leman, the Robot Trilogy, and I don't know, Starship Troopers. Science fiction had been popular enough for basically all of the 20th century.


That's also disregarding the fact that D&D changed. While individual settings might be relatively static both Eberron and Nentir Vale (from that edition liked to an MMORPG because of the use of explicit combat roles and practically nothing else) represent more modern takes on fantasy. Eberron is arguably one of the codifiers of Dungeon Punk, and features heavy influence from early twentieth century pulp. While Nentir Vale was a more explicitly post apocalyptic take.

I've seen people digest that Eberron was released before it's time, but honestly it was and is one of the most popular D&D settings. And if you want your sci fi influences even more, well those Houses look an awful lot like megacorporations...

Satinavian
2021-02-05, 03:05 AM
So, why is D&D so stuck in Medieval? Is it still THAT popular? Was it ever? It seems a lot more people like settings that are anything else, but D&D does not change.

Medieval IS still very popular.

But Sword and Sorcery and early D&D were not particularly medieval. There is a lot of post-apocalyptic nonsense there as well as poorly understood ancient societies.

And D&D is utterly bad at "medieval". Hardly any of the books actually helps to flesh out a feudal society based on personal bond, privileges, titles and obligations. Instead adventurers are basically treated as the same social class whatever their background. The D&D world is full of untamed wilderness full of monsters where in medieval europe every bit of territory had its owner or might be constested by multiple ones. Power in D&D does not come from your ability to call in allies to field an army, it comes from individuals powerful enough to take on an army by themself.

I don't know anyone actually playing medieval fantasy and using D&D for it. There are so many other systems that do that way better.

MoiMagnus
2021-02-05, 04:10 AM
(1) Peoples love swords. To the point that some of the most popular futuristic settings (Star Wars & Warhammer 40k) twist the logic of the world so that fighting in melee with powerful swords is actually a thing peoples do quite often, instead of just blasting each other at long distance.

(2) Peoples like small scale worlds. As soon as you reach industrial era, travel is becomes easily available. This increase the scale of the society, and makes it even more complex for the DM to world-build, makes it way more difficult for peoples to understand the stakes (is ten thousand death as collateral damage a lot or a cheap price to save many more?) and reduces the impact of single common individuals.

(3) With modern settings come modern social issues, which a lot of peoples want to avoid in their game.

(4) D&D is not "full medieval" either. Technologically, it's usually late medieval (plate armour), if not Renaissance (first firearms). Society-wise, it's all over the place.

jayem
2021-02-05, 04:17 AM
Also it wants Magic.
Trying to graft that into a future society and you have the problem that the magic should be available in the present. It can of course be done, e.g. Star Wars, but it needs a different presentation, and then it's not D&D it's .
Trying to graft that into a modern society raises similar questions, we know how this world works. Again you can put it in a conspiracy (world of darkness, harry potter) or bring the 'magic' from outside (superheros).

In a quasi-medievel setting you can put the goalposts on wheels. You can play the "XXX hasn't been developed yet card if needed, you can throw in a Mages guild. Of course all Wizards do XYZ

Yuki Akuma
2021-02-05, 04:29 AM
They made a version of D&D set in the modern period. It was called D20 Modern: Urban Arcana.

They made a version of D&D set during an industrial revolution. It's called Eberron.

They made a version of D&D based on space opera tropes. It was called Spelljammer.

dancrilis
2021-02-05, 04:30 AM
I assume that D&D still has a medieval feel because that is what people want to play.

Nifft
2021-02-05, 05:29 AM
So, why is D&D so stuck in Medieval? Is it still THAT popular? Was it ever? It seems a lot more people like settings that are anything else, but D&D does not change.

Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?

D&D was never strictly medieval.

Ye Olde D&D was Classical monsters (manticores, sphinxes, etc.), frog-people in a swamp, and robots with ray-guns in a crashed starship-- which the PCs fight using Renaissance swords & armor.

None of that was specifically medieval.


Greyhawk had an order of knights who used handguns, IIRC revolvers. I think the explosive powder was a secret of their knightly order.


Planescape and Eberron were both popular enough that you should have heard of them, and neither of those was strictly medieval either.


What is "the setting" which you think is stuck in medieval stasis?

Zwinmar
2021-02-05, 06:46 AM
Try the Alternity setting, it's Future Tech D&D. That said, there are a lot of misunderstanding about swords and few people around who have real world combat experience with them (I would say none, but never know so..) where as many, if not most, people have a basic understanding of guns. You can go down to your local Veterans Organization and find people with very real combat experience with them.

This does not include other things like planes, trains, and tanks, or rockets, bombs, and missiles. All would be mindboggling confusing to adequately portray in a pen and paper game like D&D. This means that D&D is, in a sense, 'simpler' to replicate an adventure in.

Chronic
2021-02-05, 07:45 AM
It's still fantasy because fantasy sell way better than science fiction, that's a given in many entertainment industries. It's way harder to produce widely appealing SF than fantasy, ergo it's harder to makes money with it.

Delta
2021-02-05, 07:56 AM
2000 and the years that follow bring more Matrix, more special effects and even some popular blends of things like sci fi western, like Firefly. Anime, cartoons and video games vastly increased special effects.

You know while you focus exclusively on SciFi stuff, there was something else that was released in the 2000s that might just have given "medieval-ish" fantasy the teeny teniest bit of a popularity boom...

Mechalich
2021-02-05, 09:34 AM
It's still fantasy because fantasy sell way better than science fiction, that's a given in many entertainment industries. It's way harder to produce widely appealing SF than fantasy, ergo it's harder to makes money with it.

Right, and the OP is conflating two things that are not entirely related.

D&D is a fantasy game with a Medieval/Renaissance tech level. It also has some, but most assuredly not all and varying heavily by specific setting, of the cultural trappings of the European Medieval period.

Fantasy is by far a more popular genre than science fiction for tabletop roleplaying. The most successful challenger to D&D was also a fantasy game - the oWoD - it just had a modern setting and its cultural trappings were those of the extremely specific Goth subculture of the 1990s. The most popular 'futuristic' setting is Star Wars, which is also a fantasy game and draws on the cultural trappings of something like Western civilization circa 1870 - 1955 (the timeframe of the adventure serials Lucas drew upon for inspiration).

The number of actual science fiction tabletop games is quite small, dwarfed by space fantasy alone.

Beleriphon
2021-02-05, 10:36 AM
Also it wants Magic.
Trying to graft that into a future society and you have the problem that the magic should be available in the present. It can of course be done, e.g. Star Wars, but it needs a different presentation, and then it's not D&D it's .
Trying to graft that into a modern society raises similar questions, we know how this world works. Again you can put it in a conspiracy (world of darkness, harry potter) or bring the 'magic' from outside (superheros).

D20 Modern did Modern Magic RightTM. It assumed a D&Desque world that was leaking magic into the modern world, and most people's brains couldn't quite get it so they rationalized magic as normal stuff. Ogre playing hockey: a particularly large NHL enforcer.

Luccan
2021-02-05, 12:09 PM
Firstly, Medieval Fantasy media didn't stop being released during that time and it never really stopped being popular. Until the last season GoT was one of the most beloved shows on the planet. That was only a few years ago. Second, early D&D had plenty of sci-fi, because the writers and players were interested in it, aided by the fact that at the time the genres were not considered separate. I would actually argue fantasy has gotten more popular since the early days and since the genres split, which is part of the reason 5e is so successful.

D&D has a few explicit settings that don't really do the faux-medievalism thing or even pay it lip service. Eberron and Spell Jammer, as have been mentioned, are fantasy, but not medieval. Dark Sun could only be considered medieval in the sense it's a pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder setting, but it's probably better described as Mad Max with elves and giant bugs. It's only in 5e that we've seen this long (edition-wise) complete focus on the medieval. And even then, Ravnica and Eberron books have been released in the past few years, which are industrial/early modern settings but with magic. If it's really just the medievalism that's the question, Theros is faux-bronze age Greece. Two of those might be MTG originally, but they're still settings you can play in modern D&D with official support.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-05, 12:15 PM
I have long said that D&D isn't really medieval, it's a Western with medieval trappings.

Relevant excerpt from a post about it on my blog (full thing not linked since it's got some contentious political in it)



While people like to point to the swords and armor and knights and call D&D and its descendants "medieval", I see them as having a lot more in common with Westerns. The class of free wanderers, righting wrongs and wronging rights, be they adventurers or cowboys. The social mobility, where a simple warrior could become king (or a poor cowpoke could become a rich landowner). And the broad assertion that race (or nationality) is personality. The only ones with significant variation are "regular Americans" (humans, in D&D-likes), while everyone else broadly adheres to their stereotypes... the Englishman, the Swede, the Indian. "You're not playing an elf; you're just playing a human with pointy ears" is a common charge leveled against people who go against type, because only humans are supposed to be varied in personality.

This gets more severe when you look at "Indians", which D&D-likes tend to cast as humanoids. Tonto, in the Lone Ranger, was cast as the "one good Indian"... every other Indian in contemporary Westerns (the Classical Western) was a ravening savage, there to kill the Good White Folks out to Tame the West. But, as the genre continued, you saw more nuanced portrayals of Indians... Charles Bronson as the noble savage half-breed of the revisionist Western, Indian-friendly protagonists (q.v. Dances with Wolves), and even crept into more classical comedy westerns (q.v. McClintock, where the Indians are honored enemies of the title character).

In a lot of ways, these "revisionist Westerns" are what you are seeing now, and a lot of other people started seeing in 1983... drow, orcs, minotaurs, and the like as people within the fictional world, with their own reasons for doing things; reasons that make sense to them, within their culture. In short, they're being viewed as people, not just creatures up from the deep to destroy good and beauty, without reason. If they're evil, it's not solely because they "deriv[e] joy from violent acts", but because that's who their culture turns them in to. The gods they worship push them in that direction... and those gods are individuals, who might be good or evil (which somewhat differentiates them from modern religions which are more social phenomenon).

IME (as a librarian), this is partially because, maybe even a cause of, Westerns are a somewhat dying genre, mostly relegated to older (60+) white guys (leaving aside the romances set in the Wild West, which are still pretty strong, and mostly the domain of white women, he generalized). A lot of the Western audience has become the Fantasy audience, and there's a fair number of Westerns you could rewrite as fantasy pretty easily (such as I did with the serial "Slocum and the Snake Pit Slavers" in my Two Tales of Tellene (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/305996/Two-Tales-of-Tellene?affiliate_id=315505); and the other story in there could easily be recast as a Western with a native American replacing the sil-karg, and a bear replacing the owlbeast.)... and this doesn't include mixtures of the genre, like Red Country or Brisco County, Jr.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-05, 12:46 PM
So, way back when, many years ago D&D was started as a fantasy game with the vague setting of Medieval Europe.

So through the '70's and '80's popular fantasy culture was dominated by Sword and Sorcery. The Tolkien books, of course. Also the works of Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance. Movies were full of sword and sorcery, as so was TV with shows like He-Man. A fan of this time sees a group of D&D characters with a barbarian with a big weapon, and a wizard with only a few spells...mostly to cast at a set time.

Sci-Fi got it's first big boost with Star Trek:The Next Generation towards the end of the '80's. And RPGs like Traveler and West End D6 Star Wars have their die hard fans, but they never much caught on big.

Into the '90's Sci Fi was on the rise. More Star Trek and Babylon 5. Independence Day. And right near the end: The Matrix. You also get the big rise of anime, and many other cartoons. The high magic shows like Hercules and Xena and Highlander. And video games with somewhat decent graphics.

Fans here loved lots more 'special effects', and characters that were magic.

Yet, D&D stayed very clearly in the setting of Medieval. Even Spelljammer was just a ship that flies...and does Medieval stuff.

2000 and the years that follow bring more Matrix, more special effects and even some popular blends of things like sci fi western, like Firefly. Anime, cartoons and video games vastly increased special effects.

And yet, D&D was still stuck in Medieval. Characters in D&D settings hunt for food and huddle around a fire for warmth. Magic gets a lot more flashy, but the setting stays dull.

By 2008 D&D had taken the turn to flashy lots of special effects for characters. But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

By 2014 D&D had toned it back down a lot, But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

And the last couple years have brought lost more special effects on TV shows and movies and video games. Even more so the whole rise of Super Heroes. Avengers Endgame is overflowing with CGI Spam. Many fans of D&D want to play characters like the super heroes in Endgame: covered in energy and blasting away.

So, why is D&D so stuck in Medieval? Is it still THAT popular? Was it ever? It seems a lot more people like settings that are anything else, but D&D does not change.

Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?
This initial premise seems deeply flawed. Star Trek: The Next Generation, influential though it was, does not hold a candle to the influence that the original Star Trek, or of course Star Wars, had on popular culture. Or, for that matter, Sputnik. Science Fiction was more prevalent than Fantasy well before the 80s. Heck, I'd say it was more prevalent specifically in the pulp magazines and old movies shown on Saturday afternoon UHF TV stations that directly influenced D&D (admittedly, a lot of those 'sci fi's were 'such and such alien monster lands from outer space in 1950s Middle America and runs amok' as opposed to high flying adventures across the galaxy, but there was plenty of that as well).

One place where Medieval/Fantasy elements dominated compared to sci fi was wargames, from which D&D was derived. Warhammer 40k or the like had not been invented. This is why D&D started out as fantasy, not because fantasy was more popular than sci fi in the early-mid 70s.
*'fantasy' being what set Chainmail apart.

As to why it stuck, while sci fi RPGs like Traveller and WEG:Star Wars (which, I'll be honest, I don't know what you're talkin about. They may be small potatoes compared to D&D, but each of these were hugely successful RPGs during their peak) and Space Opera and Star Frontiers and Metamorphosis Alpha and GammaWorld and Aftermath and (you seeing a trend here?) never quite caught on nearly as much, well there are a number of theories.
First-to-market has always been a favorite concept. D&D was first, was a smash hit (relatively speaking) even in the 70s, and generally used that momentum to continue capturing a huge swath of anyone who might get into roleplaying games. It is Coke, and everyone else is Pepsi at best, RC cola most likely. It certainly has to be a significant factor, although I haven't seen anyone do any scientifically rigorous economic research into how much of an effect it is.
Also important, is that there is an inherent 'hook' -- you are an adventurer going into conveniently constrained environments that the DM can have mapped out ahead of time, looking for treasure and possibly combat*, and along the way the treasure (magic items) and XP (derived however) make you better at going back out and looking for more treasure to get you better at looking for treasure and so on indefinitely. It is a clear, obvious answer to the question of 'but what do we do with these characters?' that does not need a rigorously defined universe or an highly capable or inventive Game Master**
*yes, initially the idea was to get as much treasure with as little combat as possible. Plenty of people never played that way even in the TSR era.
**and, regardless of what the average age of gamers actually is, I find it unsurprising that the system that holds the top spot has design choices making it easy for middle- to high-school age kids to play by themselves, with the GM possibly learning the game along with the players.
Finally, as others have mentioned, a pseudo-medieval (honestly the swords and bows and horses rather than cannons and trains and planes or lasers and space fighters being the important points. As others have mentioned the actual medieval-ness is often paper-thin) setting keeps the world small, the solutions to problems relatively personal in scope, and the ability to solve problems through personal action and a special piece of loot all fairly plausible. Modern and Sci fi settings often have it such that the guy with the bigger spaceship (or power armor and a fusion rifle, when you have a laser pistol and your good looks) will win unless there's some amazingly good situational setup (GM and players are actually quite good at strategy, or the like) or some form of plot armor.



D&D is a fantasy game with a Medieval/Renaissance tech level. It also has some, but most assuredly not all and varying heavily by specific setting, of the cultural trappings of the European Medieval period.

Fantasy is by far a more popular genre than science fiction for tabletop roleplaying. The most successful challenger to D&D was also a fantasy game - the oWoD - it just had a modern setting and its cultural trappings were those of the extremely specific Goth subculture of the 1990s. The most popular 'futuristic' setting is Star Wars, which is also a fantasy game and draws on the cultural trappings of something like Western civilization circa 1870 - 1955 (the timeframe of the adventure serials Lucas drew upon for inspiration).

Gygax and D&D also drew heavily from 1870 - 1955 tropes. D&D towns are often small and (often somehow wall-less, although I don't think EGG or Dave ever made that mistake) towns out in the wilderness, being small inroads of civilization into the wild frontier. Very much like towns in Westerns. Then the PCs end up going on very Cliffhanger-like adventures. I always felt that D&D was equally H. Rider Haggard meets Zane Grey with a coat of paint provided by Tolkien than strictly Tolkien (or Leiber and Vance, as EGG suggested were more influential).
Edit: Mark bet me to it.

Tvtyrant
2021-02-05, 12:56 PM
So, way back when, many years ago D&D was started as a fantasy game with the vague setting of Medieval Europe.

So through the '70's and '80's popular fantasy culture was dominated by Sword and Sorcery. The Tolkien books, of course. Also the works of Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert E. Howard, Michael Moorcock and Jack Vance. Movies were full of sword and sorcery, as so was TV with shows like He-Man. A fan of this time sees a group of D&D characters with a barbarian with a big weapon, and a wizard with only a few spells...mostly to cast at a set time.

Sci-Fi got it's first big boost with Star Trek:The Next Generation towards the end of the '80's. And RPGs like Traveler and West End D6 Star Wars have their die hard fans, but they never much caught on big.

Into the '90's Sci Fi was on the rise. More Star Trek and Babylon 5. Independence Day. And right near the end: The Matrix. You also get the big rise of anime, and many other cartoons. The high magic shows like Hercules and Xena and Highlander. And video games with somewhat decent graphics.

Fans here loved lots more 'special effects', and characters that were magic.

Yet, D&D stayed very clearly in the setting of Medieval. Even Spelljammer was just a ship that flies...and does Medieval stuff.

2000 and the years that follow bring more Matrix, more special effects and even some popular blends of things like sci fi western, like Firefly. Anime, cartoons and video games vastly increased special effects.

And yet, D&D was still stuck in Medieval. Characters in D&D settings hunt for food and huddle around a fire for warmth. Magic gets a lot more flashy, but the setting stays dull.

By 2008 D&D had taken the turn to flashy lots of special effects for characters. But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

By 2014 D&D had toned it back down a lot, But the setting was still Medieval, with dirt and fire.

And the last couple years have brought lost more special effects on TV shows and movies and video games. Even more so the whole rise of Super Heroes. Avengers Endgame is overflowing with CGI Spam. Many fans of D&D want to play characters like the super heroes in Endgame: covered in energy and blasting away.

So, why is D&D so stuck in Medieval? Is it still THAT popular? Was it ever? It seems a lot more people like settings that are anything else, but D&D does not change.

Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?

D&D is actually a medieval Western, with gunslingers and saloon towns, not a pseudo-medieval settings. Notice the general lack of farming or population? Tatooine and Forgotten Realms have more in common with Stagecoach then they do to Heinlein or mythology.

Pex
2021-02-05, 01:07 PM
Playing in a world different from our own is what makes it fun. Not having modern conveniences makes magic magical and heroic deeds fantastical. Other genres are their own thing. The world is big enough to have all of them.

FrogInATopHat
2021-02-05, 02:51 PM
Grave-robbing transitioned into archaeology about the time of the industrial revolution.

I love this line.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-05, 02:54 PM
Playing in a world different from our own is what makes it fun. Not having modern conveniences makes magic magical and heroic deeds fantastical. Other genres are their own thing. The world is big enough to have all of them.

Eh, the Earth set fantasy games I've played have tended to be more fun, even if we had access to mobile phones. Part of it was that magic, or mad science, tended to do what mundane science couldn't, so we have more tools.

I still remember trapping a demon in a notebook so that we'd have a record of our interrogation.

Not saying that Fantasy on other worlds is worse, just that I've had really good experiences with bringing the internet into fantasy games. Including the GM getting so excited k annoyed that he added an internet search skill after we stopped paying points into knowledge skills and just used Wikipedia.

FrogInATopHat
2021-02-05, 02:56 PM
IME (as a librarian)

As a what!!!!????

Are we in some of the same facebook dumpster fires?

LibraryOgre
2021-02-05, 03:13 PM
As a what!!!!????

Are we in some of the same facebook dumpster fires?

Possibly? I mean, there's a lot of dumpster fires over there.

Xuc Xac
2021-02-05, 03:36 PM
Guns changed everything

Some of those ways negatively impact the ability to tell certain types of stories or do certain types of roleplaying. That is why D&D had to pick a default position (and create some optional content if it was worth the investment).

That's not it. D&D's default technology level is set a century or two after widespread use of handguns and several centuries after the use of cannon (even in fiction: Mordred used cannon in his siege of Camelot).

Sociologically, D&D isn't medieval either. In medieval Europe (and Asia), all the land belonged to somebody. There was no unexplored frontier waiting to be tamed where a high level fighter could just set up a fort and declare himself lord over a new territory. There were no wandering adventurers who answered to no one and who helped the local peasants to solve their monster problems. In a real feudal society, peasants under threat of being eaten by monsters would just walk to the local lord's manor and say "Hey, m'lord. Get your axe and gather up your boys, please. Kill the beast what eats our cows or there won't be any cheese or leather at tax time." There are no wandering mercenaries or hired guns that can save the village for a bag of coins in a feudal society.

D&D is a Western that dressed up for the Renaissance Fair.

Tanarii
2021-02-05, 04:26 PM
Some of you are thoroughly talking down the patchwork nature of civilization in medieval times, and talking up the civilization of westerns.

Yeah, if you run a west marches campaign where it's the frontier of D&D civilization and you're exploring to see what's out there, it's kinda western-like, with the occasional cluster of hovels of settlers. But far more common is either a points of light, among crumbled ancient empires and dangerous wilderness and invading hordes, Dark ages medieval. Or a Balkanized patchwork of independent kingdoms, also among crumbled ancient empires and surrounded by somewhat less dangerous wilderness and yes still the occasional invading horde, Middle Ages medieval.

Nifft
2021-02-05, 04:36 PM
D&D is a Western that dressed up for the Renaissance Fair.

Can't agree with that.

Westerns did have an influence on D&D, and there are some significant Western tropes in D&D, but it's not reasonable to wash away the Classical, Sci-Fi, Renaissance, and Eastern influences & tropes.

King of Nowhere
2021-02-05, 05:14 PM
is d&d still medieval?
while the core game is, there are several options to expand it to whatever time one wants. there is a whole d20modern srd

Imbalance
2021-02-05, 05:20 PM
Nobody knows Toril is a Dyson sphere...

OldTrees1
2021-02-05, 05:37 PM
That's not it.
:smallconfused: I know Guns rendering melee obsolete without BS is part of it. That might not be your reason and it is not the only component, but as MoiMagnus said, "people like Swords" and Guns change the feasibility of that dramatically.


D&D's default technology level is set a century or two after widespread use of handguns and several centuries after the use of cannon (even in fiction: Mordred used cannon in his siege of Camelot).
And yet D&D does not have handguns in the PHB because the lethality of handguns changes a lot. So while D&D is not medieval, it has chosen to be mostly in the "guns do not exist" camp which seems to effect how far it is willing to push other areas of technology.


D&D is a Western that dressed up for the Renaissance Fair.
And replaced their Guns with Swords & Sorcery.
Not a perfect analogy, but neither is "medieval".

LibraryOgre
2021-02-05, 05:50 PM
Can't agree with that.

Westerns did have an influence on D&D, and there are some significant Western tropes in D&D, but it's not reasonable to wash away the Classical, Sci-Fi, Renaissance, and Eastern influences & tropes.

I don't think the generalization washes those away, though. It is a generalization but, to continue the Renaissance Faire analogy, you'll see Eastern, Classical, and Sci-Fi references at a Renn Faire, too... from people in samurai armor to Star Trek cosplayers.

Mechalich
2021-02-05, 06:10 PM
Sociologically, D&D isn't medieval either. In medieval Europe (and Asia), all the land belonged to somebody. There was no unexplored frontier waiting to be tamed where a high level fighter could just set up a fort and declare himself lord over a new territory.

Um, no, not quite. All of the land may have belonged to someone on paper, but huge portions of Medieval Europe and Asia were extremely thinly settled to the point of being functionally uninhabited and you absolutely could just go out into the wilderness, clear a bunch of trees, and setup a town somewhere. The Norse actually did this on a fairly regular basis and the further back into the Medieval period you go the more viable it becomes. Additionally during some of the more lawless intervals land that was only nominally claimed was vulnerable to some dude with an army showing up and declaring themselves lord of the province by force of arms and eventually acquiring official recognition for doing so if giving the land back to the proper owners was seen as too much of a hassle. The further back you go towards the beginning of the Medieval period the more common this sort of thing was.

And this is without counting any of the various prolonged conquests and displacements by members of one cultural group over another, which absolutely did involve land changing hands and newly minted nobility (forum rules probably prohibit in-depth discussion of any examples, but they're definitely there).


There were no wandering adventurers who answered to no one and who helped the local peasants to solve their monster problems. In a real feudal society, peasants under threat of being eaten by monsters would just walk to the local lord's manor and say "Hey, m'lord. Get your axe and gather up your boys, please. Kill the beast what eats our cows or there won't be any cheese or leather at tax time." There are no wandering mercenaries or hired guns that can save the village for a bag of coins in a feudal society.

Wandering mercenary companies, if not individuals, absolutely did exist, though yes, they weren't doing a whole lot of monster hunting. Banditry and raiding threatening settlements, including raids well beyond the power of local nobility to repulse, absolutely were an issue though. They were more tied up in broad-scale intercultural conflict, such as the aforementioned Norse or the arrival of various steppe cultures from beyond the frontier (elements derived from the Golden Horde continued to raid in what is now Eastern Europe well into the 17th century), or components of prolonged wars between states - such as the tactic of chevauchee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevauch%C3%A9e)


D&D is a Western that dressed up for the Renaissance Fair.

The Western, as a genre, draws heavily on the medieval literary tradition of the Knight Errant, so it's more like the Western is a chivalric romance that dressed up for 19th century America. D&D emphasizes elements of both that are more useful for gameplay purposes than for literature - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a fine adventure tale, but would make for a terrible session of gameplay - ultimately making it in many ways the foundation of its own specific subgenre.

Jay R
2021-02-05, 06:30 PM
Disney still does animation because it sells.
Ford still makes cars because cars sell.
MicroSoft still sells operating systems because they sell.
Marvel still makes modern superhero comic books because they sell.

And D&D is still its own unconvincing modern Horatio Alger world with a medieval-ish overlay because it continues to sell.

D&D is its own genre. It grew out of a poor attempt to simulate heroic fantasy, but it is its own brand of fantasy, with its own feel.

And it retains that feel because it is selling. It's the best-selling, best known rpg in the world. That is, all by itself, a reason not to change it.

Nifft
2021-02-05, 07:23 PM
I don't think the generalization washes those away, though. It is a generalization but, to continue the Renaissance Faire analogy, you'll see Eastern, Classical, and Sci-Fi references at a Renn Faire, too... from people in samurai armor to Star Trek cosplayers.

You're only making concessions about trappings, though. The non-trappings tropes and activities from those genres are also relevant.

For every Western-ish plot like the Keep on the Borderlands where you are contracted by a shady stranger in a saloon to stop a nearby gathering of uppity natives, there are more non-Western tropes which don't fit that genre.


When you're playing slaves thrown into gladiatorial combat, which Western is that?

When you're solving riddles to avoid fighting a manticore in unfavorable terrain, which Western are you borrowing from?

When you're trekking across badlands to map out the burial site of a long-dead king so you can excavate his tomb and loot his riches, that's not just gold-rush claim-jumping with a veneer of fantasy.

When you're a knight-errant on an journey through foreign lands to stab monsters, secure riches, and earn honor for your glorious return, that's much like being a 6th century islamic adventurer-merchant (as represented in e.g. Adventures of Sinbad) -- though of course the knight-errant part was likely to be due to western adaptation of those stories.



IMHO it's a solid insight to say that D&D borrows from Westerns, but it's not reasonable to say that D&D is a Western.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-05, 07:31 PM
And yet D&D does not have handguns in the PHB because the lethality of handguns changes a lot. So while D&D is not medieval, it has chosen to be mostly in the "guns do not exist" camp which seems to effect how far it is willing to push other areas of technology.

I thought historically guns changed things because they were relatively simple to train your conscripts in.

There are D&D style games with guns in the player's guide, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess or AD&D2e. And generally the more historically accurate the guns the less they matter. I'm LotFP guns have a special armour piercing effect no other weapon has, but the sheer length of the relief (10 rounds! 8 if you're a fighter, and you can reduce that sightly by taking the special bandoleer) means that unless you're carting around a barrel of loaded muskets you're not getting that more than maybe twice a combat and those will be your only actions.

Firing mechanisms also matter, LotFP points out how matchlocks, wheellocks, and flintlocks give you different chances of misfiring (which means you have to spend rounds sorting that out before you can get off a successful shot), impact reloading times due to varying complexity in priming then, and earlier firing mechanisms don't work when wet. Speaking of which, you need to make sure you keep your powder dry, or it's no guns for you.

Oh, and if you want rifling? That'll be extra cash.

Pre cartridge firearms are terrible for adventuring. Sure, rain also stops bowstrings from working properly, but the best thing to do with flintlock muskets is hand them out to a bunch of extras/nooks, train them in using them, and then having them fire once before fleeing/hiding

Also my primary all these days if I'm playing a Rogue is if I can fluff a hand crossbow as a flintlock pistol. It serves the purpose well with for most games.

Tanarii
2021-02-05, 07:37 PM
Speaking of which, you need to make sure you keep your powder dry, or it's no guns for you.

Sure, rain also stops bowstrings from working properly,
Pretty sure most people don't bother keeping their bowstrings dry. It's hard enough to get them to count the .8 oz arrows they unrealistically carry 200+ of.

Luccan
2021-02-05, 07:52 PM
Pretty sure most people don't bother keeping their bowstrings dry. It's hard enough to get them to count the .8 oz arrows they unrealistically carry 200+ of.

AFAIK, none of the modern versions of D&D care about bowstrings or gunpowder (if you're using those optional rules) being dry, while at least one has explicit rules about arrow recovery, so I'm not sure that's a good comparison.

Edit: What I mean is, no one is ignoring any explicit rules if they don't worry about their bowstring getting wet

OldTrees1
2021-02-05, 09:21 PM
I thought historically guns changed things because they were relatively simple to train your conscripts in.

That too. Guns were basically a warfare cheat code (although not the first such revolution in history). Also you were right to point out that it was not an instantaneous transition. LotFP seems to be aiming for having guns without letting them be developed enough to negate melee. From your description I assume there is an initial volley before the melee fighters switch to melee.


Also my primary all these days if I'm playing a Rogue is if I can fluff a hand crossbow as a flintlock pistol. It serves the purpose well with for most games.

Heh, refluffing the skill of rogue pinpointing an extraordinary weak point as a gunslinger being accurate enough with a flintlock to aim the devastating weapon. Nice refluff.

Pex
2021-02-05, 11:27 PM
What it comes down to is D&D is pre-Industrialization. In the real world there were still machines of sorts during that time, but historical accuracy is irrelevant for the game. How much technology your game has is up to the DM. Eberron is about magic is the Industrial Revolution. D&D is a world without Electric Power. Those who prefer SteamPunk, CyberPunk, Science Fiction, Space Opera, Modern Times, whatever are welcome to it, but D&D is not wrong being in the setting that it is.

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-06, 02:29 AM
Can someone explain the supposed connection between movie special effects and why D&D should or should not be medieval fantasy? I seriously have no idea why the OP kept mentioning special effects. :smallconfused::smallconfused::smallconfused:

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-06, 06:05 AM
Pretty sure most people don't bother keeping their bowstrings dry. It's hard enough to get them to count the .8 oz arrows they unrealistically carry 200+ of.

I've known people who don't track spell points/slots, so yeah. Just trying to point out how balancing guns for realism tends to make them an NPC weapon.

Also I once made a character who carried 300 quarrels and dedicated a proficiency slot to being able to craft more, but they were a paranoid dwarf. It was all work encumbrance as well IIRC.


That too. Guns were basically a warfare cheat code (although not the first such revolution in history). Also you were right to point out that it was not an instantaneous transition. LotFP seems to be aiming for having guns without letting them be developed enough to negate melee. From your description I assume there is an initial volley before the melee fighters switch to melee.

Yeah, although a high Dex would allow a fighter to fire a flintlock maybe every other round. The book points out that dedicated ranged fighters would likely stick to the bow and crossbow, while other characters carry a gun or two, fire when they hit short range, and then switch to axes.

[/QUOTE]Heh, refluffing the skill of rogue pinpointing an extraordinary weak point as a gunslinger being accurate enough with a flintlock to aim the devastating weapon. Nice refluff.[/QUOTE]

Eh, the theory behind it is that a flintlock isn't that much more deadly than a crossbow, but being able to use the inaccurate gun and still hit weak points is incredibly difficult.


As a side note, while I've not run them yet I have written a couple of settings with less restrictive guns. One uses a magical method to ignite power in a metal cartridge (and requires them to be primed before every shot), while the other uses magical crystal based railguns where swapping magazines is a bit of a faff (takes two rounds, but you get up to twelve shots). But they have guns being dominant, so their damage and capabilities are balanced to make them roughly on par with bows so as not to break the system.

Chronic
2021-02-06, 12:04 PM
I've seen people referring to western as an influence for D&d and they aren't wrong, but it's not because of the trope attached to the genre, but because the western genre is a deeply mythological one, that's why it's fairly easy to draw similarities with fantasy. Hero's journey etc.

137beth
2021-02-06, 12:10 PM
I'd say that D&D isn't actually Medieval. Rather than make my own argument, I'll just quote someone else (https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2n1zo&page=5?Does-Anyone-Else-Hate-Gunslingers#219):


I don't get why people see D&D or it's derivatives as medieval european.

you have medieval knights wearing rennaiscane era armor, wielding roman era falcatas, worshipping greek gods, traveling with native american shamans wearing the hides of saharan beasts, who transform into prehistoric dinosaurs who are accompanied by modern japanese schoolgirls wielding Tokugawa Era Daisho and Wearing black pajamas, and old men wearing robes and pointed hats who chant mathematical equations to control reality, on a journey to kill brain eating space aliens, giant sentient firebreathing spellcasting reptiles and sentient jello.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-02-06, 01:34 PM
D&D is, was, and always has been an amalgam of genres, ideas, and influences from across the spectrum and from across the eras of history (plus a bunch of just crazy stuff thrown in because it looked cool). Sure, some strains are stronger than others. But those who claim it isn't a good medieval simulator are right. Because that's not what it's intended to do. Nor is it a good western simulator. Or a good anything simulator. D&D does D&D. Its genre is D&D. And it does D&D pretty darn well (well, most of the time).

Cluedrew
2021-02-06, 09:18 PM
So what I gather is D&D started as a dungeon-crawler with medieval Europe theming and the narrative of a western and then people kept piling on and working in new ideas until it gained sentience.

OK that last part hasn't happened yet.


I thought historically guns changed things because they were relatively simple to train your conscripts in.I do believe there was a period where the conscripts used guns and the train soldiers used bows. There is quite a technology gap between when you can make a gun and when you can make a gun that is "better" than a bow. Its something that always annoys me when technological development is showing during a story (I'm sure some stories have gotten it right but I can't think of any write now), and a few decades of work happens in a few months.

Mechalich
2021-02-06, 10:33 PM
So what I gather is D&D started as a dungeon-crawler with medieval Europe theming and the narrative of a western and then people kept piling on and working in new ideas until it gained sentience.

Technically D&D started as a modification of a tactical wargame. The 'dungeon' concept was a way to move characters through a series of tactical maps in sequence while maintaining a continual resource counter - a method still used by many board games and tactical rpgs.

D&D had 'medieval' themes, but they were drawn from a mixture of fiction that could best be described as 'loosely medieval.' Several of the key inspirational sources, such as Conan and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are much more Bronze Age in derivation than medieval. It's also important to note that Gygax, Arneson, et al were a bunch of hobbyists from the 1970s, something that is extremely relevant when considering the historical sources they had to work with and the historical data the literary works they were drawing from had as well. The understanding of Medieval warfare someone could acquire from popular sources, in English, in 1975, was in no way comparable to what's available today. Even someone who was trying to be 100% historically accurate, which they weren't, would be considered way off now after a half century of new scholarship.

As far as narrative, D&D definitely wasn't written as a Western, but it draws on storytelling traditions that share a lot of narrative and thematic DNA with Westerns. These include the literary tradition of the knight-errant and adventure serials. A key difference between D&D and Westerns is that Westerns often include an element of homesteading. That is, whether or not the specific adventure in question involves making the land safe for settlers, that's part of the overall context. Some D&D-type stories (and actual adventure paths, like Pathfinder: Kingmaker) do include that, but many of them are simply pure romps by characters who are almost entirely self-interested. Many modern D&D inspired characters, for example Geralt of Rivia, are a mixture of both - people who don't fit into society and who undertake actions primarily for profit but whose chosen career ends up broadly improving society anyway. Tolkein, after all, posited a bunch of noble, selfless, dedicated heroes who saved the world from evil, but the Dragonlance Chronicles built a party of outcast screw-ups who did the same (there are many issues with the Dragonlance Chronicles, but the positively wacky and discordant nature of its party roster is incredibly D&D).

Ultimately though, D&D is still 'medieval' because medieval fantasy has remained popular and D&D has worked very hard to provide all possible medieval fantasy options for gameplay. This hasn't always worked particularly well, nor does medieval fantasy hold any sort of position of inherent dominance in the marketplace. While science fiction hasn't successfully challenged fantasy for the crown at any point since D&D's creation, both urban fantasy and superhero fantasy have successfully challenged are arguably surpassed traditional high fantasy at points. D&D did, after all, lose out to Vampire as the world's #1 rpg for a few years in the late 1990s.

On that note, it's probably worth mentioning a purely marketing related reason that keeps D&D 'medieval' in terms of most presented technologies. D&D is owned by a card-game company that makes a 'medieval' fantasy card game whose monetary value dwarfs that of the tabletop product. So long as D&D retains a function as an MTG tie-in product, of course it will stay medieval.

Luccan
2021-02-07, 01:41 AM
On that note, it's probably worth mentioning a purely marketing related reason that keeps D&D 'medieval' in terms of most presented technologies. D&D is owned by a card-game company that makes a 'medieval' fantasy card game whose monetary value dwarfs that of the tabletop product. So long as D&D retains a function as an MTG tie-in product, of course it will stay medieval.

I don't know if this is entirely accurate. WotC has owned D&D for over 20 years now and they're only.just doing tie-ins with MTG (neither of which are even medieval fantasy). Unless there were less widely talked about 3e or 4e crossovers I'm unaware of, I think it's more likely they kept it the same just to make sure they kept the D&D-fan market share.

Theodoxus
2021-02-07, 01:31 PM
Disney still does animation because it sells.
Ford still makes cars because cars sell.
MicroSoft still sells operating systems because they sell.
Marvel still makes modern superhero comic books because they sell.

And D&D is still its own unconvincing modern Horatio Alger world with a medieval-ish overlay because it continues to sell.

D&D is its own genre. It grew out of a poor attempt to simulate heroic fantasy, but it is its own brand of fantasy, with its own feel.

And it retains that feel because it is selling. It's the best-selling, best known rpg in the world. That is, all by itself, a reason not to change it.

Which is why I'm so sad that there hasn't been ANY good High Sorcery movies or even tv shows developed. If Disney could hook up with Hasbro and yank the teams from both Marvel and Star Wars, we could have some AMAZINGLY good stories and CGI to finally wash away the harsh aftertaste that was the D&D movies.

Currently, even Netflix is creating more WOD-esque gothic horror tales with their fantasy. And even then, the CGI is horrible, It looks like cut and paste fireballs from 80's explosions thrown in front of blue screens (yeah, not even green screen tech seems to be used).

I'm tired of 'The Magicians' level of magic. Or Sarina, or Wynx... I want to see D&D fireballs, magic missiles, healing spells, bloody Tiny Huts! on par with Endgame graphics. Unfortunately, I think the stink of prior High Magic projects is keeping anyone willing to invest in a quality product.

Maybe WandaVision, if they really delve into Wanda's magical prowess, will spark the next revolution.

ETA:

As a side note, while I've not run them yet I have written a couple of settings with less restrictive guns. One uses a magical method to ignite power in a metal cartridge (and requires them to be primed before every shot), while the other uses magical crystal based railguns where swapping magazines is a bit of a faff (takes two rounds, but you get up to twelve shots). But they have guns being dominant, so their damage and capabilities are balanced to make them roughly on par with bows so as not to break the system.

I really like how Modern AGE handles capacity. Basically, your gun never runs out (if you're playin a cinematic type game, which D&D most certainly is), until you botch an attack. In D&D parlance, if you roll a 1, your gun is out of ammo. (Modern AGE uses a different dice mechanic than a d20, so each weapon can have a different 'fail' number representing a larger or smaller magazine). Unless you specifically bought spare ammo, you're now using an improvised cudgel.

I don't make my players count their arrows, except for magical ones - those I just multiply by 1.5 and that's how many they get. No scrounging or nothing - but I might start using this rule for quivers. You roll a 1, it's not that you missed horribly, it's that you reached to grab an arrow or bolt, and there isn't any left. (Would probably need to do something specific for halflings and the Lucky feat... though I guess halflings could just be known to oddly never run out of arrows...)

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-07, 02:50 PM
I really like how Modern AGE handles capacity. Basically, your gun never runs out (if you're playin a cinematic type game, which D&D most certainly is), until you botch an attack. In D&D parlance, if you roll a 1, your gun is out of ammo. (Modern AGE uses a different dice mechanic than a d20, so each weapon can have a different 'fail' number representing a larger or smaller magazine). Unless you specifically bought spare ammo, you're now using an improvised cudgel.

Oh, the Modern AGE rules are great, although in some cases (particularly gritty games) I'd much rather track the bullets in the gun. But it works great for what it's designed for, and helps with the 'players donm't like to track ammo' problem (as does the fatigue-based casting you can use instead of MP).

Side note: it only calls out 'must be carrying spare ammo' for gritty games. While I think it should be a standard rule I also think that Gritty is the best of the three Modern AGE modes.

God I want to play M-AGE.


I don't make my players count their arrows, except for magical ones - those I just multiply by 1.5 and that's how many they get. No scrounging or nothing - but I might start using this rule for quivers. You roll a 1, it's not that you missed horribly, it's that you reached to grab an arrow or bolt, and there isn't any left. (Would probably need to do something specific for halflings and the Lucky feat... though I guess halflings could just be known to oddly never run out of arrows...)
[/FONT]

One GM I had handwaved reloading and normal ammunition, but any special ammo you had to track. You also bought and tracked ammo by the attack, meaning it cost a lot more if your weapon ad automatic fire (not that the weapon list was very detailed in that game).

Mechalich
2021-02-07, 05:38 PM
Which is why I'm so sad that there hasn't been ANY good High Sorcery movies or even tv shows developed. If Disney could hook up with Hasbro and yank the teams from both Marvel and Star Wars, we could have some AMAZINGLY good stories and CGI to finally wash away the harsh aftertaste that was the D&D movies.

Currently, even Netflix is creating more WOD-esque gothic horror tales with their fantasy. And even then, the CGI is horrible, It looks like cut and paste fireballs from 80's explosions thrown in front of blue screens (yeah, not even green screen tech seems to be used).

I'm tired of 'The Magicians' level of magic. Or Sarina, or Wynx... I want to see D&D fireballs, magic missiles, healing spells, bloody Tiny Huts! on par with Endgame graphics. Unfortunately, I think the stink of prior High Magic projects is keeping anyone willing to invest in a quality product.

Maybe WandaVision, if they really delve into Wanda's magical prowess, will spark the next revolution.

High magic is expensive. Wandavision costs a truly unbelievable $25 million dollars per episode (for reference that's like 2.5 episodes of Season 4 Game of Thrones). Disney can make super high priced streaming shows because they have deep pockets and because the streaming wars are a drawn out battle to the death. Netflix has a different strategy, which is to flood the zone with content, so they make a lot of cheap shows where attractive people run around in Lower Mainland BC or Metro Atlanta.

The big test of high sorcery is coming, in the form of Amazon's Wheel of Time series. That's the biggest high magic franchise out there and if it does well, expect more to follow, but that's a big if.

Nifft
2021-02-07, 06:02 PM
High magic is expensive. Yeah.

Cartoons might be a place to look, where the trade-off is that special effects are much easier but characters take more effort.

But that's a bit off-topic.


Dragon this back on-topic, I guess the analogue would be that modern economics are complicated, so some game settings avoid advancing into such an economy.

Tanarii
2021-02-07, 06:13 PM
The big test of high sorcery is coming, in the form of Amazon's Wheel of Time series. That's the biggest high magic franchise out there and if it does well, expect more to follow, but that's a big if.
What would be amazing would be if they did Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive.

Either way, they are both super flashy Magic settings that take time to get to the really flashy Magic. So they can take their time to do the standard medieval tropes and world building with a lower budget, until the series has established itself and proven the brand. And it'd be awesome to see some of the large-scale battles from either on the big screen,

Xuc Xac
2021-02-07, 06:52 PM
A key difference between D&D and Westerns is that Westerns often include an element of homesteading. That is, whether or not the specific adventure in question involves making the land safe for settlers, that's part of the overall context.

D&D as originally written (and through AD&D 2E) was all about homesteading. The primary goal was to reach "name level" when fighters could build a castle, clerics could found a temple, thieves could start a thieves' guild, etc. to attract followers. Going on adventures was considered a "side quest" or "minigame" to gain resources for the main wargame where you send your armies to fight other lords for territory. As more and more players came into the hobby specifically for the role-playing adventures instead of coming to it through wargaming, the domain management became less important. That's why 3E let PCs gain more hit dice when their levels hit double digits: they were going to keep adventuring and fighting bigger badder monsters themselves instead of sitting in a fortress and sending out their underlings to do missions for them.

AdAstra
2021-02-07, 08:12 PM
I thought historically guns changed things because they were relatively simple to train your conscripts in.

There are D&D style games with guns in the player's guide, such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess or AD&D2e. And generally the more historically accurate the guns the less they matter. I'm LotFP guns have a special armour piercing effect no other weapon has, but the sheer length of the relief (10 rounds! 8 if you're a fighter, and you can reduce that sightly by taking the special bandoleer) means that unless you're carting around a barrel of loaded muskets you're not getting that more than maybe twice a combat and those will be your only actions.

Firing mechanisms also matter, LotFP points out how matchlocks, wheellocks, and flintlocks give you different chances of misfiring (which means you have to spend rounds sorting that out before you can get off a successful shot), impact reloading times due to varying complexity in priming then, and earlier firing mechanisms don't work when wet. Speaking of which, you need to make sure you keep your powder dry, or it's no guns for you.

Oh, and if you want rifling? That'll be extra cash.

Pre cartridge firearms are terrible for adventuring. Sure, rain also stops bowstrings from working properly, but the best thing to do with flintlock muskets is hand them out to a bunch of extras/nooks, train them in using them, and then having them fire once before fleeing/hiding

Also my primary all these days if I'm playing a Rogue is if I can fluff a hand crossbow as a flintlock pistol. It serves the purpose well with for most games.

The ease of training influenced things, and absolutely changed the nature of armies, but guns and powder were rather expensive. It wasn't as simple as hordes of untrained peasant hordes musketing superior archers through greater numbers. Notably, guns coexisted with crossbows and and bows for quite a while, and early on they were considered fairly prestigious, not a peasant's weapon.

The greater lethality is severe. Media tends to severely inflate the deadliness of arrows and quarrels, but armor (especially shields) dramatically reduces their effectiveness, especially at longer ranges. There are tons of instances of reasonably armored and disciplined troops weathering sustained arrow fire for periods of time that would be wholly unsustainable against musketry. Armor was not rendered obsolete by firearms (the two techs coexisted for quite a while), the increasing quality and proliferation of armor spurred their adoption. The shock value of being able to let loose a single overwhelmingly deadly volley can't be underestimated in an age of warfare where morale is critical. Also, the rate of fire that bows allow is somewhat overstated. In a short burst you can fire quite quickly, but that will tire you out very fast, especially if you're using the famously powerful bows. Over long periods your rate of fire actually isn't much greater than that of a trained firearms user, especially once you consider that arrows are bulky and expensive.

As for the overall topic.. honestly basically everything other people have said is relevant here. DND is hardly just medieval fiction, it borrows heavily from all over. Many eras of history, tons of genre conventions across just as many settings. The rise and fall of genres is not some linear progression, they're more like fashions, where something old can easily come back, and in most cases never really went away. And what reason business-wise does DnD have to move away from what has worked, and that very few have advocated they move away from? It's dungeons and dragons, and people like the dungeons and dragons. DND sets the trends just as much as it chases them.

CharonsHelper
2021-02-07, 10:49 PM
And D&D is utterly bad at "medieval". Hardly any of the books actually helps to flesh out a feudal society based on personal bond, privileges, titles and obligations. Instead adventurers are basically treated as the same social class whatever their background. The D&D world is full of untamed wilderness full of monsters where in medieval europe every bit of territory had its owner or might be constested by multiple ones. Power in D&D does not come from your ability to call in allies to field an army, it comes from individuals powerful enough to take on an army by themself.

Really early D&D leaned pretty heavily towards what would now be considered a "points of light" setting, with the implication that civilization's existence was somewhat on a razor's edge, and things had been better in the past. (Which is where all of the dungeons with better magic gear etc. came from.)

The Keep of the Borderlands definitely had that vibe.

Which makes sense that it couldn't really just transplant Feudalism wholesale into D&D. Historical Feudalism is based on the idea that the lord and his men are the toughest around and can keep the peasantry in line and have full control of the land. That often doesn't work so well if there are dragons and other beasties around. A lot of Feudalism is really designed to keep control of the peasantry and isn't actually the most efficient way to have a military force, which I'm not sure that you'd bother with if there are monsters to worry about. etc.

Mutazoia
2021-02-08, 12:07 AM
Probably because D&D is D&D. If you want Sci-Fi there are hundreds of other options. You want your magic with a heaping side of technology? Go play Shadowrun? Or Star Wars. Or pick up a generic system and homebrew your own setting.

Kings, queens, dragons, dwarves, horses, fortresses, magic, and swords, that's what D&D is made of. You want something different, go pick up a different game.

Satinavian
2021-02-08, 02:07 AM
Really early D&D leaned pretty heavily towards what would now be considered a "points of light" setting, with the implication that civilization's existence was somewhat on a razor's edge, and things had been better in the past. (Which is where all of the dungeons with better magic gear etc. came from.)

The Keep of the Borderlands definitely had that vibe.I am aware. That is part of what i meant with postapocalyptic nonsense.


Which makes sense that it couldn't really just transplant Feudalism wholesale into D&D. Historical Feudalism is based on the idea that the lord and his men are the toughest around and can keep the peasantry in line and have full control of the land. That often doesn't work so well if there are dragons and other beasties around. A lot of Feudalism is really designed to keep control of the peasantry and isn't actually the most efficient way to have a military force, which I'm not sure that you'd bother with if there are monsters to worry about. etc.Historical feudalism is not for keeping control of the peasantry, it is for providing protection and large scale administration for very cheap when most of your population barely produces beyond sustenance. It was a success model for a reason.
And the decentralised structure of feudalism would actually work pretty well with random monsters. The local knigth and his retainers can be there in a day to kill it and might call on local militia and if it is too big, he could call on his liege and so on. That is way better than have to move units of a centralised army all the time.

Hopeless
2021-02-08, 07:16 AM
Why is d&d still medieval?

Because that's often where the game starts unless you're one of those that likes to establish how good things were BEFORE the fall like they did with Cyre in Eberron or Dale in the Hobbit.

When a game commonly starts is after that situation so you have your players understanding where they are, what they know is going on, what they can do and then ask them what do they want to do?

Its entirely possible now to have a character start off with a firearm and the means to maintain and build more ammunition but that doesn't mean they will have the funds to continue doing so and that means finding work or the means to pay for their lifestyle and occupation whether that means working as a guard or occasionally going on missions for their own livelihood.

That doesn't mean you can't run Traveller style scenarios or superhero games using d&d its just another genre you might find easier using a different game system but that's on the dm and their players.

To me the story is the most important part of the game for others its to kick somethings backside and loot their remains so they can get more powerful, rinse and repeat.

What is the most important part of d&d is to you?

Imbalance
2021-02-08, 08:00 AM
I feel like most people who are asking for these wondrous magic and creature effects in their shows also skipped the Warhammer and Monster Hunter flicks which had wondrous magic and creature effects.

Bugbear
2021-02-08, 10:18 AM
Can someone explain the supposed connection between movie special effects and why D&D should or should not be medieval fantasy? I seriously have no idea why the OP kept mentioning special effects. :smallconfused::smallconfused::smallconfused:

Well, I was a bit all over the place, so I'll try to clean it up.

Most DMs, when making a campaign don't want anything even close to a before 1500 Earth setting. they want a much more 'modern' setting for society and business and trade and travel. Life in even 1500 AD was very alien to anyone alive in 2021. And that says a lot as life in even 1990 is alien to life in 2021.

Most players like a setting that is just like 2021. When a player has a character goes into a tavern, they expect it to be a hip modern place like Applebees with modern food and drinks, ice, and so on. They sure don't want a 1400 AD tavern with only local game food like birds and squirrels, things like Baby Mice Wine(this is a real thing..and then you eat the mice too) and no ice (unless it's cold wintertime).

Most players expect the Law to be a lot like the 2021 law with rights and fair treatment and lawyers....but any near historical law before, oh 1900, was...an unbelievably harsh nightmare. Tossed in a jail for no reason, chained to a wall, not given any regular food or water....yea, if your lucky.

Building even a simple house took a good amount of time back in 1400 AD, plus it likely had no glass windows, pluming, easy heating, easy waste disposal, and for sure had no electricity and machines. And things like to make a cup of tea you had to first go outside and get some water. Then go outside and get some wood and make a fire. Then heat the water, then finally make your tea. Sure is a far cry from pushing the 'tea' button on the microwave and waiting.

Most games and even settings just ignore all the 'old stuff' or just have everything almost just like 2021. When the characters stay at an inn they "just have" hot running water" in their rooms...somehow. When working a job characters somehow just get to work 9 to 5 with a lunch break and OSHA rules.

So why do the makes of D&D keep it in the "old times" when just about no one wants that?

---

So I tried to tie the above to popular culture and the way it has changed over time. In the 70's and 80's fans were fine with tough guy fights with no special effects, other then real stunts. A typical Clint Eastwood movie of the era, for example. Getting into the 90's you get the "Mortal Combat' special effects....where a character punches with a glowing fist, making a glowing arc of light and hits the foe with a glow of power. This has the cap stone of the Matrix with it's impossible martial arts. And into the 2000 and 2010 and up to today. Where far too many fights are just a mess of CGI spam. Thor does not just 'hit foes with a hammer', he lights up like a holiday tree of the fourth of July and fires off a storm of lightning bolts. Captain American even does the whole lightning bit in Avengers Endgame.

And for combat, D&D has followed. A 2E fighter could mostly just swing a weapon. By 3E they had tons of feats and classes and items. By 5E everyone has magic effects where they can use 'lightning spin whirlwind attack' in each encounter.

But the setting stays locked in "oh if your character is cold you must build a fire by hand" and it takes "years and years to construct a castle".

Why?

Tanarii
2021-02-08, 10:38 AM
By 5E everyone has magic effects where they can use 'lightning spin whirlwind attack' in each encounter.
Uh, what? That's nothing like 5e.

MoiMagnus
2021-02-08, 10:42 AM
So why do the makes of D&D keep it in the "old times" when just about no one wants that?

Because peoples want it. They just don't want the old times you're describing. They want their fantasied version of the old time, and don't care for historical accuracy as it is medieval fantasy.

You're focussing yourself on law, social structures, commodities, etc. They don't care about those, and that's why they use modern equivalents. You don't need to introduce modern concept, so they are the default.

They want to play in a universe where the main weapon is the sword, peoples live in castles, and wilderness is still very present.

If you want to describe what is medieval fantasy, especially what it means for newer generations, I think that World of Warcraft is a better starting point than any work of literature (including LotR).

Luccan
2021-02-08, 10:47 AM
Another important factor is that both TSR and WotC have had separate RPG products from mainline D&D for other genres. Despite D&D's occasional genre mixing, as noted previously, changing everything to be, say, a nuclear apocalypse game wouldn't have even made sense prior to 4e. They had other games for that.

kyoryu
2021-02-08, 11:11 AM
D&D is actually a medieval Western, with gunslingers and saloon towns, not a pseudo-medieval settings. Notice the general lack of farming or population? Tatooine and Forgotten Realms have more in common with Stagecoach then they do to Heinlein or mythology.

Somewhere between a western and a post-apocalyptic setting.

Look at Mad Max - isolated towns holding their walls against an untamed and uncivilized wilderness. Sounds about right. It's just a post apocalypse at medieval tech level.

At least in the initial versions, the dungeons and how spells were acquired made more sense from the perspective of people scrabbling for existence on the ruins of a previous, more advanced, society. A lot of artifacts/etc. kinda point this way too.

Tanarii
2021-02-08, 11:24 AM
Somewhere between a western and a post-apocalyptic setting.

Look at Mad Max - isolated towns holding their walls against an untamed and uncivilized wilderness. Sounds about right. It's just a post apocalypse at medieval tech level.

At least in the initial versions, the dungeons and how spells were acquired made more sense from the perspective of people scrabbling for existence on the ruins of a previous, more advanced, society. A lot of artifacts/etc. kinda point this way too.
I mean, that's exactly what the Middle Ages were, at least in pop culture. Post-apocalyptic collapse of the world empire, with invading hordes from the outside trying to finish the deal. Or, yknow, descendants of the initial hordes defending against the next invading horde.

Telok
2021-02-08, 11:38 AM
Another important factor is that both TSR and WotC have had separate RPG products from mainline D&D for other genres. Despite D&D's occasional genre mixing, as noted previously, changing everything to be, say, a nuclear apocalypse game wouldn't have even made sense prior to 4e. They had other games for that.

Well, back in TSR times Gamma World and D&D were close enough that crossover adventures were very easy to do and players didn't have to change character sheets or learn new rules to take the trip. And early on in the WotC days Alternity originally looked like it was shaping up that way.

TSR's setting & offshoot game spam had some issues, but it did put out some real gems that people still use 30 years later. WotC's 30 year legacy is looking like its going to be Ebberon and the 3.5s Bo9S splat. Everything since has been increasingly restrained and limited. That's probably better for the business cost/return accounting, but people who like more variety than a "faux-dark ages with plate armor & superhero spell casters" are spending time & money elsewhere.

Satinavian
2021-02-08, 12:31 PM
Well, I was a bit all over the place, so I'll try to clean it up.

Most DMs, when making a campaign don't want anything even close to a before 1500 Earth setting. they want a much more 'modern' setting for society and business and trade and travel. Life in even 1500 AD was very alien to anyone alive in 2021. And that says a lot as life in even 1990 is alien to life in 2021.

Most players like a setting that is just like 2021. When a player has a character goes into a tavern, they expect it to be a hip modern place like Applebees with modern food and drinks, ice, and so on. They sure don't want a 1400 AD tavern with only local game food like birds and squirrels, things like Baby Mice Wine(this is a real thing..and then you eat the mice too) and no ice (unless it's cold wintertime).

Most players expect the Law to be a lot like the 2021 law with rights and fair treatment and lawyers....but any near historical law before, oh 1900, was...an unbelievably harsh nightmare. Tossed in a jail for no reason, chained to a wall, not given any regular food or water....yea, if your lucky.

Building even a simple house took a good amount of time back in 1400 AD, plus it likely had no glass windows, pluming, easy heating, easy waste disposal, and for sure had no electricity and machines. And things like to make a cup of tea you had to first go outside and get some water. Then go outside and get some wood and make a fire. Then heat the water, then finally make your tea. Sure is a far cry from pushing the 'tea' button on the microwave and waiting.

Most games and even settings just ignore all the 'old stuff' or just have everything almost just like 2021. When the characters stay at an inn they "just have" hot running water" in their rooms...somehow. When working a job characters somehow just get to work 9 to 5 with a lunch break and OSHA rules.

So why do the makes of D&D keep it in the "old times" when just about no one wants that?
Your experiences seem to be very different from mine. At all of my tables people actually are playing as if at setting appropriate tech levels and are fully aware of all the differences.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-08, 01:53 PM
they want a much more 'modern' setting for society and business and trade and travel. Life in even 1500 AD was very alien to anyone alive in 2021. And that says a lot as life in even 1990 is alien to life in 2021.
Most players like a setting that is just like 2021. When a player has a character goes into a tavern, they expect it to be a hip modern place like Applebees with modern food and drinks, ice, and so on. They sure don't want a 1400 AD tavern with only local game food like birds and squirrels, things like Baby Mice Wine(this is a real thing..and then you eat the mice too) and no ice (unless it's cold wintertime).
Most players expect the Law to be a lot like the 2021 law with rights and fair treatment and lawyers....but any near historical law before, oh 1900, was...an unbelievably harsh nightmare. Tossed in a jail for no reason, chained to a wall, not given any regular food or water....yea, if your lucky.
Building even a simple house took a good amount of time back in 1400 AD, plus it likely had no glass windows, pluming, easy heating, easy waste disposal, and for sure had no electricity and machines. And things like to make a cup of tea you had to first go outside and get some water. Then go outside and get some wood and make a fire. Then heat the water, then finally make your tea. Sure is a far cry from pushing the 'tea' button on the microwave and waiting.
Most games and even settings just ignore all the 'old stuff' or just have everything almost just like 2021. When the characters stay at an inn they "just have" hot running water" in their rooms...somehow. When working a job characters somehow just get to work 9 to 5 with a lunch break and OSHA rules.
There is quite a lot of assumption about what ‘most’ people want with which I fundamentally do not agree. I don’t think there are a lot of people that want their D&D taverns to be Applebees (wait, you consider Applebees to be hip?) or to have plumbing, or anything else. I think this misrepresents other gamers to a huge degree. What I do think is accurate is that a lot of people want the differences between now and the past to be relatively straightforward. Using your tea water example-- that tea water is heated over a fire is taken as a granted; that tea might not be the beverage of choice maybe – maybe a group doesn’t care. Same with construction – yes people recognize that indoor plumbing and glass windows wouldn’t be a thing, but do they care overly about thinking through that downstream ramifications of that? Well, depends on the group.
I think that feeds into Tanarii’s point about “Middle Ages were, at least in pop culture.” – people want (and I am also leaning heavily into generalization here) want ‘the Middle Ages, but sufficiently divorced from the truth as to 1) be exceedingly convenient to facilitating activities that the PCs want to do (travel about the countryside to conveniently located subterranean combat funhouses lined with traps, treasures, and troglodytes), and 2) facilitating to a variety of pop culture power fantasies (so swords and spells and arrows and armor because that can facilitate knights errant, Merlin-eque mages, swashbucklers, skulking rogues, pirates, or if you allow some cultural genre mixing samurai and ninja as well).

So why do the makes of D&D keep it in the "old times" when just about no one wants that?
Seriously, what don’t they want? Do they not want to have to roleplay their PCs doing their business in the pre-indoor plumbing era? Sure. Likewise, if the game were sci fi, very few games treat going into space (much less interplanetary travel, or space combat, or anything else) entirely realistically. This isn’t more true for medieval fantasy than any other form of fiction.

So I tried to tie the above to popular culture and the way it has changed over time. In the 70's and 80's fans were fine with tough guy fights with no special effects, other then real stunts. A typical Clint Eastwood movie of the era, for example. Getting into the 90's you get the "Mortal Combat' special effects....where a character punches with a glowing fist, making a glowing arc of light and hits the foe with a glow of power. This has the cap stone of the Matrix with it's impossible martial arts. And into the 2000 and 2010 and up to today. Where far too many fights are just a mess of CGI spam. Thor does not just 'hit foes with a hammer', he lights up like a holiday tree of the fourth of July and fires off a storm of lightning bolts. Captain American even does the whole lightning bit in Avengers Endgame.
You are mixing genres for this comparison. Clint Eastwood was a western (also, 20th century western movies were chock full of anachronisms). Modern westerns might CG out the starbuck cups and modern buildings in the background, but would otherwise be much the same. Sci fi and superhero movies of the time used high tech special effects of their relevant time. Christopher Reeve chroma key flying looks pretty tame nowadays since your average local weather forecaster uses the same technology, but it is hi tech special effects of the time just the same. There was 'high tech special effects' then, and 'high tech special effects now.

And for combat, D&D has followed. A 2E fighter could mostly just swing a weapon. By 3E they had tons of feats and classes and items. By 5E everyone has magic effects where they can use 'lightning spin whirlwind attack' in each encounter.
Very much not the case. In 2e the fighter didn’t have any in-built expendable resource mechanics* like a 5e battlemaster fighter might have in ‘superiority dice,’ but they were much more likely to have a whole bevvy of magic items with X/day abilities, or similar. Beyond that, magic users have existed in the game since before it was fully D&D, and they have always had such things. The overall distance between oD&D and 3e or 5e is trivial, when including nonmedieval fantasy games into the comparison.

Garimeth
2021-02-08, 02:50 PM
What would be amazing would be if they did Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive.

Agreed! I'd hate to have them do it before he finishes though. I would totally not mind seeing the original Mistborn done though, as long as it wasn't some low-budget affair.

Tanarii
2021-02-08, 03:00 PM
Agreed! I'd hate to have them do it before he finishes though. I would totally not mind seeing the original Mistborn done though, as long as it wasn't some low-budget affair.
Agreed, as asoiaf demonstrated, starting a show before the series is done is a recipe for ruining the book series.

Mistborn would be pretty cool too. And really should come before stormlight anyway.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-08, 04:07 PM
Aren't there like seven Mistborn books in the 'coming soon, but not that soon' phase? It's pretty much the only Sanderson series I'm still interested in though, and even own the game (interesting little system).

On the thread topic, it's not like there isn't competition in the fantasy RPG market, my copy of Advanced Fighting Fantasy arrived today and my copy of Jaxckals arrives tomorrow. Sot it's certainly a market people are interested in, and as people want to play this D&D they've heard so much about it has little reason to change (even if many games are so much better).

Garimeth
2021-02-08, 04:51 PM
Aren't there like seven Mistborn books in the 'coming soon, but not that soon' phase? It's pretty much the only Sanderson series I'm still interested in though, and even own the game (interesting little system).

There is, but I think the first trilogy is contained enough to do on its own. The Alloy of Law western style stuff could be neat too.

TBH though, ALOT happens in just that first book. You could make just that first book into a trilogy of movies.

SandyAndy
2021-02-08, 05:32 PM
Why do they need to update it? Why not just flavor it your way. I run a space campaign and the magic is just people being mentally linked to the machinery in such a complex way that the common man can't really grasp how it works. Do all the same things only in space, and an added bonus is that if I don't want them using a certain spell then I can come up with an in-game reason pretty quick.

t209
2021-02-08, 08:28 PM
And D&D is utterly bad at "medieval". Hardly any of the books actually helps to flesh out a feudal society based on personal bond, privileges, titles and obligations. Instead adventurers are basically treated as the same social class whatever their background. The D&D world is full of untamed wilderness full of monsters where in medieval europe every bit of territory had its owner or might be constested by multiple ones. Power in D&D does not come from your ability to call in allies to field an army, it comes from individuals powerful enough to take on an army by themself.

I think they try to do that with Birthright and AD&D Oriental Adventure, the latter being controversial for associating that aspect with Faux-Asian culture (or the misfortune of trying to make an expansion pack while compromising with Zeb Cook's want for his fondness of Kung Fu and Samurai movies, also maybe Gygax's "human-centric sword-and-sorcery fantasy" against the demihuman-heavy Tolkienian fantasy genre by his colleagues if you believe the story that he had to be "encouraged" to include Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings).

Theodoxus
2021-02-08, 11:17 PM
Somewhere between a western and a post-apocalyptic setting.

Look at Mad Max - isolated towns holding their walls against an untamed and uncivilized wilderness. Sounds about right. It's just a post apocalypse at medieval tech level.

At least in the initial versions, the dungeons and how spells were acquired made more sense from the perspective of people scrabbling for existence on the ruins of a previous, more advanced, society. A lot of artifacts/etc. kinda point this way too.

This is so deeply ingrained, when I started worldbuilding my own campaign, I originally thought of going with an 'in the beginning' type setting, where the campaign was basically ~50 years or so after the gods had formed everything and then left with fledgling humanoid races vying for land and glory... and then I quickly realized that there weren't any bones of old civilizations to explore, nor dungeons to explore... just vast regions of untamed wilderness... and I wasn't really interested in running a Kingmaker style campaign just then.

So, I fast-forwarded my own world, generating histories, civilizations and civ-ending events and plopped my players into a half-baked world that was still cooling out of the oven. They enjoyed it, but they really got a kick when I fast-forwarded again and their next campaign took place on the bones of their previous campaign's civilization! When they went dungeon delving and found themselves walking the streets of the city they had helped build up... the shock on their faces was priceless. Whenever we get over this Covid crap, I've already advanced the world again, now with a more overt post-apoc feel... I suspect they'll once again run around looking for clues to their former character's lives. I can't wait.

t209
2021-02-08, 11:52 PM
Interesting that you say DnD being based on elements of wild west but in medieval fantasy.
I kinda had the idea, but with less arid desert and more "a local sheriff or mayor called you up for deputies and helping out", "place where outlaws and exiles can make fresh start", or "forming rangers, as in cowboy law enforcement than character class".

Roger_Druid
2021-02-09, 01:36 AM
Hi all!

Whereas, of course, once upon a time TSR tried... Amazing Machine (TSR 2700s):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Engine

Roger Druid

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-09, 02:10 AM
I mean, I'll obviously agree that big budget special effects driven action movies have gotten bigger and better special effects over the last two or three decades.

But for every flashy X-Men or Avengers movie, there's a Jason Bourne or Mission Impossible or The Expendables that's totally focused on nitty gritty fist fights, shoot outs, and gasoline explosions. For every character throwing around a lightning hammer or a laser sword, there are dozens of characters who are CIA operatives or buddy cop duos or retired ex-military/mercenary types. For every film about a giant monster or wacky space army, there are probably a hundred about casino heists, spy thrillers, organized crime, or modern depictions of war.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-09, 02:34 AM
If you want to describe what is medieval fantasy, especially what it means for newer generations, I think that World of Warcraft is a better starting point than any work of literature (including LotR).

As former WoW player, I find it ironic that WoW of all things is being held up as a medieval standard.

WoW is full of technology beyond medieval era:
-gnomes just to start has the entire city of Gnomeregan full of gears, radiation, robots and the like
-there are airships between continents made by goblins
-in Burning Crusade we had the Draenei crashing in a space ship and Outland instances of Draenei tech being more advanced
-goblins eventually became the Horde's tech base to even them out with the gnomes with rockets and explosives and by the time of Cataclysm both sides basically had modern planes and vehicles, musket rifles, cannons and robots to fight each other with
-Azeroth is full of Titan ruins which have more advanced technology
-the Burning Legion is a basically a space fleet of demons traveling the stars to destroy all of existence
-you the player can craft things like dynamite, bombs, helicopters, motorcycles, guns, goggles, various toy-like inventions and so on
-by the time of Battle for Azeroth, the Alliance basically has a spaceship beyond anything the horde can make that can cause massive destruction, I forget how much but people complained that if people remembered it existed, the Alliance would basically win.
-like there is just multiple kinds of technology, magitech and so on going on in WoW: goblin tech, gnome tech, titan tech, demon magitech, blood elf magitech, human/dwarf/gnome combined built tech, forsaken tech, draenei/naaru tech, not only it is in a lot of places, much of it just seems to work on completely different principles without any explanation why there are so many ways to become an advanced technological society.

like there is tech in a lot of places, its just very very schizo and inconsistent. one storyline you'll be doing a quest that makes sense for a wandering adventurer with little tech base. next you'll be in a modern war story piloting some machine for the alliance or horde war effort as if your on the front as apart of the military. another story you'll do some weird magical solution when you just came out of a quest that might invalidate the need it with some gadget. like your statement might've been true back when WoW came out, but these days its pretty all over the place in terms of technological capability.

MoiMagnus
2021-02-09, 04:15 AM
but these days its pretty all over the place in terms of technological capability.

That's also the case for D&D if you include the different settings. Both D&D and WoW hover around the different variation of medieval fantasy (sometimes forgetting the medieval part), it's just that WoW put them in different regions while D&D put them in different books (and the different settings might or might not be part of the same multiverse).

Lord Raziere
2021-02-09, 04:37 AM
That's also the case for D&D if you include the different settings. Both D&D and WoW hover around the different variation of medieval fantasy (sometimes forgetting the medieval part), it's just that WoW put them in different regions while D&D put them in different books (and the different settings might or might not be part of the same multiverse).

Eeeeeeeeeh....

I dunno. maybe its because I don't have much visual representation of DnD vs. WoW since I only have still pictures of DnD stuff versus WoW being an entire digital world, but to me DnD just doesn't have that level of technological insanity. Eberron is pretty minimalist with the author explicitly writing against steampunk or guns, Spelljammer I couldn't read through for some reason but it seems to center around mostly the spelljammer with nothing much else being advanced, and I don't have much knowledge of other settings to really say anything about them. overall DnD or at least many of the DMs who run it are pretty against guns or other tech is the impression I got from people talking about this, so my picture of DnD as a whole is being more medieval than WoW.

like its one thing to say they're similar, but I'm not convinced. I need more than that to really believe it.

Scots Dragon
2021-02-09, 04:58 AM
Dungeons & Dragons retains the heroic fantasy standard because it is and always has been a heroic fantasy game. All this talk about science fiction that got popular, but it ignores stuff like Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, the Witcher, and countless anime (the entire Isekai genre), cartoons (Dragon Prince), novels, comics, etc.

And of course the enduring popularity of D&D itself in the pseudo medieval heroic fantasy form it most commonly takes. Why wouldn’t it remain as it was?

Other games exist to scratch different itches. If I wanted something like the Matrix, I’d be playing Shadowrun. If I wanted space opera, I’d play Traveller or WEG Star Wars.

D&D is where I get my swords and castles and wizards and weird monsters fix.

Mutazoia
2021-02-09, 10:01 AM
If you want Sci-Fi in your D&D, you really should just go play Starfinder.

kyoryu
2021-02-09, 10:11 AM
This is so deeply ingrained, when I started worldbuilding my own campaign, I originally thought of going with an 'in the beginning' type setting, where the campaign was basically ~50 years or so after the gods had formed everything and then left with fledgling humanoid races vying for land and glory... and then I quickly realized that there weren't any bones of old civilizations to explore, nor dungeons to explore... just vast regions of untamed wilderness... and I wasn't really interested in running a Kingmaker style campaign just then.

So, I fast-forwarded my own world, generating histories, civilizations and civ-ending events and plopped my players into a half-baked world that was still cooling out of the oven. They enjoyed it, but they really got a kick when I fast-forwarded again and their next campaign took place on the bones of their previous campaign's civilization! When they went dungeon delving and found themselves walking the streets of the city they had helped build up... the shock on their faces was priceless. Whenever we get over this Covid crap, I've already advanced the world again, now with a more overt post-apoc feel... I suspect they'll once again run around looking for clues to their former character's lives. I can't wait.

I played in a game in the 90s where there were two games running - one was in the "Kingmaker" period, effectively, and the other was the later game.

I've actually considered running a game like that, where there were various periods of history (empire building, the rise of the decadent empire, the fall of the decadent empire, the immediate post-apocalyptic period, and the later "recovery" period), where the last would be the closest to "typical" D&D. I figured starting with the last would be the most interesting. Never got it off the ground, though.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-09, 10:39 AM
If you want Sci-Fi in your D&D, you really should just go play Starfinder.

While I personally quite like that game, it really needs a rework. Also the entire levelled weapons thing annoys me, it's clearly because of the fast scaling of HP and Stamina but it feels like it would have been more elegant to give an extra damage die every X levels.

That said, there are many science fantasy games out thereleaning to every side of the spectrum, and some which technically aren't but can easily be hacked to be (such as Stellar Adventures material being easily cross compatible with Advanced Fighting Fantasy material).

Nifft
2021-02-09, 10:52 AM
If you want Sci-Fi in your D&D, you really should just go play Starfinder.

- Expedition to Barrier Peaks
- Temple of the Frog God
- Apparatus of Kwalish
- probably another quarter of the junk in the kitchen sink

Or just play D&D.

Bugbear
2021-02-09, 11:52 AM
Uh, what? That's nothing like 5e.

There are tons of 5E examples. How about a path of wild magic barbarian shooting off wild magic surges each fight? A Warlock Hexblade? The Fighter Arcane Archer?


I mean, I'll obviously agree that big budget special effects driven action movies have gotten bigger and better special effects over the last two or three decades.

But for every flashy X-Men or Avengers movie, there's a Jason Bourne or Mission Impossible or The Expendables that's totally focused on nitty gritty fist fights, shoot outs, and gasoline explosions. For every character throwing around a lightning hammer or a laser sword, there are dozens of characters who are CIA operatives or buddy cop duos or retired ex-military/mercenary types. For every film about a giant monster or wacky space army, there are probably a hundred about casino heists, spy thrillers, organized crime, or modern depictions of war.

Yea, but gamers mostly seem to want more. Tell them their character can punch or just swing a weapon and they are unhappy at best. Tell them their character can go all "Lightning God Blaster" like Thor or Captain America in Avengers Endgame and they get all excited to play.

And a LOT of the 'gritty' movies are fake with CGI: people jumping or falling form heights, people impossibly dodging and shaking off hits. Plus the wacky "jump in the air, kick three other people, spin around in midair, somehow 'fly' backwards several feet, land on a wall sideways several feet off the ground, then jump sideways through a window, and land on a passing moving truck.

ironkid
2021-02-09, 12:06 PM
In default D&D, there's religious freedom, (mostly) racial tolerance, and magic is seen with awe, respect and maybe fear, but not necessaily inherently evil, and strangers are almost always immediately offered a dangerous (but handsomely paid) jobs. That's NOT medieval by ANY means. Why, thats and improvement over ANYWHERE in the real world.

A pseudo-medieval word offers many convenience for murder-hobos: you don't pay taxes, you don't have to have a passport to enter a different country, its lawless enough to give jobs to random bands of mercenaries.

More importantly, as somebody said, its more credible that you can solve things with swords. In a modern setting, a your average dungeon would very likely flooded with a compost lethal to monsters but harmless to precious metals and magical items; all handled by the countries military. Lack of technology is what makes DnD playable.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-09, 01:00 PM
There are tons of 5E examples. How about a path of wild magic barbarian shooting off wild magic surges each fight? A Warlock Hexblade? The Fighter Arcane Archer?
These are things that exist. They are not things that move the game past the bounds that already existed in D&D. People (including fighters, because magic weapons) have been throwing around bigger and flashier effects from day one.


Yea, but gamers mostly seem to want more. Tell them their character can punch or just swing a weapon and they are unhappy at best. Tell them their character can go all "Lightning God Blaster" like Thor or Captain America in Avengers Endgame and they get all excited to play.
I really don't know where we can go with this. You keep trying to define 'gamers' and 'gamers mostly' in ways I don't think many of the rest of us agree. Certainly not specific to 5e (5e, as well as 4e, have been a step less epic in scope compared to 3e, or heck Eldritch Wizardry and Arduin Grimoire in the oD&D era).


And a LOT of the 'gritty' movies are fake with CGI: people jumping or falling form heights, people impossibly dodging and shaking off hits. Plus the wacky "jump in the air, kick three other people, spin around in midair, somehow 'fly' backwards several feet, land on a wall sideways several feet off the ground, then jump sideways through a window, and land on a passing moving truck.
The special effects have improved, but the core concepts haven't changed. People impossibly dodging and shaking off hits in modern movies are shown with more detail, but certainly don't outdo Die Hard or 60s era James Bond in terms of unreality. I'm honestly not sure what point this is supposed to make anymore. People have successfully pointed out that there was plenty of sci fi in the 70s when D&D started and plenty of swords and sorcery movies post 2000, and you never did regroup after that and make clear your point or what you thought on the matter. This argument seems to have meandered into 'they have better special effects now' which doesn't really support any point I can see one way or another.

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-09, 03:06 PM
Yea, but gamers mostly seem to want more. Tell them their character can punch or just swing a weapon and they are unhappy at best. Tell them their character can go all "Lightning God Blaster" like Thor or Captain America in Avengers Endgame and they get all excited to play.

You're still over-generalizing and making a lot of assumptions I disagree with. Some people do that, others do not.


And a LOT of the 'gritty' movies are fake with CGI: people jumping or falling form heights, people impossibly dodging and shaking off hits. Plus the wacky "jump in the air, kick three other people, spin around in midair, somehow 'fly' backwards several feet, land on a wall sideways several feet off the ground, then jump sideways through a window, and land on a passing moving truck.

I honestly have no idea what you're talking about here. This sounds more like something that would happen in a wuxia film or a super hero movie like Captain America than something grounded like James Bond.

But yes, even James Bond or Jason Bourne surely use some CGI. That's part of the movie magic. The difference is in how it's used and what it depicts. You can use CGI to help show gritty things just like you can use it to help show fantastical things.

Let's take Die Hard as an example, because I find it interesting how it's changed over the years. In the 80s and 90s, Die Hard was a very practical action franchise featuring a very down-to-earth hero. Then in the last couple films in 2007 and 2013, John McClane suddenly became a larger than life action hero. In one sense, that could be seen as a logical progression of his character, but it feels like a departure from the series' roots. The latter films use CGI to make plane crashes and explosions more exciting, but that's because CGI has become much cheaper and easier to do since the earlier films were made.

Despite that, jumping out of CGI airplanes doesn't stop John McClane from continuing to be a gritty action hero who punches bad guys and feels pain when he gets shot. He's not a super hero who flies through the air and spin kicks the bad guys, or whatever. He may have more skills in driving and flying helicopters, but he's still a basic Fighter-type hero who shoots guns and punches the bad guys without any extra fancy moves. He's just higher level than he was before, with more knowledge and experience.

I don't have any problem with a character like John McClane, who just gets incrementally better at punching/shooting bad guys and surviving life threatening injuries. Watching him or playing as him, he doesn't need to have magical abilities for me to have a good time. There is satisfaction in simplicity.

Bugbear
2021-02-10, 11:47 AM
These are things that exist. They are not things that move the game past the bounds that already existed in D&D. People (including fighters, because magic weapons) have been throwing around bigger and flashier effects from day one.

For all of 1E and 2E D&D there were plenty of classes that did little more then 'hit a foe' with few special effects.



I really don't know where we can go with this. You keep trying to define 'gamers' and 'gamers mostly' in ways I don't think many of the rest of us agree. Certainly not specific to 5e (5e, as well as 4e, have been a step less epic in scope compared to 3e, or heck Eldritch Wizardry and Arduin Grimoire in the oD&D era).

So, yes there are people that play D&D super hardcore gritty. 5E even has core rules for it, and there is at least one 'gritty' sourcebook out there. So, if that is what you are saying, then OK.

The rest of the gamers, when offered a choice between:

A. Your character can hit with a weapon and do some damage

And

B.You can use Lightning Strike to charge your weapon with energy, do more damage, maybe stun your opponent and possibly shot a arc as a bonus action at a nearby foe.

Now, I meet few players when given both options pick "oh, I want to just hit a foe and do damage".




The special effects have improved, but the core concepts haven't changed. People impossibly dodging and shaking off hits in modern movies are shown with more detail, but certainly don't outdo Die Hard or 60s era James Bond in terms of unreality. I'm honestly not sure what point this is supposed to make anymore. People have successfully pointed out that there was plenty of sci fi in the 70s when D&D started and plenty of swords and sorcery movies post 2000, and you never did regroup after that and make clear your point or what you thought on the matter. This argument seems to have meandered into 'they have better special effects now' which doesn't really support any point I can see one way or another.

I'm not trying to talk about Hollywood: my point was what "fans" like.

If you put out a action movie with no CGI period and only limited 'real' stunts and no explosions.....most action movie fans, that don't specifically like that exact setting, won't like the movie.

If you put out a movie with near endless CGI spam over the whole movie with no real stunts and lots and lots and lots of explosions....then nearly all action movie fans will love the movie.

It's the same with video games:

80's action video game: hit the foe with a sword and they fall down and fade from the screen.

21st century: massive colorful animated spam covers the whole screen as the character swings their weapon and hits the foe and causes even more massive colorful animated spam, and more massive colorful animated spam.

AND this is NOT about "just" the bland fact that computers and special effects have gotten better so they AUTOMATICALLY put them in everything. You DO NOT have to use super computer special effects: It IS possible to make a movie with out them. Even an action type movie.


So my point is MOST gamers LIKE and WANT special flashy abilities in the game. And D&D over the years has added more and more and more effects.

BUT the setting lags way, way, way behind. A character can be covered with lightning and force effect spam......but in the setting it is still 'strike two rocks together to make a fire to cook for dinner'. A character can teleport around, but still have to walk 100 miles to the next city.

Gam
2021-02-10, 12:23 PM
Seems to be mostly an easy frame of reference, granted funny enough many new campaign settings seem to shy away from the weirdness of yesteryears mixing science fiction and fantasy into one, it was fun.

InvisibleBison
2021-02-10, 02:22 PM
The rest of the gamers, when offered a choice between:

A. Your character can hit with a weapon and do some damage

And

B.You can use Lightning Strike to charge your weapon with energy, do more damage, maybe stun your opponent and possibly shot a arc as a bonus action at a nearby foe.

Now, I meet few players when given both options pick "oh, I want to just hit a foe and do damage".

Do you have any evidence to back up this assertion?

Also, even if you're right, how many people are going with B because they like special effects, and how many are going with B because they like dealing more damage? Would there still be a preference for B if it had the same mechanical effects as A, and was only described differently?




If you put out a action movie with no CGI period and only limited 'real' stunts and no explosions.....most action movie fans, that don't specifically like that exact setting, won't like the movie.

If you put out a movie with near endless CGI spam over the whole movie with no real stunts and lots and lots and lots of explosions....then nearly all action movie fans will love the movie.

It's the same with video games:

80's action video game: hit the foe with a sword and they fall down and fade from the screen.

21st century: massive colorful animated spam covers the whole screen as the character swings their weapon and hits the foe and causes even more massive colorful animated spam, and more massive colorful animated spam.

Again, do you have any data to support these claims about changes in the preferences of movie and video game consumers?

Willie the Duck
2021-02-10, 03:10 PM
For all of 1E and 2E D&D there were plenty of classes that did little more then 'hit a foe' with few special effects.
First and foremost, no, not really. Because, as previously pointed out, magic items. Regardless, the movement in 'flash' from fighters then until fighters now is less than the flash provided by magic users, who have been able to throw balls of fire initially built around the same template as artillery weaponry since chainmail. That some (some) fighters now have flashier options than some fighters had then is a point you really need to flesh out on why you feel that it is meaningful.


So, yes there are people that play D&D super hardcore gritty. 5E even has core rules for it, and there is at least one 'gritty' sourcebook out there. So, if that is what you are saying, then OK.
I have no idea why you think that is what I am saying. I am saying that if you want us to take you and your point seriously that I think you ought to stop trying to tell us what 'the most of' gamers are like unless you have any sources to back it up, and generally approach this as a discussion where you made an assertion, and are therefore prepared to back it up in a meaningful way. Even bringing in some anecdotes from games you've personally played in would be more convincing that continuously repeating 'most gamers want _____<things we disagree most games want>.'
*btw, If you mean Hardcore Mode, that 'gritty sourcebook isn't for people who want to play gritty, it is for people who want to pat themselves on the back for how 'hardcore' they are.


The rest of the gamers, when offered a choice between:
A. Your character can hit with a weapon and do some damage
And
B.You can use Lightning Strike to charge your weapon with energy, do more damage, maybe stun your opponent and possibly shot a arc as a bonus action at a nearby foe.
Now, I meet few players when given both options pick "oh, I want to just hit a foe and do damage".
If someone wants the former situation, why are they picking D&D at all, current edition or otherwise? There are so many other game (Hero System, Mutants and Masterminds, Lancer, Riddle of Steel and its successors, Runequest/Mythras. etc.) who do any of these (or at least complex tactical combat) so much better than D&D. D&D, despite an increase in... what I will call 'character-build-derived expendable resource actions/abilities with riders and effects,' the combat portion of the game is still mostly about using up your opponent's hit points.


I'm not trying to talk about Hollywood: my point was what "fans" like.

If you put out a action movie with no CGI period and only limited 'real' stunts and no explosions.....most action movie fans, that don't specifically like that exact setting, won't like the movie.

If you put out a movie with near endless CGI spam over the whole movie with no real stunts and lots and lots and lots of explosions....then nearly all action movie fans will love the movie.
Leaving aside all the CGI/explosion movies that failed at the box office (or, like Transformers, sold tickets but have been critically panned), this comparison seems incredibly lopsided. They're being compared to an Action movie that is only allowed "limited 'real' stunts" -- what exactly does that mean? Does the original Die Hard count? What about 60s James Bond?


AND this is NOT about "just" the bland fact that computers and special effects have gotten better so they AUTOMATICALLY put them in everything. You DO NOT have to use super computer special effects: It IS possible to make a movie with out them. Even an action type movie.
Yes. The Bourn Identity movies do a good job of using subtle computer effects to mostly put people in places where they aren't, but otherwise aren't crazy over-the-top like the Transformer movies or the like. Both exist in modern times. Both existed in the past (just with the effects looking less impressive at the time).


So my point is MOST gamers LIKE and WANT special flashy abilities in the game. And D&D over the years has added more and more and more effects.
You keep saying this but not showing it in any way whatsoever.


BUT the setting lags way, way, way behind. A character can be covered with lightning and force effect spam......but in the setting it is still 'strike two rocks together to make a fire to cook for dinner'. A character can teleport around, but still have to walk 100 miles to the next city.
The characters in D&D are coded as having rare abilities, yes. Others in that world who do not have access to routine magic very well may have to use flint and steel (which is pretty far removed from 'strike two rocks together,' but whatever) to light their fire or to walk instead of use magic flight or teleportation. That is part of the power fantasy of D&D -- you are (or quickly become) powerful people. Honestly, that's probably a reason why fantasy is more popular than sci-fi in gaming -- in science fiction, your powerful PC can often be outclassed by any old foe with a better spaceship. set of power armor, etc.

Regardless, what is systematically not clear is why you think that the desire to garner special abilities (which again, I do not think you have shown has progressed since the 70s) means that the D&D setting should have moved to science fiction. The two do not seem to be correlated in any particular way.

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-10, 08:53 PM
Okay, so Bugbear's argument appears to be:

1) Swordmages or Fighter/Mage multiclass characters or archetypes exist.

2) "Most players" prefer these to regular Fighters because they do more than just hit for damage.

3) Therefore, why should mundane Fighters even still exist in the setting? And therefore, why should mundane anything still exist in the setting?


The third point is where he is jumping the shark, even considering that many people in the thread are also disagreeing with the second point.

The assertion that players preferring non-mundane characters (which again, many people are challenging) should lead to a sweeping change to the general D&D-style campaign setting is a bit ridiculous. He's essentially arguing for the Tippy-verse, where everyone is magic because obviously everyone would want to be magic, and therefore we can use magic to raise the quality of life of everyone from the medieval to modern or futuristic levels of security and convenience.



I'm going to go out on a limb and say that WotC, who is actually able to poll gamers and study focus groups and perform market research, probably has a better idea of what "most gamers" want than Bugbear does.

Pex
2021-02-10, 08:58 PM
You can have both, as a contest did way back when in 3E had a certain person named Keith Baker convince WOTC to modernize D&D and gave us Eberron if you don't want to do the work yourself. People travel by train and plane. They have appliances to keep food cold and heat it up. They have indoor plumbing and a metropolis of skyscrapers. They have robots!

LibraryOgre
2021-02-11, 09:46 AM
You can have both, as a contest did way back when in 3E had a certain person named Keith Baker convince WOTC to modernize D&D and gave us Eberron if you don't want to do the work yourself. People travel by train and plane. They have appliances to keep food cold and heat it up. They have indoor plumbing and a metropolis of skyscrapers. They have robots!

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A warforged's got oil for blood
Metal and wood and steel and bronze
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day's orders and ya ain't free yet
Sweet Maker don't you scrap me 'cause I don't know....
What happens to a warforged when he ain't no mo'

If you see me coming
Better step aside
Lotta men didn't, lotta men died
Got one fist of iron, the other of steel
If the left one don't get you
Then the right one will

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day's orders and ya ain't free yet
Sweet Maker don't you scrap me 'cause I don't know....
What happens to a warforged when he ain't no mo'

I was made by the Cannith, I was rune-forged
Given a sword and sent to the wars
I was raised by a sergeant on the front line
Though it's made of stone, got a heart like a lion

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day's orders and ya ain't free yet
Sweet Maker don't you scrap me 'cause I don't know....
What happens to a warforged when he ain't no mo'

kyoryu
2021-02-11, 11:07 AM
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that WotC, who is actually able to poll gamers and study focus groups and perform market research, probably has a better idea of what "most gamers" want than Bugbear does.

Every survey I've ever seen has "human fighter" as the most common race/class combo.

Telok
2021-02-11, 11:17 AM
Every survey I've ever seen has "human fighter" as the most common race/class combo.

"How to Lie with Statistics", a $5 to $10 book that's possibly one of the best non-math explanations of all the ways stats, studies, and survey data can fail, be manipulated, or get misrepresented.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tLP1TcwMi02sSwzYPSST8rPz1bIyC9X KMlXyMlMVSjPLMlQKC5JLMksLslMLgYAO1oPJA&q=book+how+to+lie+with+statistics&oq=book+%22how+to+lie&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46j0l2.9327j0j7&client=ms-android-htc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#scso=_alclYIX6DOHE0PEPvPG8qA821:0

Democratus
2021-02-11, 11:35 AM
"How to Lie with Statistics", a $5 to $10 book that's possibly one of the best non-math explanations of all the ways stats, studies, and survey data can fail, be manipulated, or get misrepresented.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tLP1TcwMi02sSwzYPSST8rPz1bIyC9X KMlXyMlMVSjPLMlQKC5JLMksLslMLgYAO1oPJA&q=book+how+to+lie+with+statistics&oq=book+%22how+to+lie&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46j0l2.9327j0j7&client=ms-android-htc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#scso=_alclYIX6DOHE0PEPvPG8qA821:0

Do you have any evidence to show that the race/class surveys are lies or manipulations?

kyoryu
2021-02-11, 12:52 PM
"How to Lie with Statistics", a $5 to $10 book that's possibly one of the best non-math explanations of all the ways stats, studies, and survey data can fail, be manipulated, or get misrepresented.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tLP1TcwMi02sSwzYPSST8rPz1bIyC9X KMlXyMlMVSjPLMlQKC5JLMksLslMLgYAO1oPJA&q=book+how+to+lie+with+statistics&oq=book+%22how+to+lie&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46j0l2.9327j0j7&client=ms-android-htc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#scso=_alclYIX6DOHE0PEPvPG8qA821:0

As Twain said, there's three types of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics.

That said, I don't see a particular agenda in these cases to drive any kind of manipulation.

Scots Dragon
2021-02-11, 03:35 PM
As Twain said, there's three types of lies - lies, damned lies, and statistics.

That said, I don't see a particular agenda in these cases to drive any kind of manipulation.

Notably, it's easy to see why it's the case, especially for beginning players.

Human is the easiest race to play. It's approximately average, and you kinda know how to act like a human from your own life. There aren't always that many stat adjustments or extra abilities to write down, at most you get a bonus feat or skill point.

Fighter is the easiest class to play. You have a sword, you hit things with the sword. You don't have to rely on sneaking around, keeping track of spells, or anything else.

And since it's what you start with, it's what you become used to.

Now, I'm sure an optimiser can say something about battle masters being more complicated than that, or how it's actually really hard to build things properly in third edition, but I'd point out that most parties don't optimise so strongly, and I'd also point out that a beginning player is likely also part of a beginning gaming group where nobody else really knows how anything works either.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-11, 03:38 PM
Why is D&D still Medieval?

Because swords are cool.

Scots Dragon
2021-02-11, 03:41 PM
Why is D&D still Medieval?

Because swords are cool.

Oh so very cool.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b0/37/3a/b0373abd2a71320de2e27079ce267fc3.jpg

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-11, 05:40 PM
Notably, it's easy to see why it's the case, especially for beginning players.

Human is the easiest race to play. It's approximately average, and you kinda know how to act like a human from your own life. There aren't always that many stat adjustments or extra abilities to write down, at most you get a bonus feat or skill point.

Fighter is the easiest class to play. You have a sword, you hit things with the sword. You don't have to rely on sneaking around, keeping track of spells, or anything else.

And since it's what you start with, it's what you become used to.

Now, I'm sure an optimiser can say something about battle masters being more complicated than that, or how it's actually really hard to build things properly in third edition, but I'd point out that most parties don't optimise so strongly, and I'd also point out that a beginning player is likely also part of a beginning gaming group where nobody else really knows how anything works either.

I've seen many people play wizards or other casters as their first class, but it does seemed to depend a lot on 'read the book beforehand'. But it's part of why I like skill based systems so much, because they tend to have vastly more possible 'simple' characters.

Although I've also considered using Romance of the Perilous Land for new players, due to it in many ways being a simpler version of D&D with only one magic-using class.

I'd like to see more pre-medieval games. Just had a new classical Greek one delivered today, I own a great Stone Age, a pretty nice warring states China game as well as that company's iron age Celt (British Isles) one, and would love to know of a decent one for Indian, Native American, or Egyptian fantasy. Because swords are cool, but I've played enough 'medieval' games that I wouldn't mind playing in a game inspired by earlier time periods.

Telok
2021-02-11, 06:06 PM
Do you have any evidence to show that the race/class surveys are lies or manipulations?

Ah, you've made an assumption based on the title of the book. The book is concerned with how statistics can mislead, not all of which is intentional.

Basically all surveys of people will have multiple inherent biases and most surveys have areas of ambiguity that require interpretation. Professionals and experts involved with making and running surveys try to mitigate these flaws and still semi-regularly come to incorrect conclusions. Based on past experience with WotC, it's surveys and results I simply have no faith that they would pay for professional survey and analysis services. So, not saying that anything iffy is going on, just that I think they have shoddy surveys that they analyze based on their own unchallenged assumptions.

Duiker
2021-02-12, 02:51 AM
BUT the setting lags way, way, way behind. A character can be covered with lightning and force effect spam......but in the setting it is still 'strike two rocks together to make a fire to cook for dinner'. A character can teleport around, but still have to walk 100 miles to the next city.

Are you saying that D&D prohibits campfires that aren't made by two rocks being struck? Or are you saying that it's weird that there aren't any firestarter kits from REI in the item lists? Because you could throw those on there for 1gp or whatever.

Is there a requirement to walk 100 miles somewhere? Or are we imagining a setting where everyone has easy access to 7th level conjuration spells? Like... if you have Teleport, then Teleport. What's stopping you, exactly?

I'm really baffled as to what kinds of setting upgrades you're expecting.

AdAstra
2021-02-12, 05:43 AM
For all of 1E and 2E D&D there were plenty of classes that did little more then 'hit a foe' with few special effects.



So, yes there are people that play D&D super hardcore gritty. 5E even has core rules for it, and there is at least one 'gritty' sourcebook out there. So, if that is what you are saying, then OK.

The rest of the gamers, when offered a choice between:

A. Your character can hit with a weapon and do some damage

And

B.You can use Lightning Strike to charge your weapon with energy, do more damage, maybe stun your opponent and possibly shot a arc as a bonus action at a nearby foe.

Now, I meet few players when given both options pick "oh, I want to just hit a foe and do damage".




I'm not trying to talk about Hollywood: my point was what "fans" like.

If you put out a action movie with no CGI period and only limited 'real' stunts and no explosions.....most action movie fans, that don't specifically like that exact setting, won't like the movie.

If you put out a movie with near endless CGI spam over the whole movie with no real stunts and lots and lots and lots of explosions....then nearly all action movie fans will love the movie.

It's the same with video games:

80's action video game: hit the foe with a sword and they fall down and fade from the screen.

21st century: massive colorful animated spam covers the whole screen as the character swings their weapon and hits the foe and causes even more massive colorful animated spam, and more massive colorful animated spam.

AND this is NOT about "just" the bland fact that computers and special effects have gotten better so they AUTOMATICALLY put them in everything. You DO NOT have to use super computer special effects: It IS possible to make a movie with out them. Even an action type movie.


So my point is MOST gamers LIKE and WANT special flashy abilities in the game. And D&D over the years has added more and more and more effects.

BUT the setting lags way, way, way behind. A character can be covered with lightning and force effect spam......but in the setting it is still 'strike two rocks together to make a fire to cook for dinner'. A character can teleport around, but still have to walk 100 miles to the next city.

Um, given that gritty warfare shooters and live action films with conservative CGI are very, very popular, this very much does not hold true. In general, people praise interesting practical effects and direction over pure flash. Things like Mad Max are both popular and stick. Even what many might consider bottom of the barrel mass-market shlock doesn't just put a million colors on the screen every time anyone does anything. Honestly the attitude of treating use of lots of color and vibrant special effects as "spam" is pretty insulting, since lots of movies do use these things and are all the better for it, but it's used skillfully. And people have been making vibrant colorful movies with special effects for as long as movies in color have existed. Back when there wasn't even colored film, and people painted individual frames. Yet even when it was a complete novelty, when film was still figuring itself out, it wasn't what everyone wanted.

If everyone thought the more CGI the better, no one would watch anything but cartoons. After all, those are nothing but special effects. Yet as is cartoons are often considered a lesser form of entertainment, and when they do reach mass appeal they tend to be pretty tame in terms of effects, like The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, which largely rely on comedy rather than action, and are certainly not visually thrilling at all times.

If most gamers wanted a superhero-like or modern setting for DnD, then you'd figure that homebrew for it or official settings would be all the rage. But they're very much not. You absolutely get high magic practically modern settings like Eberron, but even that for all its quality is just very well-loved, not completely dominant. d20 Modern is hardly forgotten, but to my knowledge was never particularly popular. The fact that these settings exist, are considered serviceable or even great, yet are not even close to the only things people play, is about as obvious an indication as any that people do in fact like other things.

P. G. Macer
2021-02-12, 05:55 AM
Regarding the ”Is Human Fighter really the most common race-class combo in 5e?” debate, I’m leaning more towards Telok’s view of things. The most common source for the statistic in 5e is D&D Beyond data. However, I have yet to see evidence that the D&D Beyond userbase is statistically similar to the general D&D playerbase, so it could potentially be a non-indicative sample. Furthermore, not every PC built in DDB is played, so we have to take into account which characters actually receive playtime;I have no idea how one would accomplish that.

As for WotC’s own data, while I trust that more than D&D Beyond, Telok again raises some decent points as to the quality of WotC’s data collection, which I am treating as more of a wild card than an outright negative.

It’s almost 3am where I am; I may come back too this post when I can think more coherently.

Mechalich
2021-02-12, 06:59 AM
Regarding the ”Is Human Fighter really the most common race-class combo in 5e?” debate, I’m leaning more towards Telok’s view of things. The most common source for the statistic in 5e is D&D Beyond data. However, I have yet to see evidence that the D&D Beyond userbase is statistically similar to the general D&D playerbase, so it could potentially be a non-indicative sample. Furthermore, not every PC built in DDB is played, so we have to take into account which characters actually receive playtime;I have no idea how one would accomplish that.

As for WotC’s own data, while I trust that more than D&D Beyond, Telok again raises some decent points as to the quality of WotC’s data collection, which I am treating as more of a wild card than an outright negative.

It’s almost 3am where I am; I may come back too this post when I can think more coherently.

The most common fantasy protagonist is a human, by something like a 100 to 1 margin. Warrior is also the most common character concept for said protagonist. That human and fighter would be the most common combination is logical.

If anything the trend in modern fantasy is against offering non-human options at all.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-12, 07:38 AM
If anything the trend in modern fantasy is against offering non-human options at all.

By this I feel a great sadness and wish this won't lead where I feel it is leading.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-12, 08:09 AM
If anything the trend in modern fantasy is against offering non-human options at all.

Which isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Playing a human in a silly hat is much more fun when we all acknowledge the existence of the dragon-feather hat.

You also get the middle ground of providing different cultures of humans instead of different races which can be... problematic. To use D&D terms it's gone when they're getting free skills or Cantrips, dodgy when they're getting stat boosts or unique powers. Not that there's anything inherently wrong about giving Rohirrim +2 Dexterity, just that you have to be very careful with how you frame it (and for the love of Pelor don't give them minuses).

Lord Raziere
2021-02-12, 08:26 AM
Which isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Playing a human in a silly hat is much more fun when we all acknowledge the existence of the dragon-feather hat.


No its depressing, leave my visually appealing species alone, humans are boring. Don't make me have to play them, I already put up with it in my anime roleplaying, I want to play a species that I'm actually interested in elsewhere.

Willie the Duck
2021-02-12, 09:07 AM
"How to Lie with Statistics", a $5 to $10 book that's possibly one of the best non-math explanations of all the ways stats, studies, and survey data can fail, be manipulated, or get misrepresented.
https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tLP1TcwMi02sSwzYPSST8rPz1bIyC9X KMlXyMlMVSjPLMlQKC5JLMksLslMLgYAO1oPJA&q=book+how+to+lie+with+statistics&oq=book+%22how+to+lie&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j46j0l2.9327j0j7&client=ms-android-htc&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#scso=_alclYIX6DOHE0PEPvPG8qA821:0

Ah, you've made an assumption based on the title of the book.
I'm not sure what you expected them to do with your posting. Just dropping the link in here without also including an explanation as to what parts of the survey in question you think are non-representative and why is vaguely like wandering into the middle of a discussion and shouting 'Fallacy!' as loud as you can instead of formulating a thought and explaining it to others. Sure, those of us with a data science background can impute* your point from missing data, but for anyone else, you've just dropped a link to a book slightly too expensive to buy just to figure out another poster's point for them (mind you, they could have asked 'and what conclusions did you draw from this book, that you consider pertinent to this discussion?')


Basically all surveys of people will have multiple inherent biases and most surveys have areas of ambiguity that require interpretation. Professionals and experts involved with making and running surveys try to mitigate these flaws and still semi-regularly come to incorrect conclusions. Based on past experience with WotC, it's surveys and results I simply have no faith that they would pay for professional survey and analysis services. So, not saying that anything iffy is going on, just that I think they have shoddy surveys that they analyze based on their own unchallenged assumptions.

The most common source for the statistic in 5e is D&D Beyond data. However, I have yet to see evidence that the D&D Beyond userbase is statistically similar to the general D&D playerbase, so it could potentially be a non-indicative sample. Furthermore, not every PC built in DDB is played, so we have to take into account which characters actually receive playtime;I have no idea how one would accomplish that.
There we go, actual meat to the matter. I tend to agree. WotC's surveys definitely seem to be skewed. Usually with regards to what questions they bother asking. Regarding P. G. Macer's point about D&D Beyond's character's made being non-representative of total gamer populations actual character's played (and at what proportion), I'd also agree. In particular, I suspect that D&D Beyond includes a whole lot of first level characters that are rolled up, but not played (or perhaps printed off and played in person, without updates back to D&DB as to how they progress or how long they are played).

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-12, 10:45 AM
No its depressing, leave my visually appealing species alone, humans are boring. Don't make me have to play them, I already put up with it in my anime roleplaying, I want to play a species that I'm actually interested in elsewhere.

Visually appealing? 90% of the time we're talking about 'human, but' physically as well.


I am sick of all-elcen parties, dwarves don't interest me anymore, and I see no 'race' that couldn't be done better with humans. Because if you put the work in humans can also be visually appealing.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-12, 10:53 AM
Visually appealing? 90% of the time we're talking about 'human, but' physically as well.


I am sick of all-elcen parties, dwarves don't interest me anymore, and I see no 'race' that couldn't be done better with humans. Because if you put the work in humans can also be visually appealing.

It is one thing I much prefer in modern games, compared to those from the 90s and earlier... concrete, mechanical, reasons to play humans, at all levels of play. Shadowrun is the earliest I can think of that had it (putting playing a metatype at a premium on character creation), but 3e really put humans as a great race to play, mechanically.

kyoryu
2021-02-12, 11:00 AM
Specifically, I'm talking a wide variety of statistics and surveys, across multiple media, between RPGs, MMOs, etc.

I do believe it to be, effectively, true.

Keep in mind that people posting on message boards are not a representative sample, and that we're talking a plurality here, not a majority.

Telok
2021-02-12, 11:14 AM
I'm not sure what you expected them to do with your posting. Just dropping the link in here without also including an explanation as to what parts of the survey in question you think are non-representative and why is vaguely like wandering into the middle of a discussion and shouting 'Fallacy!' as loud as you can instead of formulating a thought and explaining it to others. Sure, those of us with a data science background can impute* your point from missing data, but for anyone else, you've just dropped a link to a book slightly too expensive to buy just to figure out another poster's point for them (mind you, they could have asked 'and what conclusions did you draw from this book, that you consider pertinent to this discussion?')
Ah, I was unclear. My apologies, I made a mistake.

As to databases... I inherited one, a live business critical one, that the users were entering "test" data into in order to check different outcomes. There were other issues, but that alone was skewing official results. To this day all reports I produce using that data have a warning on them that the data from 1996 to 2017 is unreliable due to "garbage in, garbage out". I fully believe that the D&D Beyond db has characters in it that are "hey, a new thing got added, make a character to check it out" from the customers and that there may well not be any way to tell if it's actually a "real" data point. People, are a problem.

P. G. Macer
2021-02-12, 02:02 PM
The most common fantasy protagonist is a human, by something like a 100 to 1 margin. Warrior is also the most common character concept for said protagonist. That human and fighter would be the most common combination is logical.

If anything the trend in modern fantasy is against offering non-human options at all.

Oh, I would be totally unsurprised if human fighter is the most popular combination after all; I’m just not convinced the evidence presented is conclusive enough to state it as absolute fact.

dps
2021-02-12, 02:14 PM
Sci fi was huge long before D&D was born.

Lookup Dan Dare and Flash Gordon.

Yeah, the comment about SF getting it's first big boost in the late 1980s shows a remarkable lack of historical perspective.

Lord Raziere
2021-02-12, 04:32 PM
Visually appealing? 90% of the time we're talking about 'human, but' physically as well.


I am sick of all-elfen parties, dwarves don't interest me anymore, and I see no 'race' that couldn't be done better with humans. Because if you put the work in humans can also be visually appealing.

I'm not talking about those races, screw them, I'm talking dragonborn, tieflings, tabaxi, warforged and so on. I don't wanna play human, I wanna play a dragon and I'm already have to make a compromise by playing dragonborn so that people don't their knickers in a twist over balance, and now your wanting to take even that bit away from me, I have no sympathy to you and your concerns and no interest in any idea for making humans visually appealing unless your talking about transforming them into the species I want at character creation.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-12, 08:23 PM
I don't think D&D was ever all that medieval.

KillianHawkeye
2021-02-13, 01:39 AM
Just to add a little anecdote, I absolutely chose the human fighter pregen character for my first game of Pathfinder 2nd Edition, and it was 100% because of the simplicity factor. IMO, the best way to learn a new game system is to start with an easy character.

And to be honest, I don't care what Bugbear says, there's just something I find satisfying about hitting monsters with sticks. The sticks don't need even need to be fancy! Give me a hammer, and the orcs and goblins all start to look like nails.

But in all seriousness, simplicity as an aesthetic is something that I feel people sometimes overlook, and it has a real value in art and media.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-13, 01:45 AM
I'm not talking about those races, screw them, I'm talking dragonborn, tieflings, tabaxi, warforged and so on. I don't wanna play human, I wanna play a dragon and I'm already have to make a compromise by playing dragonborn so that people don't their knickers in a twist over balance, and now your wanting to take even that bit away from me, I have no sympathy to you and your concerns and no interest in any idea for making humans visually appealing unless your talking about transforming them into the species I want at character creation.

So basically, you want a human in an incredibly silly hat?

Lord Raziere
2021-02-13, 02:41 AM
So basically, you want a human in an incredibly silly hat?

Let answer your question with another question:
DnD is known to make shortcuts, biologically with its races, morally and philosophically with alignment, with classes it makes the shortcut of portraying the most archetypical and generic versions of each, making shortcuts historically by not actually portraying a medieval world. Everyone knows and accepts this. These elements are defended and seen as taken "apart of DnD".

So why in the name of the Seven Heavens is the races psychology suddenly being held to this academic standard of mental difference that we all know can't be achieved in any realistic capacity, that DnD never will reach for and why are you bent out of shape about ruining other peoples fun just because that standard can never be achieved?

Its none of your business what I want to play. Nor is it your right to deny me it just because you don't like it. If your term for it is supposed to shame me, it doesn't. Its another shortcut. My advice is that you accept that Dnd races will always be this way, and move on. Myself, I always find more depth in portraying the individual as themselves rather than as a member of something else. Besides I don't do silliness much. I do conflict and suffering. You want something to be anything more than a comedic joke you put real pain and tragedy into it. They can still happy even humorous yes. But your "silly hats" only exist because the effort was never made to make them properly into cool helms, scratched, dented by time and suffering.

The lack of such suffering is why so many imitators of an original thing fail after all. They imitate the looks and what they as good about something without bothering to study the pain that is the heart, the core of it. Of course I'm not saying the races will can or should be changed to experience more suffering- I'd be hypocritical and foolish to think I have any hope of changing how they are made in the books any more than you- but at least I can extrapolate what pain could logically be caused from their current depictions and develop individual PCs who portray that pain well and thus move beyond being a "silly hat" played for pure comedy. As for other people, they are free to play their hats as silly as possible. Their style of roleplaying is just different from mine, not worse or better. However I will say that if you want them to not be silly hats....you got to stop being silly and start portraying some actual suffering maybe even horror. And if they don't want to do that? Oh well. Can't be helped. :smallamused:

Pex
2021-02-13, 03:53 AM
No problem with non-humans having all kinds of buttons to push to do something cool and/or passive nice things and/or interesting roleplaying hooks. That doesn't mean humans should be denied their own.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-13, 04:21 AM
Let answer your question with another question:
DnD is known to make shortcuts, biologically with its races, morally and philosophically with alignment, with classes it makes the shortcut of portraying the most archetypical and generic versions of each, making shortcuts historically by not actually portraying a medieval world. Everyone knows and accepts this. These elements are defended and seen as taken "apart of DnD".

Wow, it's like you're listing all the reasons I'm not interested in playing D&D. Can you edit that to fit 'the class system is needlessly restrictive' in there somewhere?

Like seriously, I'm not saying that any of that is something I'm happy with either.


So why in the name of the Seven Heavens is the races psychology suddenly being held to this academic standard of mental difference that we all know can't be achieved in any realistic capacity, that DnD never will reach for and why are you bent out of shape about ruining other peoples fun just because that standard can never be achieved?

Because it's my opinion, and it makes worldbuilding easier for me if I don't have to make each culture have a silly physical trait, or try to do mental lairs to work out how fish people would love when I'm not a fish person. There ain't no troglodytes here because they're ain't no troglodytes here.


Its none of your business what I want to play. Nor is it your right to deny me it just because you don't like it. If your term for it is supposed to shame me, it doesn't. Its another shortcut. My advice is that you accept that Dnd races will always be this way, and move on. Myself, I always find more depth in portraying the individual as themselves rather than as a member of something else. Besides I don't do silliness much. I do conflict and suffering. You want something to be anything more than a comedic joke you put real pain and tragedy into it. They can still happy even humorous yes. But your "silly hats" only exist because the effort was never made to make them properly into cool helms, scratched, dented by time and suffering.

Because you're the one who carried my view depressing? I didn't originally reply to you, I replied to a different postet, and you found my view so offensive you had to tell me I was having badwrongfun by not including intelligent nonhumans.


The lack of such suffering is why so many imitators of an original thing fail after all. They imitate the looks and what they as good about something without bothering to study the pain that is the heart, the core of it. Of course I'm not saying the races will can or should be changed to experience more suffering- I'd be hypocritical and foolish to think I have any hope of changing how they are made in the books any more than you- but at least I can extrapolate what pain could logically be caused from their current depictions and develop individual PCs who portray that pain well and thus move beyond being a "silly hat" played for pure comedy. As for other people, they are free to play their hats as silly as possible. Their style of roleplaying is just different from mine, not worse or better. However I will say that if you want them to not be silly hats....you got to stop being silly and start portraying some actual suffering maybe even horror. And if they don't want to do that? Oh well. Can't be helped. :smallamused:

Which has nothing to do with my actual point, but sure, putt words in my mouth. For clarity here's my original post, where I'm talking about hats and how to use them, and mainly saying 'let's Amit were playing humans in hats, because then we can more easily discuss and play with the hats' (or at least, that was the intent).


Which isn't a bad thing in my opinion. Playing a human in a silly hat is much more fun when we all acknowledge the existence of the dragon-feather hat.

You also get the middle ground of providing different cultures of humans instead of different races which can be... problematic. To use D&D terms it's gone when they're getting free skills or Cantrips, dodgy when they're getting stat boosts or unique powers. Not that there's anything inherently wrong about giving Rohirrim +2 Dexterity, just that you have to be very careful with how you frame it (and for the love of Pelor don't give them minuses).

AdAstra
2021-02-13, 06:48 AM
Wow, it's like you're listing all the reasons I'm not interested in playing D&D. Can you edit that to fit 'the class system is needlessly restrictive' in there somewhere?

Like seriously, I'm not saying that any of that is something I'm happy with either.



Because it's my opinion, and it makes worldbuilding easier for me if I don't have to make each culture have a silly physical trait, or try to do mental lairs to work out how fish people would love when I'm not a fish person. There ain't no troglodytes here because they're ain't no troglodytes here.



Because you're the one who carried my view depressing? I didn't originally reply to you, I replied to a different postet, and you found my view so offensive you had to tell me I was having badwrongfun by not including intelligent nonhumans.



Which has nothing to do with my actual point, but sure, putt words in my mouth. For clarity here's my original post, where I'm talking about hats and how to use them, and mainly saying 'let's Amit were playing humans in hats, because then we can more easily discuss and play with the hats' (or at least, that was the intent).


Wait, what's your definition of hats in this case? Because it seems like sometimes you talk about it like playing a dragon is just being a human in a funny hat, sometimes not. Normally a Hat is basically a stereotype, mostly cultural, but the way you're using it doesn't always seem to hew to that?

People do have a right to have opinions on your opinions.It's an opinion after all, which is an unassailable right. This whole thread's all about someone's opinion and most of it has consisted of people poking holes in it.

Plus in many cases the appeal of playing things that aren't humans (or even just playing humans who aren't you) is specifically the appeal of that alternative psychology and experience. You can't actually understand it fully, what with being a human, but it can be interesting to explore and think through what it might be like. Or just being able to look cool. I think games probably would be lesser if they didn't allow that.

Not even mentioning that in many cases, the psychology isn't all that different. A fish is usually not as smart as a person, but it's not like the things that drive it are completely incomprehensible to us. It wants to eat, avoid getting eaten, and ideally live at least long enough to secure some kind of legacy (in this case in the form of more fish). Dragons are pretty different from humans in many ways, but they really don't have drives that are that alien to us. If anything, the fiction of dragons is highly relatable to a person. Lazy, wealth-craving, substantially longer-lived and more intelligent than most of the life they share this world with, sounds pretty familiar. If anything a lot of popular culture overstates how alien even other humans are (seeing all the articles about how totally alien my culture supposedly is is both fascinating and also rather annoying).

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-13, 08:02 AM
So basically, you want a human in an incredibly silly hat?

You're coming across as very reductionist and belittling, you know.

Max_Killjoy
2021-02-13, 08:06 AM
Not even mentioning that in many cases, the psychology isn't all that different. A fish is usually not as smart as a person, but it's not like the things that drive it are completely incomprehensible to us. It wants to eat, avoid getting eaten, and ideally live at least long enough to secure some kind of legacy (in this case in the form of more fish). Dragons are pretty different from humans in many ways, but they really don't have drives that are that alien to us. If anything, the fiction of dragons is highly relatable to a person. Lazy, wealth-craving, substantially longer-lived and more intelligent than most of the life they share this world with, sounds pretty familiar. If anything a lot of popular culture overstates how alien even other humans are (seeing all the articles about how totally alien my culture supposedly is is both fascinating and also rather annoying).


Sadly, we've seen a resurgence of the idea that the minute details that make us different supposedly overwhelm all the things we have in common, and make it impossible for us to understand or empathize.

Tanarii
2021-02-13, 10:57 AM
Wait, what's your definition of hats in this case? Because it seems like sometimes you talk about it like playing a dragon is just being a human in a funny hat, sometimes not. Normally a Hat is basically a stereotype, mostly cultural, but the way you're using it doesn't always seem to hew to that?"A human in a silly hat" is kinda the exact opposite of "a race of hats". They both speak to race Psychology / personality. Or rather the first to physical only difference lacking psychological, and the second to one identical psychological difference only.

A "race of hats" are ones with one very strong psychological difference from humans, one so strong it's the only thing that defines them and it becomes a caricature for the personality of every member of the race, allowing no or only very difficult variation between members of the race.

A "human in a silly hat" are races that are psychologically identical to humans, merely looking physically different, often wildly so.

Possibly we need something like "you in a silly hat" to describe an avatar character, where it's just the player's personality, but playing a PC. :smallamused: (Note, I find avatars fine, especially among new to roleplaying players.)

DwarfFighter
2021-02-13, 01:01 PM
I'm told the DA1-5 modules (Temple of the Frog, The City of the God's) introduced a lot of sci-fi elements. There is also Expedition to Barrier Peaks.

D&D is what you put into it. The default level of classes and equipment sets this to a medieval level, true. This appears to be sufficiently popular to get people interested. I see no problem here.

Leon
2021-02-14, 03:29 AM
The High the Tech level is the less important "magic" is and magic is what lets most people get their power trip on.

TridentOfMirth
2021-02-14, 03:33 PM
Why have we never seen a more updated setting? I mean really updated closer to modern day. How many games even use the Medieval setting? Or do most use a much more modern one anyway?

So, why don't the makes of D&D update?

They DID update. In the early 2000s, WotC was producing "medieval" D&D as well as Star Wars and d20 Modern/Future games. Star Wars proved to be very popular while d20 Modern/Future really languished. It languished, not due to lack of support (it had loads of books and dragon/dungeon articles) but because it was simply less popular than "medieval" D&D.

Look at the RPG industry in general - outside of Star Wars (and 40k for a bit), there are not really any sci-fi games that dominate the sales charts or grab zeitgeist and become wildly popular.

Satinavian
2021-02-15, 02:42 AM
Look at the RPG industry in general - outside of Star Wars (and 40k for a bit), there are not really any sci-fi games that dominate the sales charts or grab zeitgeist and become wildly popular.There have been a couple more over the years. Traveller and SR for example were at least at times quite big. For modern but not SF there was always the whole WoD line and also CoC. And then don't forget all those Superhero RPGs.

D20 modern had a hard time not because no one is playing modern games but because everything it did, other, well established system could already do. And those had often properly flashed out settings. Or rules that were tailor-made for the setting at hand.

I mean, when i want to do a Star Trek campaign, would i try to do it it with D20 modern, one of half the dozen official Star Trek TPGs or use another generic without the D20 baggage like GURPS ?

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-15, 06:49 AM
They DID update. In the early 2000s, WotC was producing "medieval" D&D as well as Star Wars and d20 Modern/Future games. Star Wars proved to be very popular while d20 Modern/Future really languished. It languished, not due to lack of support (it had loads of books and dragon/dungeon articles) but because it was simply less popular than "medieval" D&D.

Look at the RPG industry in general - outside of Star Wars (and 40k for a bit), there are not really any sci-fi games that dominate the sales charts or grab zeitgeist and become wildly popular.

To be fair to d20 Modern it failed due to a mix of two things: the d20 system not being that great outside of D&D, and other games already being in the space it to move into. I'm actually sightly more interested in it now than I was at the time (when I had never even heard of it), but as I already own Modern AGE it would be somewhat redundant.

D20 Modern tried to do modern day roleplaying when World of Darkness was at it's height, it tried to do space opera when both Traveller and Star Wars games were available. It tried to do historical fantasy when Ars Magica existed. It tried to do low magic fantasy, but Runequest already existed. It tried to be a universal system, but didn't have simplicity in the way the soon to be released Savage World's did, or the sheer in depth research that goes into GURPS books.

d20 Modern might have been saved by better compatibility with D&D, but that's pure conjecture. I know I might have loved to have futuristic weapons in my teenage D&D games, and the DMG entries were never that detailed.

The OGL might have also caused WotC some problems here, because there was d20 everything. Although the same thing has happened with 5e WotC also isn't releasing anything outside D&D roleplaying-wise, which means that but even Adventures in Middle-earth (which I'm somewhat annoyed has stopped) is in the same exact niche as what they're selling.

As a side note, my go-to generic right now is Modern AGE using GURPS books for additional support, mainly because many people don't have the patience for GURPS character creation (it's easy, but it's also relatively long even for a 100CP character). Although I've grown to prefer more specialised systems, I wouldn't use it for a dark urban fantasy game when Chronicles of Darkness exists.


Also, 5e has been another attempt at updating D&D, but instead of chasing trends in media it tried to chase trends in indie RPGs. To me it also failed because of it, if I want narrative than I own Fate or a couple of Forged in the Dark games (as well as a couple other games with nareativist elements), and if I want rules light fantasy I own Advanced Fighting Fantasy*, where character creation is quick, painless, and the rules are significantly lighter.

* And soon Stellar Adventures, or AFF IN SPACE!!!!

Willie the Duck
2021-02-15, 10:22 AM
There have been a couple more over the years. Traveller and SR for example were at least at times quite big. For modern but not SF there was always the whole WoD line and also CoC. And then don't forget all those Superhero RPGs.

I was going to drop in to say similar (regarding the sci fi ones). Ming you, up until WoD, no line (including WEG Star Wars) ever really got enough traction to get a lot of notice outside of gaming circles, but within the circles at at specific times WEG SW, Traveller, and Shadowrun were all successful game systems with significant followings.

Yanagi
2021-02-15, 11:01 AM
As far as I can tell, D&D settings stay the same because when the company wants to try out something different they create a separate product line. That way they retain the successful product while gambling on the new product. Over the years many product lines didn't stick as effectively, so D&D has become synonymous with that particular fantasy no-time that's present in Greyhawk and FR.

(With 5e we're actually watching an attempt to re-introduce IP that was set to the way side, so we're in another round of experimenting with what will sell how well.)

The other thing that has happened is that like Star Wars, D&D has become its own context. Where once is was one paradigm of fantasy among others, it reached a point of both market dominance and cultural ubiquity that it's the standard against which other fantasy materials are compared. This isn't bad...it's just an inevitability. People expect a certain backdrop, a feel of how to be in a D&D world...which makes it valuable intellectual property.

But I also think it's worth noting that D&D has always been a kitchen sink--overlapping multiple genres *and* deliberately modular with materials aping tropes from prominent writers with dissimilar worlds--in an attempt to draw in players that want different things but all want to be at the same tabletop. It has always been incoherent because the point is to create a product that captures as much market share as possible for the least amount of work...so the setting remaining relatively static, but the ruleset expands to allow more and different play styles rooted in disparate genre tropes, and the aesthetics transform to meet the expectations of younger audiences with a different expectations.

Nifft
2021-02-15, 12:19 PM
As far as I can tell, D&D settings stay the same because when the company wants to try out something different they create a separate product line. That way they retain the successful product while gambling on the new product. Over the years many product lines didn't stick as effectively, so D&D has become synonymous with that particular fantasy no-time that's present in Greyhawk and FR.

This is wrong.

FR does "advance" in time into every new edition, making changes in landscape if not society or technology.

Greyhawk did advance in both time and technology -- there's recently a fun order of Paladins who use revolvers, for example -- but it's been unsupported long enough that it might look static, even though it wasn't.

Alteiner
2021-02-15, 02:07 PM
No D&D setting that I've run has been medieval for over a decade. I run D&D in one of two broad paradigms. Either technology and magic are at least at the level of Eberron, or it's a "Points of Light" style setting where individual walled city-states with wildly-different technologies and magics are separated by vast gulfs of hostile terrain. Even the ruins of the lost ancient empire which I typically use as the basis for a setting like that was well beyond Europe's medieval period in its heyday.

Clistenes
2021-02-15, 03:37 PM
I don't see D&D as medieval, but just as pre-industrial...

Technology, culture, economy, politics, religion...etc., are made up of bits taken from the Bronze Age all the way to the XVIII century.

As for why it remains pre-industrial and most often lacking gunpowder... D&D is a fantasy based on a combination of tales and fantasies from all mythical pasts... anything after the Industrial Revolution is just too close to us...

Scots Dragon
2021-02-15, 04:56 PM
I don't see D&D as medieval, but just as pre-industrial...

Technology, culture, economy, politics, religion...etc., are made up of bits taken from the Bronze Age all the way to the XVIII century.

As for why it remains pre-industrial and most often lacking gunpowder... D&D is a fantasy based on a combination of tales and fantasies from all mythical pasts... anything after the Industrial Revolution is just too close to us...

Also all of these settings are set during a specific time in their history, with the one that's had the most timeline evolution covering at most a hundred and thirty-five years.

And that was purely due to an ill-conceived timeskip.

quinron
2021-02-15, 05:18 PM
This is wrong.

FR does "advance" in time into every new edition, making changes in landscape if not society or technology.

Greyhawk did advance in both time and technology -- there's recently a fun order of Paladins who use revolvers, for example -- but it's been unsupported long enough that it might look static, even though it wasn't.

I don't know enough about Greyhawk, but I know that the technological changes in the Forgotten Realms, at least since 3.5, have been almost entirely to accommodate the rules changes. The only "technology" that significantly changes is magic, which to be fair has changed as drastically in universe as mechanically.

Which provides one possible answer to OP's question: the technology in the game hasn't progressed because they haven't made rules for it, and they haven't made rules for it because most things that can be accomplished with advanced technology either a) are already accomplished more easily with magic, or b) would invalidate now-classic magical elements to a degree that you'd be fundamentally re-evaluating the whole system.

Clistenes
2021-02-15, 05:18 PM
Also all of these settings are set during a specific time in their history, with the one that's had the most timeline evolution covering at most a hundred and thirty-five years.

And that was purely due to an ill-conceived timeskip.

But even when there isn't an advance in time and all the adventures happen in a few consecutive years and in the same country, D&D settings tend to be a mishmash of traits from many pre-industrial societies, and even some from industrial societies.

Like, you have a walled village that is an independent city-state, similar to Iron Age oppida settlements, only the village head is voted by all adult citizens and has a position similar to the mayor of a Far West settlement, but the main religion has an authority close to the medieval Catholic Church, there are Druids living in the nearby forest (save these "druids" are more like Native American Medicine Men combined with Central Asian Shamans), Bards have a privileged status similar to Celtic Ovates, there are banking companies similar to Renaissance Italian ones, the architecture is inspired in the Tudor style save the temple, which is of Greco-Roman style, they have XVIII level clocks, their clothes are similar to XVII century Slavic ones, their weapons and armor are of Renaissance level, they grow potatoes, tomatoes, maize, rice, tobacco and cotton, and glass is common and cheap...

quinron
2021-02-15, 05:44 PM
But even when there isn't an advance in time and all the adventures happen in a few consecutive years and in the same country, D&D settings tend to be a mishmash of traits from many pre-industrial societies, and even some from industrial societies.

Like, you have a walled village that is an independent city-state, similar to Iron Age oppida settlements, only the village head is voted by all adult citizens and has a position similar to the mayor of a Far West settlement, but the main religion has an authority close to the medieval Catholic Church, there are Druids living in the nearby forest (save these "druids" are more like Native American Medicine Men combined with Central Asian Shamans), Bards have a privileged status similar to Celtic Ovates, there are banking companies similar to Renaissance Italian ones, the architecture is inspired in the Tudor style save the temple, which is of Greco-Roman style, they have XVIII level clocks, their clothes are similar to XVII century Slavic ones, their weapons and armor are of Renaissance level, they grow potatoes, tomatoes, maize, rice, tobacco and cotton, and glass is common and cheap...

I've never really had much interest in D&D's settings, but the fact that they really lean into the historical mishmash - which I've gathered is what older D&D used to do - is why I find the Pathfinder setting really charming. Especially because they decided to put "Stone Age nomads" and " robot aliens from beyond the stars" in the same 100-mile radius.

Nifft
2021-02-16, 10:33 AM
Which provides one possible answer to OP's question: the technology in the game hasn't progressed because they haven't made rules for it, and they haven't made rules for it because most things that can be accomplished with advanced technology either a) are already accomplished more easily with magic, or b) would invalidate now-classic magical elements to a degree that you'd be fundamentally re-evaluating the whole system.

There were firearms rules in the 3e DMG.

The absence had nothing to do with a lack of rules.



But even when there isn't an advance in time and all the adventures happen in a few consecutive years and in the same country, D&D settings tend to be a mishmash of traits from many pre-industrial societies, and even some from industrial societies.

Like, you have a walled village that is an independent city-state, similar to Iron Age oppida settlements, only the village head is voted by all adult citizens and has a position similar to the mayor of a Far West settlement, but the main religion has an authority close to the medieval Catholic Church, there are Druids living in the nearby forest (save these "druids" are more like Native American Medicine Men combined with Central Asian Shamans), Bards have a privileged status similar to Celtic Ovates, there are banking companies similar to Renaissance Italian ones, the architecture is inspired in the Tudor style save the temple, which is of Greco-Roman style, they have XVIII level clocks, their clothes are similar to XVII century Slavic ones, their weapons and armor are of Renaissance level, they grow potatoes, tomatoes, maize, rice, tobacco and cotton, and glass is common and cheap...

... and then you're thrown into a slave gladiatorial coliseum, and you have to pilot a crab-robot submarine to escape through 20th century sewer pipes ...

quinron
2021-02-16, 07:08 PM
There were firearms rules in the 3e DMG.

The absence had nothing to do with a lack of rules.

There are firearms and laser guns in the 5e DMG, but that doesn't mean you should expect to see them in a game. Firearms have always been heavily gated: they're placed in the DMG, not the PHB; they're usually prohibitively expensive; and they always come with disclaimers saying "be careful about deciding whether you want to include these in your game because they'll screw the balance," unlike other things (i.e., magic items) gated by cost and DM approval. The reason for the proliferation of firearms was that they're more functional and easier to train in and maintain than bows or melee weaponry, but in D&D they're usually considered "exotic" or "advanced" weapons.

Which all suggests - and I'm far from the first to make this observation - that the rules for firearms introduced into D&D games weren't given a lot of balance consideration and thus firearms aren't expected to be used by most players. Maybe amend my prior post from "they haven't made rules for it" to "they haven't prioritized rules for it."

Gnoman
2021-02-16, 09:33 PM
There are firearms and laser guns in the 5e DMG, but that doesn't mean you should expect to see them in a game. Firearms have always been heavily gated: they're placed in the DMG, not the PHB; they're usually prohibitively expensive; and they always come with disclaimers saying "be careful about deciding whether you want to include these in your game because they'll screw the balance," unlike other things (i.e., magic items) gated by cost and DM approval. The reason for the proliferation of firearms was that they're more functional and easier to train in and maintain than bows or melee weaponry, but in D&D they're usually considered "exotic" or "advanced" weapons.

Which all suggests - and I'm far from the first to make this observation - that the rules for firearms introduced into D&D games weren't given a lot of balance consideration and thus firearms aren't expected to be used by most players. Maybe amend my prior post from "they haven't made rules for it" to "they haven't prioritized rules for it."

The 3.5e DMG, at least, stated that there was no reason not to include firearms if that's what you wanted. They just weren't included in the basic setup because that's not what most people want, so they're part of the "setting variations" chapter.


The "cheap and easy to train with" bit is mostly myth. Early handgonnes were fairly expensive, powder was more so, and they were difficult to use. Proper matchlock arquebuses and muskets were easier to use, but still expensive.

Pex
2021-02-18, 01:30 AM
Firearms can be more unbalancing than magic items precisely because they are non-magical. Being non-magical means anyone can make them or learn how to, but even if cost and secret knowledge are a factor in the making anyone can use them. They aren't too expensive to get. Farmer Joe will have a rifle to use against the bard wooing his daughter. A proliferation would make the game The Old West. Some people may want that, but it alters the prevalent atmosphere of D&D; hence they're gated.

Nifft
2021-02-18, 04:54 AM
the technology in the game hasn't progressed because they haven't made rules for it


There are firearms and laser guns in the 5e DMG

It's great that you've abandoned the (obviously untrue) claim that "they haven't made rules" for higher tech.

Can you believe that some people are unable to admit being wrong?



Firearms can be more unbalancing than magic items precisely because they are non-magical. Being non-magical means anyone can make them or learn how to, but even if cost and secret knowledge are a factor in the making anyone can use them. They aren't too expensive to get. Farmer Joe will have a rifle to use against the bard wooing his daughter. A proliferation would make the game The Old West. Some people may want that, but it alters the prevalent atmosphere of D&D; hence they're gated.

It wouldn't be any default setting, but a lot of Western tropes could find a home in many D&D games.

Off the top of my head...

Dirty Hennet: "I know what you're thinking: `Did he spend six first-level slots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself. But being this is a magic missile spell, the most accurate spell in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do you, Monk?"

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-19, 05:24 AM
Firearms can be more unbalancing than magic items precisely because they are non-magical. Being non-magical means anyone can make them or learn how to, but even if cost and secret knowledge are a factor in the making anyone can use them. They aren't too expensive to get. Farmer Joe will have a rifle to use against the bard wooing his daughter. A proliferation would make the game The Old West. Some people may want that, but it alters the prevalent atmosphere of D&D; hence they're gated.

A lot of this also applies to magic items, the real game changing factor is that guns are generally an order of magnitude cheaper. Even if we assume that they're Exotic rather than Simple or Martial weapons, if we're being honest most people in-setting probably aren't proficient in any weapons.

It's also not hard to turn D&D into a Western in a silly hat. You already have the PCs as the drifters who'll get into the gunfight at noon, so it's just a case in focusing on the untamed Wonderbra and associated press level threats like bandits (and increasing the focus on horses and wagons). If the setting is a frontier for a relatively prosperous nation you could even get cowboys driving herds to their new homes.

Mechalich
2021-02-19, 07:01 AM
D&D designers like to pretend that D&D worlds actually look like E6 worlds - quasi-medieval with relatively little magic where everyone's running fetch quests all the time. From that perspective firearms absolutely are destabilizing. That's not what D&D worlds embracing the full spectrum of 1-20 actually look like, but I can see where the impulse originates.

quinron
2021-02-19, 07:02 AM
It's great that you've abandoned the (obviously untrue) claim that "they haven't made rules" for higher tech.

Can you believe that some people are unable to admit being wrong?

If this is meant to be as sarcastic as it's reading, I did admit I was wrong; I specifically amended the first statement you quoted at the end of the second post that you clipped a quote from. If that feels insufficient, take this as an admission: I was wrong and there are in fact rules for firearms. It just seems to me that there wasn't a lot of consideration given to making them feel balanced alongside the weapons on the basic equipment lists in the PHB.


Firearms can be more unbalancing than magic items precisely because they are non-magical. Being non-magical means anyone can make them or learn how to, but even if cost and secret knowledge are a factor in the making anyone can use them. They aren't too expensive to get. Farmer Joe will have a rifle to use against the bard wooing his daughter. A proliferation would make the game The Old West. Some people may want that, but it alters the prevalent atmosphere of D&D; hence they're gated.

At least in 3.5, 5e, and Pathfinder - i.e., the games I'm familiar with - I've always been a little annoyed by how powerful guns have been made relative to other weapons. Particularly in Pathfinder, where they've been given the most attention, firearms deal significantly more damage than comparable weapons and target touch AC and have a x4 crit multiplier; I'm just dubious as to whether a person shot in the head by a pistol is really going to be roughly twice as grievously injured as someone shot in the head with a bow or crossbow or stabbed in the head with a longsword. That said, I'm no ballistics or physical trauma expert, so I could be totally wrong.


A lot of this also applies to magic items, the real game changing factor is that guns are generally an order of magnitude cheaper. Even if we assume that they're Exotic rather than Simple or Martial weapons, if we're being honest most people in-setting probably aren't proficient in any weapons.

It's also not hard to turn D&D into a Western in a silly hat. You already have the PCs as the drifters who'll get into the gunfight at noon, so it's just a case in focusing on the untamed Wonderbra and associated press level threats like bandits (and increasing the focus on horses and wagons). If the setting is a frontier for a relatively prosperous nation you could even get cowboys driving herds to their new homes.

Tonally, I already tend to run my games like Westerns in silly hats. I don't use magitech, I just let magic stand in for technology - sendings are telegraphs, fire bolts are pistols, etc.

Darth Credence
2021-02-19, 10:57 AM
A lot of this also applies to magic items, the real game changing factor is that guns are generally an order of magnitude cheaper. Even if we assume that they're Exotic rather than Simple or Martial weapons, if we're being honest most people in-setting probably aren't proficient in any weapons.

It's also not hard to turn D&D into a Western in a silly hat. You already have the PCs as the drifters who'll get into the gunfight at noon, so it's just a case in focusing on the untamed Wonderbra and associated press level threats like bandits (and increasing the focus on horses and wagons). If the setting is a frontier for a relatively prosperous nation you could even get cowboys driving herds to their new homes.

I have no idea what happened here, but "focusing on the untamed Wonderbra" is outstanding. I am trying to figure out ways to plan an adventure that does so.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-19, 11:37 AM
I have no idea what happened here, but "focusing on the untamed Wonderbra" is outstanding. I am trying to figure out ways to plan an adventure that does so.

The autocorrect on my phone is weird. Or well, what it guesses I want when typing via SwiftKey is weird. Wonderbra should be wilderness.

And I think it's the key component for a brassiere of fire elemental summoning.

DrewID
2021-02-20, 12:58 PM
The autocorrect on my phone is weird. Or well, what it guesses I want when typing via SwiftKey is weird. Wonderbra should be wilderness.

And I think it's the key component for a brassiere of fire elemental summoning.

And here I thought "focusing on the untamed Wonderbra" was funny. <tips hat>

DrewID

Destro2119
2021-02-20, 08:51 PM
DnD itself isn't medieval. DnD worlds aren't even medieval even as far as serfdom, feudal lords etc go. In truly medieval times you did not have nation states like you always do in the standard fantasy world; you have people who just vaguely live on "Lord Ollie's land" or whatever. You also would not have the friggin nigh universal literacy you see in the standard fantasy worlds like FR or Greyhawk for the simple reasons that it is *beyond* tedious to play out illiteracy with even a GM of average skill.

DnD worlds are meant to be consistent only insofar as you can go adventure in them and convenient for a GM to run them. It's that simple. In this respect, we can see that Starfinder/d20 Modern are basically identical to Greyhawk. When all is said and done, they are essentially theme parks, and the "average fantasy world" is theme park lands within a theme park. Otherwise, yeah, I agree with the current state of technology/education/magic/high level characters of the "average fantasy setting" is sufficient that the world would advance quickly enough that the published setting would be a relic in a matter of decades.

EDIT: Not even getting into the completely ****ed settlement tables. Paris in medieval times had average of 200000 people. Nanjing (for the inevitable Asia expy) had a population of 400000 in medieval times. London in the year 1700 had a population of 500000 (accounting for the fact that most tech in DnD worlds is basically at least 1700s level except for guns).

False God
2021-02-20, 09:08 PM
I mean, it is isn't...It's some weird mash up of about 1000+ years worth of fantasized IRL history, ranging from the 500's to the 1500's, with it's fingers stretching out far beyond that in both directions.

But the answer is: D&D is what it is because that's what people want from it. More or less.

It's not a "real world" with a constantly advancing timeframe parallel to ours that we're only witnessing through the books.

Destro2119
2021-02-21, 10:30 AM
If you want Sci-Fi in your D&D, you really should just go play Starfinder.

Exactly. Honestly, if you think about it, there are so many things that the very societal structure of Starfinder should make obsolete that it's almost laughable. Wandering encounters/random monster attacks should be no more with the presence of a well armed police force.

Yet, because it's an adventure game, the game inevitably needs people who are "high level" to go and kill the Big Bad when they easily just have the capability to just nuke them or something.

The very concept of Starfinder should not be, since progress IRL is built off the backs of a billion people innvating and pooling their knowledge, yet in SF it is done by a few 15th level people.

Destro2119
2021-02-21, 10:32 AM
I've never really had much interest in D&D's settings, but the fact that they really lean into the historical mishmash - which I've gathered is what older D&D used to do - is why I find the Pathfinder setting really charming. Especially because they decided to put "Stone Age nomads" and " robot aliens from beyond the stars" in the same 100-mile radius.

Golarion is THE definition of "theme park fantasy." And yes, it often makes no sense.

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-21, 08:06 PM
Golarion is THE definition of "theme park fantasy." And yes, it often makes no sense.

Meanwhile I prefer at least the pretense of realistic technological progression and adoption, and highly dislike things like 'technology has been basically unchanged for 1000 years'.

I think of it as 'stage play fantasy'. Yes we know that the throne room set is lit by modern lights carefully positioned and angled, but as long as no actor is checking social media on their phone I'm willing to buy into the illusion.

It tends to invoice things like having especially high and low tech cultures exist behind some kind of barrier, or have them be affected by proximity, but for some of us it's just a much, much easier buy-in. And then you can start bringing in such things as a renegade set of dwarves who refuse to use any technology not mentioned in their millennia old holy book.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-21, 09:41 PM
Meanwhile I prefer at least the pretense of realistic technological progression and adoption, and highly dislike things like 'technology has been basically unchanged for 1000 years'.


I have a semi-answer to that.. basically, tech is stagnant because magic is there. You don't need as much technological development because magic meets many of the needs that would otherwise come from technological advancement.

Telok
2021-02-21, 10:57 PM
I have a semi-answer to that.. basically, tech is stagnant because magic is there. You don't need as much technological development because magic meets many of the needs that would otherwise come from technological advancement.

People keep saying this but in most cases even the levels of magic knowledge and ability is stagnant too. Even RL alchemy, our closest analog to actual d&d working magic, which started as mostly mysticisim and philosophy kept consistently advancing as its practioners experimented and tried to understand what was happening.

Nifft
2021-02-21, 11:16 PM
People keep saying this but in most cases even the levels of magic knowledge and ability is stagnant too. Even RL alchemy, our closest analog to actual d&d working magic, which started as mostly mysticisim and philosophy kept consistently advancing as its practioners experimented and tried to understand what was happening.

D&D magic wasn't originally static.

If your games have static magic, you might want to talk to your DM.

See, most of those "named" spells you know about in D&D? Those names came from characters in a campaign.

Melf's Acid Arrow was created by a Magic-User named "Melf". Otto's Irresistible Dance was created by a Magic-User named ... wait for it ... "Otto".

If your games don't allow you to immortalize your PC's name by creating new magic, then you should talk to your DM -- and if you are the DM, you should take this lesson from the early editions.

PC names on setting elements feels awesome.

KineticDiplomat
2021-02-21, 11:21 PM
It is also worth noting that the idea of constantly evolving technology is a very, very modern one. Even the idea that you fundamentally should be driving change is way less common back in the day.

Take chain mail. It was in use in the BCs. It was still in use into the early renaissance, and until the Hundred Years’ War it was arguably the premier armor. Or the plow, which was invented several thousand years BC, and basically only had three major changes (the mould board, adding wheels, and engineering heavier metal shod blades) prior to the industrial revolution. Let’s be clear on that: in over 5000 years the single most important tool in human agriculture, the basis of all societal wealth, got wheels, a heavier blade, and a few extra divots.

The holy trinity of capital/easy credit-large scale management-innovator that has driven so much modern development is not a granted part of societies for a long time...and the cultural mindset that men of science would immediately be turning about their inventions into immediately practical tools as a natural part of society’s advancement definitely wasn’t there.

———

And, you know, because no one wants machineguns cutting down their wizards. (Or they play shadowrun)

Mechalich
2021-02-21, 11:40 PM
People keep saying this but in most cases even the levels of magic knowledge and ability is stagnant too. Even RL alchemy, our closest analog to actual d&d working magic, which started as mostly mysticisim and philosophy kept consistently advancing as its practioners experimented and tried to understand what was happening.

Not really. Most D&D settings are post-apocalyptic. There was, at some point in the past, a massive magitech empire or regime that pushed capabilities far above what is presently known, and the current generations are struggling to redevelop these achievements. Additionally, in some cases the current powers-that-be are engaged in restricting on-going development for some reason.

This is common even beyond D&D. The Wheel of Time, for example, is explicitly set in a society recovering from what was actually two different apocalypses that destroyed its magitech utopia, and the recovery has been extremely slow both to ongoing oppression by the forces of evil in the form of both the corrupt of one half of magic and active aggression (Jordan smartly made the point that on the continent where active aggression was largely absent the society developed considerably further, if in some uncomfortable ways). When these oppressive forces are removed during the series the path towards restoration of a magitech utopia is laid bare, something a brief hypothetical flash forward makes clear.

That said, there's no reason why magical development should allow infinite advancement any more than there's no reason for science to do the same (modern physics has been pretty could at crushing some of the dreams of science fiction actually, like FTL travel). If development of magical systems to support society occurs instead of technological change, then the development of the fictional society caps at whatever point the full extent of the magic system allows. That's totally arbitrary, because magic systems are themselves arbitrary.

It's possible to imagine a magic system were maximized application of magic produces a quasi-medieval world with some quirks. E6, depending on how you structure it, gets you at least partway there.

Tanarii
2021-02-22, 12:44 AM
Not really. Most D&D settings are post-apocalyptic. There was, at some point in the past, a massive magitech empire or regime that pushed capabilities far above what is presently known, and the current generations are struggling to redevelop these achievements. Additionally, in some cases the current powers-that-be are engaged in restricting on-going development for some reason.
Definitely the setting is post apocalyptic in Birthright, Darksun, Dragonlance, Eberron, Mystara (three times in history; once after Wrath), and even Spelljammer. But while I don't feel that Birthright or Dragonlance had the "magitech aspect", the other three definitely did. Although technically Darksun's was bio-psionic tech. Also Birthright is more "collapse of continent-wide empire" than post-apocalyptic.

I honestly don't know if that's an accurate way to describe Forgotten Realms, unless you want to count the Elven Kingdoms, then definitely. Not sure about Greyhawk or Rokugan, I don't know them very well. And definitely not for Planescape, it's got its whole own thing with the Blood War.

Pex
2021-02-22, 12:55 AM
D&D magic wasn't originally static.

If your games have static magic, you might want to talk to your DM.

See, most of those "named" spells you know about in D&D? Those names came from characters in a campaign.

Melf's Acid Arrow was created by a Magic-User named "Melf". Otto's Irresistible Dance was created by a Magic-User named ... wait for it ... "Otto".

If your games don't allow you to immortalize your PC's name by creating new magic, then you should talk to your DM -- and if you are the DM, you should take this lesson from the early editions.

PC names on setting elements feels awesome.

Yep

In 2E it was specifically discussed in the DMG how a player could create his own spells. I've made quite a few, and by personal happiness coincidence 3E published their own version of the same effect. In 3E/Pathfinder every new splat book had new spells. You could call that advancement but people soon complained about the spell bloat. It's unfair to blame current D&D for lack of advancement when it's the players themselves who yelled "STOP!". Again, though, there is Eberron which is precisely magic as technological advancement. Planes, trains, and robots. You can go all goth punk if you care about tatoos/dragon marks. You can have a full on alien invasion if you care about kalashtar/quori. Have warforged terminators springforth from the Mournland.

DrewID
2021-02-22, 01:22 AM
That said, there's no reason why magical development should allow infinite advancement any more than there's no reason for science to do the same (modern physics has been pretty could at crushing some of the dreams of science fiction actually, like FTL travel). If development of magical systems to support society occurs instead of technological change, then the development of the fictional society caps at whatever point the full extent of the magic system allows. That's totally arbitrary, because magic systems are themselves arbitrary.

It's possible to imagine a magic system were maximized application of magic produces a quasi-medieval world with some quirks. E6, depending on how you structure it, gets you at least partway there.

This is something to consider. It takes a fairly advanced society, one with resources to spare, to engage in research to research's sake. If technology has reached level, let's call it 3, when magitech becomes a viable alternative, and then magitech advances to what would have been, say, level 5 and then stagnates, there is not a lot of impetus for non-magical technology to advance, since it (in many fields) has to advance in steps, and what is the benefit of creating and expanding on level 4 technology (which is what comes after 3) when level 5 magitech is still better.

Mechalich
2021-02-22, 02:40 AM
This is something to consider. It takes a fairly advanced society, one with resources to spare, to engage in research to research's sake. If technology has reached level, let's call it 3, when magitech becomes a viable alternative, and then magitech advances to what would have been, say, level 5 and then stagnates, there is not a lot of impetus for non-magical technology to advance, since it (in many fields) has to advance in steps, and what is the benefit of creating and expanding on level 4 technology (which is what comes after 3) when level 5 magitech is still better.

Right.

A simple example here is lighting.

In D&D lighting is super easy. You gather up tens of thousands of pebbles, and then you cast Lesser Planar Ally to bring forth a Lantern Archon. It has Continual Flame as an at will ability. It casts the spell every round for seven days at the cost of 500 gp (longer if the caster is higher level). That produces just over 100,000 torch-level lights that require no power and never burn out. With the rare exception of certain specialized needs, this method will take care of all artificial lighting needs on the cheap, forever.

The level of technology needed to surpass this is 20th century minimum, and because Continual Flame cheats the laws of thermodynamics for many uses it will always be superior to technology based lights (it would easily replace 90% of the bulbs in the houses and workplaces of everyone reading this right now).

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-22, 04:23 AM
I have a semi-answer to that.. basically, tech is stagnant because magic is there. You don't need as much technological development because magic meets many of the needs that would otherwise come from technological advancement.

I fully believe that in z Eberron, less so in the settings where magic is pretty of the tech of must people.

Also, I can easily accept it for a couple of hundred years, but when it becomes thousands? My brief is in very shaky supports.


Melf's Acid Arrow was created by a Magic-User named "Melf".

I thought it was created by an unnamed male elf?

But yeah, things shouldn't be static. I'm in a Warhammer based have right now where the elves* are soon going to get very annoyed that humans and dwarfs have both begin to reverse engineer Waystones.

* Who seem to be in technological stasis but might be advancing magically

Willie the Duck
2021-02-22, 09:41 AM
I fully believe that in z Eberron, less so in the settings where magic is pretty of the tech of must people.

Also, I can easily accept it for a couple of hundred years, but when it becomes thousands? My brief is in very shaky supports.

Once we get 'thousands of years after the a society with magic was conceived' it pretty much becomes random speculation, in my book.


I thought it was created by an unnamed male elf?
According to the lore, Ernie Gygax named the elf character Melf, meaning 'male elf,' at a time when you went through characters like tissue paper and who knew that the characters that would gather enough lasting survivability to influence the game world would be 'Melf,' 'Fighter #45,' 'Ben Dover,' and 'Killroy Washere.'

Anonymouswizard
2021-02-22, 10:02 AM
Once we get 'thousands of years after the a society with magic was conceived' it pretty much becomes random speculation, in my book.

It's more of a gripe against unnecessarily 'epic' timescales, as much as eternal stasis. Many D&D settings have had a thousand year status quo, in many cases longer, with only the occasional new spell as a development.

And as 3.5's Complete Arcane pointed out, only the spells the creator distributes to others create a setting change.

Eberron in a thousand years will, if it continues it's current trend of development, look very weird. This is a good thing.

My settings tend to operate on a shorter time scale than many, individual pieces of technology may be around for centuries but there are both incremental improvements and major developments in other areas. Generally full gothic plate is less than a century old, although I'm considering for my next game pulling back and having it appear mid-campaign.

Also can we please get gambesons that are actually worthwhile?


According to the lore, Ernie Gygax named the elf character Melf, meaning 'male elf,' at a time when you went through characters like tissue paper and who knew that the characters that would gather enough lasting survivability to influence the game world would be 'Melf,' 'Fighter #45,' 'Ben Dover,' and 'Killroy Washere.'

I heard that the character wasn't named, so at the top of the character sheet were the words 'M elf'.

Destro2119
2021-02-22, 10:45 AM
It's more of a gripe against unnecessarily 'epic' timescales, as much as eternal stasis. Many D&D settings have had a thousand year status quo, in many cases longer, with only the occasional new spell as a development.

And as 3.5's Complete Arcane pointed out, only the spells the creator distributes to others create a setting change.

Eberron in a thousand years will, if it continues it's current trend of development, look very weird. This is a good thing.

My settings tend to operate on a shorter time scale than many, individual pieces of technology may be around for centuries but there are both incremental improvements and major developments in other areas. Generally full gothic plate is less than a century old, although I'm considering for my next game pulling back and having it appear mid-campaign.

Also can we please get gambesons that are actually worthwhile?



I heard that the character wasn't named, so at the top of the character sheet were the words 'M elf'.

This timescale problem isn't even restricted to 3.X. In Starfinder, we are led to believe that it took a colony of highly advanced magical and technological peoples thousands of years to get off planet.

The "Complete Arcane" thing is presumably not the assumption for all spells, otherwise we would have basically none of the "name" spells. Plus, wizards can redevelop spells too.

Eberron demonstrates advancements are possible. Any sort of "medieval permanency" is just pure fantasy in more ways than one.

LibraryOgre
2021-02-22, 12:13 PM
People keep saying this but in most cases even the levels of magic knowledge and ability is stagnant too. Even RL alchemy, our closest analog to actual d&d working magic, which started as mostly mysticisim and philosophy kept consistently advancing as its practioners experimented and tried to understand what was happening.

My perspective may be different because of some older material, notably Cormanthyr: Empire of the Elves (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17550/Cormanthyr-Empire-of-the-Elves-2e?affiliate_id=315505) and Netheril: Empire of Magic (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17546/Netheril-Empire-of-Magic-2e?affiliate_id=315505). Set 5000 years before the standard Forgotten Realms, they DO have more primitive magic, with a lot of spells gone, because they haven't been invented, yet.

Nifft
2021-02-22, 01:20 PM
I thought it was created by an unnamed male elf?


I heard that the character wasn't named, so at the top of the character sheet were the words 'M elf'.

That is the origin of the name Melf, yes.

The player hadn't written a name on his sheet, so the character's name became Melf for "M elf".

From that point on, the character's name was Melf, and that name has been immortalized in official D&D books for decades -- none of his other deeds or traits, just the spells that bear his name.


Melf is the immortal name of a nameless, forgotten elf.

Luccan
2021-02-22, 11:51 PM
That is the origin of the name Melf, yes.

The player hadn't written a name on his sheet, so the character's name became Melf for "M elf".

From that point on, the character's name was Melf, and that name has been immortalized in official D&D books for decades -- none of his other deeds or traits, just the spells that bear his name.


Melf is the immortal name of a nameless, forgotten elf.

Melf has a fair bit of lore, actually. Not like, Mordenkainen amounts of lore, but more than the actual unnamed characters at the early tables. He's the PC of one of Gary's kids, IIRC.

Scots Dragon
2021-02-23, 04:59 AM
He’s apparently Prince Brightflame, and is a minor royal amongst the elves.

Melf is basically a nickname that he picked up somewhere. Likely got tired of humans mispronouncing his real name, which has not been revealed.

Clistenes
2021-02-25, 09:15 PM
People keep saying this but in most cases even the levels of magic knowledge and ability is stagnant too. Even RL alchemy, our closest analog to actual d&d working magic, which started as mostly mysticisim and philosophy kept consistently advancing as its practioners experimented and tried to understand what was happening.

My personal theory is that deities themselves preserve the status quo, for two reasons:

1.-There are deities of civilization and wilderness, of law and chaos, of joy and despair, of health and disease, of wealth and poverty...etc. In most D&D settings they have a compact that prevents direct intervention in the mortal world. I think that compact also includes certain limits to the world's development (or lack of it); the world must have room for primitive tribes living in the woods, and to cities too, to brutal raiders and to shining cities...

The gods of nature don't want an industrial revolution; the gods of health, order and prosperity don't want civilization to be destroyed... so the world remain a patchwork of wastelands and prosperous, orderly realms...

The problem is, past certain level of development, human beings (and maybe other PC races too) would curb-stomp any threats to their civilization with technology, magic or a mix of both, turning the planet into a magitech version of our Earth... so the gods that favor civilization have signed a pact limiting development to appease the deities who oppose it, and in exchange they receive some securities... The use of magic is one of these setoffs; magic allows mortals to better their lifestyle if they work for it, so they don't have to live in squalor in the absence of scientific and industrial advancement (again, if they work for it).

2.-The gods themselves feel uncomfortable if the world deviates too much from what they have gotten used too... can you imagine being a patron deity of rural, pre-industrial world during thousands of years, and suddenly, in the blink of an eye... BAM! INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION! FACTORIES! GLOBAL COMMUNICATION AND TRANSPORT! TV! COMPUTERS! INTERNET! and you no longer understand the world...? (well you DO understand the world because you are a super-intelligent being, but it still feels disorienting and unfamiliar...).

tomandtish
2021-02-26, 12:11 AM
That is the origin of the name Melf, yes.

The player hadn't written a name on his sheet, so the character's name became Melf for "M elf".

From that point on, the character's name was Melf, and that name has been immortalized in official D&D books for decades -- none of his other deeds or traits, just the spells that bear his name.


Melf is the immortal name of a nameless, forgotten elf.

Not just D&D books. He also shows in the Greyhawk novels written by Gygax, both as Melf and Prince Brightflame.

Destro2119
2021-02-28, 05:33 PM
It's more of a gripe against unnecessarily 'epic' timescales, as much as eternal stasis. Many D&D settings have had a thousand year status quo, in many cases longer, with only the occasional new spell as a development.

And as 3.5's Complete Arcane pointed out, only the spells the creator distributes to others create a setting change.

Eberron in a thousand years will, if it continues it's current trend of development, look very weird. This is a good thing.

My settings tend to operate on a shorter time scale than many, individual pieces of technology may be around for centuries but there are both incremental improvements and major developments in other areas. Generally full gothic plate is less than a century old, although I'm considering for my next game pulling back and having it appear mid-campaign.

Also can we please get gambesons that are actually worthwhile?



I heard that the character wasn't named, so at the top of the character sheet were the words 'M elf'.

Exactly. Everything else might hold, but let's remember that "5000 years" is Ancient Crete to a moon landing

Prince of Thorns does a little study on this, but Prince of Thorns is centuries, in a highly unstable political climate (think constant warring states) with basically no magic. As in, not "normal DnD world."

It's frankly the extended timescale (1000s of yeeeeeears!) that makes any attempt to rationalize a setting fail on its own.

Nifft
2021-02-28, 06:30 PM
Not just D&D books. He also shows in the Greyhawk novels written by Gygax, both as Melf and Prince Brightflame.

Greyhawk books aren't D&D books?

KineticDiplomat
2021-02-28, 07:33 PM
Since the rest of the setting is more or less entirely irrational other than “Because Plots of Adventure Require It” is this really such a big deal? It’s a milquetoast and mediocre system for generic fantasy adventuring. Is this really such an issue?

As always, you could always play any game that isn’t a grudgingly accepted mediocrity if this bothers you.

Tanarii
2021-02-28, 07:39 PM
Exactly. Everything else might hold, but let's remember that "5000 years" is Ancient Crete to a moon landing
It's usually there so that longer lived, slower changing races can have their empires before humanity. Traditionally Elves, then Dwarves, possibly with Dragons and/or Giants before them. Although how those races had civilization while humans were hunter/gatherers can be an issue in some. Although some just assume humans were like Orcs & Goblins traditionally are, a kind of pest pushed to the corners and badlands, but dangerous because they breed so fast and overrun things if not kept in check.

Clistenes
2021-03-01, 12:00 PM
Exactly. Everything else might hold, but let's remember that "5000 years" is Ancient Crete to a moon landing

Prince of Thorns does a little study on this, but Prince of Thorns is centuries, in a highly unstable political climate (think constant warring states) with basically no magic. As in, not "normal DnD world."

It's frankly the extended timescale (1000s of yeeeeeears!) that makes any attempt to rationalize a setting fail on its own.

Well, you have to take into account that technology only started to advance at a really fast pace a few centuries ago...

People have been using spears, bows, shields and swords to fight for thousands of years.

Sea People's ships, weapons and tactics 1200 BC weren't so different to Viking ships, weapons and tactics 1000 AC.

Scale armor was used 3,500 ago in Ancient Egypt, and Asian Steppe people kept using it until guns made it obsolete.

Longbows similar to Medieval English longbows were used by Paleolithic big game hunters. Composite recurve bows were used 3,000 year ago, and both were of use in battle until a few centuries ago.

Mounted archers were around 3,000 ago in Middle East, and they were only rendered obsolete during the XIX century.

Mounted lancers were even older, and they were still around during the XIX century too.

Ancient Greek sculpture couldn't be matched until the Renaissance, and some may say it was never surpassed.

From the first Mesopotamian ziggurat 7,000 years ago to the last Mesoamerican pyramid 500 years ago the only thing that changed was the addition of more levels.

Add a few magical catastrophes, monsters hindering the advance of economy and industry, meddling deities, and I can see a world that gets stuck in a pre-industrial state for thousands of years...

What I find difficult to believe is that none of the many D&D worlds in the Great Wheel cosmology manages to beat the odds and break through to a higher level of development. Eberron and Ravnica kinda did, but they are isolated from the greater Multiverse, cut off from direct divine intervention... that's the reason I think the gods are the X factor that prevents most worlds' advancement...

Duff
2021-03-01, 05:50 PM
Sorry if this has been said before and i missed it, but
If it's not medievalish, it's a different game to D&D

LibraryOgre
2021-03-01, 08:01 PM
Exactly. Everything else might hold, but let's remember that "5000 years" is Ancient Crete to a moon landing


On the other hand, 5000 years is also "neolithic farming" to "ancient Crete". Or "Paleolithic period" to "paleolithic period" a few hundred times.

Tanarii
2021-03-01, 08:04 PM
On the other hand, 5000 years is also "neolithic farming" to "ancient Crete". Or "Paleolithic period" to "paleolithic period" a few hundred times.Problem is when the elves and dwarves were building cities and using advanced food generating techniques while the humans living right next to them and interacting with them were in an extended Stone Age. For some reason.

quinron
2021-03-01, 08:50 PM
Problem is when the elves and dwarves were building cities and using advanced food generating techniques while the humans living right next to them and interacting with them were in an extended Stone Age. For some reason.

Ehhhh, I'm actually pretty happy with that if elves and dwarves are played (and depicted in-game) the way they're typically described: xenophobic and self-contained.

The Knight of the Swords by Moorcock actually depicts this pretty well from the demihumans' side - the not-elves of the setting (of which the protagonist is one) have a very small population that's mostly secluded in their ancestral manors and don't find it odd to go decades or centuries without hearing from even their relatives. They're totally caught off guard when the humans attack them, because they don't interact with humans often enough to see how relatively quickly their technology has been progressing.

snowblizz
2021-03-02, 07:40 AM
Problem is when the elves and dwarves were building cities and using advanced food generating techniques while the humans living right next to them and interacting with them were in an extended Stone Age. For some reason.

Right now there are African bushmen living a hunter gatherer lifestyle, tribes in the Amazon that have yet not been contacted and a people living on some small islands in the Indian Ocean that are basically off-limits to modern humans.

And that's not even touching a fairly broad category of people poor enough or choosing to live lives that are more traditional in nature. While we travelled to the moon there are still neolitihic stoneage people alive. Effectively.

Tanarii
2021-03-02, 10:23 AM
Is that going to last through 5k-10k years of technological disparity, without any trickle down influences and advances?

I'm a bigger fan of the "humans were dangerous pests" justification. Or slaves (e.g. Krynn and the Irda). Sure, there was trickle down technology/magic. Humans just didn't have a chance to expand by breeding like crazy until the dominate race(s) collapsed.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-02, 12:07 PM
Sorry if this has been said before and i missed it, but
If it's not medievalish, it's a different game to D&D

D&D has plenty of not-medieval in it... it already drags in a ton of classical, ancient, renaissance, and early modern elements, and elements from far beyond the core geographic area of "medieval" tropes.

Destro2119
2021-03-02, 02:37 PM
Well, you have to take into account that technology only started to advance at a really fast pace a few centuries ago...

People have been using spears, bows, shields and swords to fight for thousands of years.

Sea People's ships, weapons and tactics 1200 BC weren't so different to Viking ships, weapons and tactics 1000 AC.

Scale armor was used 3,500 ago in Ancient Egypt, and Asian Steppe people kept using it until guns made it obsolete.

Longbows similar to Medieval English longbows were used by Paleolithic big game hunters. Composite recurve bows were used 3,000 year ago, and both were of use in battle until a few centuries ago.

Mounted archers were around 3,000 ago in Middle East, and they were only rendered obsolete during the XIX century.

Mounted lancers were even older, and they were still around during the XIX century too.

Ancient Greek sculpture couldn't be matched until the Renaissance, and some may say it was never surpassed.

From the first Mesopotamian ziggurat 7,000 years ago to the last Mesoamerican pyramid 500 years ago the only thing that changed was the addition of more levels.

Add a few magical catastrophes, monsters hindering the advance of economy and industry, meddling deities, and I can see a world that gets stuck in a pre-industrial state for thousands of years...

What I find difficult to believe is that none of the many D&D worlds in the Great Wheel cosmology manages to beat the odds and break through to a higher level of development. Eberron and Ravnica kinda did, but they are isolated from the greater Multiverse, cut off from direct divine intervention... that's the reason I think the gods are the X factor that prevents most worlds' advancement...

Yes, but those "few centuries" weren't just everybody waking up one day and deciding to do the Industrial Revolution, there was an incredible buildup of proto industrialization, nation-states, and trade that started from basically the Renaissance (and even before that-- see Venetian Arsenal) which is basically where most DnD worlds have been for "thousands of years."

DnD worlds presumably ALREADY have all that stuff, and it's not like tech was a straight line IRL either-- there were tons of setbacks IRL, but things always HAPPENED. Which doesn't happen for some reason in DnD, and no, if monsters are so prevalent as you say, then we don't have nation-states at all.

"gods are the X factor"

Depends. For FR? 1000% yes. For Eberron/Greyhawk/Dragonlance/Pathfinder? They're nowhere near involved enough.

Clistenes
2021-03-02, 06:08 PM
Yes, but those "few centuries" weren't just everybody waking up one day and deciding to do the Industrial Revolution, there was an incredible buildup of proto industrialization, nation-states, and trade that started from basically the Renaissance (and even before that-- see Venetian Arsenal) which is basically where most DnD worlds have been for "thousands of years."

DnD worlds presumably ALREADY have all that stuff, and it's not like tech was a straight line IRL either-- there were tons of setbacks IRL, but things always HAPPENED. Which doesn't happen for some reason in DnD, and no, if monsters are so prevalent as you say, then we don't have nation-states at all.

"gods are the X factor"

Depends. For FR? 1000% yes. For Eberron/Greyhawk/Dragonlance/Pathfinder? They're nowhere near involved enough.

Eberron is going through a magitech industrial revolution right now... Did the lack of divine involvement contribute to it? We don't know...

Dragonlance is actually a good example of deities forcing a reset of civilization and purposely sending people back to barbarism not once, but twice (the Fall of the Irda and the Cataclysm), plus the damage inflicted by several divine wars...

Both Oerth and Golarion have suffered their own resets too (the Twin Cataclysms and the Earthfall), but I will admit the hand of deities isn't evident (as a matter of fact, the gods prevented Golarion from being utterly destroyed).

Oerth has developed advanced magitech civlizations several times during its history: The City of the Gods in Blackmoor was destroyed by the Gear Madness, Sulm, was destroyed by its ruler's magic, the ancient elven kingdoms by the wars against the Ur-flan, Baklunish and Suloise empires by the Twin Cataclysms...etc...
Could the gods have stopped such disasters? We don't know...

Golarion is kinda weird in that you have late XVIII/early XIX level civilizations (minus gunpowder) side by side to a copy of Ancient Egypt... But anyways, Golarion does have advanced magical civilizations, they just exist outside the Inner Sea Region; the Vudrani are said to be able to raise woundrous cities in days using magic. Golarion has also suffered its own share of cataclysms: The Earthfall, which explicitly resetted technological an magical development, the Worldwound, the conquest of Geb, Ustalav and the Gravelands by undead, the war between Geb and Nex...etc.

Nifft
2021-03-02, 06:32 PM
Oerth has developed advanced magitech civlizations several times during its history: The City of the Gods in Blackmoor was destroyed by the Gear Madness, Sulm, was destroyed by its ruler's magic, the ancient elven kingdoms by the wars against the Ur-flan, Baklunish and Suloise empires by the Twin Cataclysms...etc...
Could the gods have stopped such disasters? We don't know...

Gods couldn't stop the Suloise Empire from doing such horrible things that one god left the pantheon in protest.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-02, 08:08 PM
The real problem is more the insistence on having histories that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years long than the particular level of development at the time the setting presents. The oldest person who's name we know lived a little more than five thousand years ago. All of what we'd call "recorded history" happened in roughly that timeframe, and maybe five hundred years of it are something you'd call even "proto-industrial" (even that is pretty unevenly distributed). There is no real in-setting explanation for it, because it's not an intentional choice. It's just that Authors Have No Sense of Scale (and, frankly, the people who write copy for D&D settings are, for the most part, not the top of the fantasy author pool).

If you want an explanation to shoehorn onto settings, the ones this thread (as do most threads on the topic) seems to have settled on is basically functional: magic causes periodic civilizational resets, gods/dragons/archmages stifle innovation, and/or tech levels are slightly higher than most settings assume (frankly, more D&D settings should have at least early firearms, because gunslingers are cool).

Tanarii
2021-03-02, 08:21 PM
Mystara:

Technology from an alternate universe crash landed in the form of a ship, and the survivors dominated the surrounding area with technological artifacts, but they eventually caused a nuclear disaster so bad it rotated the axis of the planet.

Then later on some elves found the somehow surviving reactor and it blew up again, causing a smaller apocalypse. This time the engine got converted to drain magical energy from around the planet to provide awesome magical powers to those who tapped into it.

Then a magical nation took over the known world, and got corrupted by an entropic immortal so badly they had to be wiped from memory and civilization collapsed.


Then hordes of humanoids ravaged the known world a few times, wiping out everything repeatedly.

It really wasn't until a bunch of tribes fled the humanoids to the southern continent to set up shop, build an Bronze Age tech civ, which then pushed out a bunch of other tribes back north to set up shop, which built an Iron Age civ, which started conquering everything, that things generally got pushed into the modern era.

And then the magic-draining reactor core caused an Immortal-driven war in which plagues ravaged the land, the elven nation's land was corrupted and conquered by dark elves, a meteor was dropped on two nations, and an entire continent ruled by max level Magic-users sank below the waves. (Side note: they lost the war.)

Destro2119
2021-03-02, 09:22 PM
Eberron is going through a magitech industrial revolution right now... Did the lack of divine involvement contribute to it? We don't know...

Dragonlance is actually a good example of deities forcing a reset of civilization and purposely sending people back to barbarism not once, but twice (the Fall of the Irda and the Cataclysm), plus the damage inflicted by several divine wars...

Both Oerth and Golarion have suffered their own resets too (the Twin Cataclysms and the Earthfall), but I will admit the hand of deities isn't evident (as a matter of fact, the gods prevented Golarion from being utterly destroyed).

Oerth has developed advanced magitech civlizations several times during its history: The City of the Gods in Blackmoor was destroyed by the Gear Madness, Sulm, was destroyed by its ruler's magic, the ancient elven kingdoms by the wars against the Ur-flan, Baklunish and Suloise empires by the Twin Cataclysms...etc...
Could the gods have stopped such disasters? We don't know...

Golarion is kinda weird in that you have late XVIII/early XIX level civilizations (minus gunpowder) side by side to a copy of Ancient Egypt... But anyways, Golarion does have advanced magical civilizations, they just exist outside the Inner Sea Region; the Vudrani are said to be able to raise woundrous cities in days using magic. Golarion has also suffered its own share of cataclysms: The Earthfall, which explicitly resetted technological an magical development, the Worldwound, the conquest of Geb, Ustalav and the Gravelands by undead, the war between Geb and Nex...etc.

Exactly. Greyhawk has no excuse, b/c deities aren't as active to "eff civilization up point," and it has been thousands of years.

Golarion STILL has the problem of "oh thousands of years pass w/ no change whatsoever" but it makes sense in its own right since Golarion was never meant to be a living world.

A side note: People say Tolkien is medieval fantasy, but the style of living of hobbitts is at least late 19th century.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-02, 09:33 PM
Exactly. Greyhawk has no excuse, b/c deities aren't as active to "eff civilization up point," and it has been thousands of years.

It was three thousand years between the building of the pyramids and the fall of Rome. I'm not saying Greyhawk has nothing to answer for (I certainly don't know the specifics), but the discussion warrants more nuance than that.


A side note: People say Tolkien is medieval fantasy, but the style of living of hobbitts is at least late 19th century.

"Medieval" (in the context of fantasy) is, in practice, as much about aesthetics as practicalities. Tolkien is clearly "medieval" in the sense that the setting cues largely draw on ideas about the middle ages. The Hobbits live in a fashion that is "idealized pastoral England". Some specific details of that may fit better in the 19th century than whatever you'd consider the "middle ages", but the Shire is missing a great many of the things we'd expect to be present in the 19th century, because it's a pastiche of Tolkien's ideas about "the good old days of England", rather than a transplanting of some particular culture into a fantasy milieu.

InvisibleBison
2021-03-02, 09:34 PM
A side note: People say Tolkien is medieval fantasy, but the style of living of hobbitts is at least late 19th century.

I don't think that's quite right. Remember, one of the reasons that the Scouring of the Shire was so bad was destructive industrialization - and the most technologically advanced element was replacing the water-powered mill with another, bigger water-powered mill. Not a steam engine in sight.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-02, 09:40 PM
I don't think that's quite right. Remember, one of the reasons that the Scouring of the Shire was so bad was destructive industrialization - and the most technologically advanced element was replacing the water-powered mill with another, bigger water-powered mill. Not a steam engine in sight.

Like I said, it's not a specific period in time, it's a vehicle for Tolkien to explore the conflict between industrial England and pre-industrial England. It's not really "this is 19th century England, only the people are Hobbits" or "this is 14th century England, only the people are Hobbits", it's "unchecked industrialization attacks the soul of the English people". You can see it with what Saruman does in Isengard. It's clearly meant to be a metaphor for the rapacious industrialism of <whatever your favorite period of rapacious industrialism is>, but it's not like Saruman is making guns or tanks or trains. He's still producing stuff that is, aesthetically, medieval, he just does it in a way that's coded as industrial.

Anonymouswizard
2021-03-02, 10:29 PM
Also, IIRC, the hobbits did originally possess at least some 19th century technology. Because the first versions of The Hobbit weren't part of Middle-earth, it was brought in later as The Lord of the Rings was being written. So Tolkien obviously did care about sticking to a rough technology level, if not limiting the kinds of cultures.

Hobbit culture also has some other interesting elements that tie into the whole 'idea, not a time period' thing. Including their lack of an overarching government, while in theory they'd be subjects of Aragorn if I'm remembering my lore correctly, the Shire never had any central leadership itself and Anor hasn't been an actual state for at least hundreds of years. Several elements also exist because Tolkien knew they wouldn't be historically accurate but fittef with his pastoral English ideal, including their tendency to smoke.

Gnoman
2021-03-03, 02:51 AM
The head of the Took family is nominally the "Thain" of the Shire, but the office is purely ceremonial because he has nothing to do. They do have a police force of sort, the Shirrifs, under the elected Mayor of Michel Delving. Again, this is primarily a ceremonial thing, as the only thing the Shirrifs normally do is manage to border patrol to keep trespassers out.

Unlike the typical D&D depiction of Halflings as extremely chaotic (and thus being essentially anarchistic in organizing themselves), the Hobbits of Tolkien are so inherently Lawful that there's no real need to govern them.

They were nominally subjects of the King of Arnor and settled the Shire with his permission, but that kingdom was extinct for a thousand years by the time of LOTR. Aragon restored that kingdom, but gave the Shire effective independence and banned interference with them.

Nifft
2021-03-03, 02:54 AM
They were nominally subjects of the King of Arnor and settled the Shire with his permission, but that kingdom was extinct for a thousand years by the time of LOTR. Aragon restored that kingdom, but gave the Shire effective independence and banned interference with them.

It's good to be friends with the king.

Clistenes
2021-03-03, 04:05 AM
About Middle Earth, there is talk of Numenor being on the cusp of an industrial revolution, and even having developed steam engines right before its fall...


Also, IIRC, the hobbits did originally possess at least some 19th century technology. Because the first versions of The Hobbit weren't part of Middle-earth, it was brought in later as The Lord of the Rings was being written. So Tolkien obviously did care about sticking to a rough technology level, if not limiting the kinds of cultures.

Hobbit culture also has some other interesting elements that tie into the whole 'idea, not a time period' thing. Including their lack of an overarching government, while in theory they'd be subjects of Aragorn if I'm remembering my lore correctly, the Shire never had any central leadership itself and Anor hasn't been an actual state for at least hundreds of years. Several elements also exist because Tolkien knew they wouldn't be historically accurate but fittef with his pastoral English ideal, including their tendency to smoke.

Tolkien didn't care a bit about economy, logistics and administration... Hobbits enjoy all the fruits of an advanced civilization (wealth, health, peace, plenty of food...) while lacking a real government, army, science, colleges, industry...etc.).

Yora
2021-03-03, 04:45 AM
Right now there are African bushmen living a hunter gatherer lifestyle, tribes in the Amazon that have yet not been contacted and a people living on some small islands in the Indian Ocean that are basically off-limits to modern humans.

And that's not even touching a fairly broad category of people poor enough or choosing to live lives that are more traditional in nature. While we travelled to the moon there are still neolitihic stoneage people alive. Effectively.

I'd even argue mesolithic.

I actually happened to think about this two days ago, and one of the things I noticed is that all these stone age societies that have survived to this is day are "tribal" rather than "civilization" in the strictest sense. They survive in their stone age culture because they don't participate in international trade.
Societies that have cities and agriculture at a scale beyond subsistence tend to adopt new technologies very quickly once they become available. You don't see civilizations make contact with more technological advanced civilizations and say "Nah, we don't need those." Once a society sets out on the path to civilization, they always tend to adapt any new more efficient technology they can afford.

While you absolutely can have stone age cultures survive basically forever, for civilizations that participate in international relations that does not appear to be the case.

Telok
2021-03-04, 01:24 PM
I wonder if magic is less analogous to science/tech and closer to an plant husbandry/biotech thing.

Lots of the settings have major magical disasters on a semi-regular basis. Tech and science stuff lends itself to an identification of the problems and fixes, because the system that failed still exists in a static state. That is, even if your spaceship blew up a copy will work exactly the same way and any fix for the "rapid unplanned deconstruction" will work on all copies of the spaceship. Further, tech and science scale in a predictable manner. The small tech thing you build and test as proof of concept has predictable effects when scaled up.

But animal/plant husbandry is less rigorous, easier to pull off with less understanding of underlying mechanics, and has many more hidden and undetectable factors. Plus, the stuff created doesn't always stay the same. You can more easily have runaway side effects without any warning and possibly no way to prevent it happening again because you can't inspect an actual copy of the original design after it's mutated. Perhaps most important, you don't have to understand genes, diseases, recessive traits, or much of anything beyond how to do cross breeding, pollinating, and grafting. You can mutate a species with just trial and error, get something self replicating that affects other species, just with trial and error (and tiime).

Your high magic civ may be less like a technology based civ, where you have infrastructure and stuff that can be learned from, replicated, or repaired. It might be more like an ecology where the correct function of the flying city spells depend in a non-obvious manner on a side effect of a critical mass of continual light spells, and failure is more like a spell effect mass extinction than a car engine breakdown. You may never get flying cities back because some feedback loop in the rules of magic broke and the rules/ecology of magic changed to work around the missing effects or the magic side effects of those continual light spells mutated in ways nobody could predict or prevent.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-04, 06:38 PM
I wonder if magic is less analogous to science/tech and closer to an plant husbandry/biotech thing.

I don't think that's quite right. It's not that magic is specifically analogous to husbandry, it's that magic is generally non-industrial. Particularly in D&D. D&D is a game about a small group of hardened badasses doing stuff. As a result, it tends towards a paradigm where stuff is accomplished by small groups of hardened badasses. That means that magical infrastructure would tend to have a much lower "bus factor" than equivalent technology does. To give a concrete example, Roman aqueducts were marvels of engineering, and required a sophisticated network of engineering knowledge to be built and maintained. But that knowledge was spread among a wide range of people, so any one guy dying wasn't a big deal, and it took a broad collapse of civilization for the knowledge to be lost. The D&D equivalent would be something like a bunch of Decanters of Endless Water, which might have just been made by some specific dude, so if he dies (or just gets bored and leaves), that puts your entire water supply in danger.

It's also not clear how well magic can be taught. Of the various magic-users, it's only really Wizards (and close equivalents like Archivists) who you'd clearly expect to be taught. Sorcerers are magic because their ancestors include powerful magical beings. Clerics are empowered by the gods. Warlocks get their powers by making deals with demons. None of that is necessarily stuff you just teach people in a classroom. And once people get their magical powers, there's no guarantee they'll get the ones you need. If your plan is to have Sorcerers run around using Wall of Stone, and the Sorcerers you train learn Cloudkill or Teleport instead, you're kinda hosed.

Now, that doesn't really help all that much with the question OP is asking, because the history of most settings doesn't particularly look like that either. But it does seem like there's the potential for a more robust setting history there, if that was something you wanted to explore.

Clistenes
2021-03-05, 05:09 AM
I wonder if magic is less analogous to science/tech and closer to an plant husbandry/biotech thing.

Lots of the settings have major magical disasters on a semi-regular basis. Tech and science stuff lends itself to an identification of the problems and fixes, because the system that failed still exists in a static state. That is, even if your spaceship blew up a copy will work exactly the same way and any fix for the "rapid unplanned deconstruction" will work on all copies of the spaceship. Further, tech and science scale in a predictable manner. The small tech thing you build and test as proof of concept has predictable effects when scaled up.

But animal/plant husbandry is less rigorous, easier to pull off with less understanding of underlying mechanics, and has many more hidden and undetectable factors. Plus, the stuff created doesn't always stay the same. You can more easily have runaway side effects without any warning and possibly no way to prevent it happening again because you can't inspect an actual copy of the original design after it's mutated. Perhaps most important, you don't have to understand genes, diseases, recessive traits, or much of anything beyond how to do cross breeding, pollinating, and grafting. You can mutate a species with just trial and error, get something self replicating that affects other species, just with trial and error (and tiime).

Your high magic civ may be less like a technology based civ, where you have infrastructure and stuff that can be learned from, replicated, or repaired. It might be more like an ecology where the correct function of the flying city spells depend in a non-obvious manner on a side effect of a critical mass of continual light spells, and failure is more like a spell effect mass extinction than a car engine breakdown. You may never get flying cities back because some feedback loop in the rules of magic broke and the rules/ecology of magic changed to work around the missing effects or the magic side effects of those continual light spells mutated in ways nobody could predict or prevent.

In the homebrew setting we play sometimes not even Wizards really understand magic... yes, they have theories, but at the end of the day it is something similar to the Ancient Greek theory of the elements, or the theory of the humors... something that sounds good, but it can't be proved, it has no actual effect on the practical use of magic, and is probably wrong...

All they know is that, if they do certain rituals, an effect happens; people who study magic seriously have figured that magic is subconsciously generated by some part of the mind and/or soul, and that rituals sorta train that part of the soul/mind to activate. Kinda like the Pavlov experiment, you sound the bell, and the dog's saliva and stomach acid glands activate... the dog isn't activating these glands consciously, he doesn't even know he has these glands, but its body knows it's time to prepare for digestion...

Bards are the same, but they use music instead of rituals to achieve the same effect.

Sorcerers don't need these rituals because they are able to generate magic at will. Warlocks are modified by an external force so they can do as Sorcerers do...

Destro2119
2021-03-05, 10:48 AM
In the homebrew setting we play sometimes not even Wizards really understand magic... yes, they have theories, but at the end of the day it is something similar to the Ancient Greek theory of the elements, or the theory of the humors... something that sounds good, but it can't be proved, it has no actual effect on the practical use of magic, and is probably wrong...

All they know is that, if they do certain rituals, an effect happens; people who study magic seriously have figured that magic is subconsciously generated by some part of the mind and/or soul, and that rituals sorta train that part of the soul/mind to activate. Kinda like the Pavlov experiment, you sound the bell, and the dog's saliva and stomach acid glands activate... the dog isn't activating these glands consciously, he doesn't even know he has these glands, but its body knows it's time to prepare for digestion...

Bards are the same, but they use music instead of rituals to achieve the same effect.

Sorcerers don't need these rituals because they are able to generate magic at will. Warlocks are modified by an external force so they can do as Sorcerers do...

I mean, this is a good way to justify it, but in the end the magic of DnD 3.X, even in-lore, was always more Magic is A Science (Net Wizard's Handbook) than anything else. I mean, large die offs of population in an apocalypse impact even technological societies.

The central point of "individuals over collective effort" usually ties back to xp, which doesn't even just include DnD. World of Darkness, Traveller, Exalted, ANY GAME that uses xp advancement in skills suffers from this problem. The problem comes from trying to take a system built around a singular group adventuring and using that system to try to model a society. It doesn't work, for many reasons, one of which being that NOTHING in DnDverse/PFverse can be industrialized. This is even clearer in PF 2e where you need a special feat called Alchemical Crafting to even make alchemical items with the Craft skill. Whereas we IRL have even children using science kits to make scientific reactions. In fact, PF1e needed a feat called Craft Technological Item to craft even "mundane" tech items! It is thus impossible to industrialize anything in DnDverse since the very physics of their world precludes industrial crafting if you try to apply that singular system onto everything.

Lord Raziere
2021-03-05, 11:05 AM
I mean, this is a good way to justify it, but in the end the magic of DnD 3.X, even in-lore, was always more Magic is A Science (Net Wizard's Handbook) than anything else. I mean, large die offs of population in an apocalypse impact even technological societies.

The central point of "individuals over collective effort" usually ties back to xp, which doesn't even just include DnD. World of Darkness, Traveller, Exalted, ANY GAME that uses xp advancement in skills suffers from this problem. The problem comes from trying to take a system built around a singular group adventuring and using that system to try to model a society. It doesn't work, for many reasons, one of which being that NOTHING in DnDverse/PFverse can be industrialized. This is even clearer in PF 2e where you need a special feat called Alchemical Crafting to even make alchemical items with the Craft skill. Whereas we IRL have even children using science kits to make scientific reactions. In fact, PF1e needed a feat called Craft Technological Item to craft even "mundane" tech items! It is thus impossible to industrialize anything in DnDverse since the very physics of their world precludes industrial crafting if you try to apply that singular system onto everything.

This is why I don't ascribe to the "rules as physics engines" school of thought. You end up with systems built to make exceptions being used to try and make everything else, with weird results that don't match up to common sense or logic, when its more reasonable to just turn off the targeting computer and just assume that that system only models what important to the game. not how the world actually works.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-05, 12:11 PM
This is why I don't ascribe to the "rules as physics engines" school of thought. You end up with systems built to make exceptions being used to try and make everything else, with weird results that don't match up to common sense or logic, when its more reasonable to just turn off the targeting computer and just assume that that system only models what important to the game. not how the world actually works.

Very much agree. The game rules are a UI to help us play. They should not conflict badly with the real in-universe laws[1], but they're not the same as those actual laws.

[1] imagine playing a competitive FPS using an old-school Sierra adventure game text input system.

Destro2119
2021-03-05, 12:14 PM
This is why I don't ascribe to the "rules as physics engines" school of thought. You end up with systems built to make exceptions being used to try and make everything else, with weird results that don't match up to common sense or logic, when its more reasonable to just turn off the targeting computer and just assume that that system only models what important to the game. not how the world actually works.

I agree. The simplest way is to accept that RAW is an abstraction, and not a physics engine. For example, all feats are exactly game conventions. Inside the game crafter just knows how to craft. He studied, and now he knows. Feats, skills, perks - abstractions
XP is abstraction, too. RAW is subordinate to reality of DnDverse/PFverse, not the other way round. If somebody can craft longsword +1 (in fact a little bit of magical improved longsword), it means he has "Craft Magic Weapon" feat.

More specifically, the "can only craft one magic item a day*" rule becomes just the amount a single person can feasibly do in one day, like forging a sword IRL, and not some universal physics engine that comes down and stops you from making more. Meaning that magic can be industrialized through usage of specialized industrial machinery/techniques.

*Not like it was super consistent on its own anyhow-- 50 magic arrows takes the same effort and time as one magic dagger to craft raw.

Luccan
2021-03-05, 05:42 PM
The head of the Took family is nominally the "Thain" of the Shire, but the office is purely ceremonial because he has nothing to do. They do have a police force of sort, the Shirrifs, under the elected Mayor of Michel Delving. Again, this is primarily a ceremonial thing, as the only thing the Shirrifs normally do is manage to border patrol to keep trespassers out.

Unlike the typical D&D depiction of Halflings as extremely chaotic (and thus being essentially anarchistic in organizing themselves), the Hobbits of Tolkien are so inherently Lawful that there's no real need to govern them.

They were nominally subjects of the King of Arnor and settled the Shire with his permission, but that kingdom was extinct for a thousand years by the time of LOTR. Aragon restored that kingdom, but gave the Shire effective independence and banned interference with them.

Interesting note, despite their rep as travelling bands of thieves, halflings in D&D have always been described as largely Lawful Good or True Neutral. And the latter only in 3rd, which also leaned into the Halfling criminals (not just rogues/thief classed) aspect.

Honestly, their real chaotic behaviors seem partly come from partially absorbing Kender in later editions to even the two races out: get rid of the Hobbit-like homebodiness of old-school Halflings and tone down the Kenders' complete lack of self-preservation instinct and in-born kleptomania.

Satinavian
2021-03-06, 02:42 AM
The central point of "individuals over collective effort" usually ties back to xp, which doesn't even just include DnD. World of Darkness, Traveller, Exalted, ANY GAME that uses xp advancement in skills suffers from this problem. The problem comes from trying to take a system built around a singular group adventuring and using that system to try to model a society. It doesn't work, for many reasons, one of which being that NOTHING in DnDverse/PFverse can be industrialized. This is even clearer in PF 2e where you need a special feat called Alchemical Crafting to even make alchemical items with the Craft skill. Whereas we IRL have even children using science kits to make scientific reactions. In fact, PF1e needed a feat called Craft Technological Item to craft even "mundane" tech items! It is thus impossible to industrialize anything in DnDverse since the very physics of their world precludes industrial crafting if you try to apply that singular system onto everything.
I disagree. There are a lot of XP based systems where the difference between a starting character and an end-of career character is still not all that huge. Or more detailed, there are a lot of xp systems where a starting character is some healthy young adult with rudimentary training in some career and an end of career character is some distinguished professional with world fame, maybe even in two or more fields but still far from superhuman anywhere.

XP don't tell you anything about what kind of abilities are on offer and how they compare to each other.

Luccan
2021-03-06, 12:49 PM
Ya know, I could be wrong, but the actual passage of time in official settings for the past five decades hasn't been all that large, has it? It may be inexcusable to some that many settings have long histories and are still medieval, but in terms of "still" being medieval, most settings haven't gone through more than maybe a couple hundred years of development since they released, right? That's still comfortably medieval in our own world, depending on when you start counting. I dunno, I've never kept close track of any setting developments, so I could be wrong, but it's not that weird in-universe that things have stayed pretty similar since the introduction of the settings either.

Nifft
2021-03-06, 02:28 PM
Ya know, I could be wrong, but the actual passage of time in official settings for the past five decades hasn't been all that large, has it? Depends whether you count only official playable content or include novels.


It may be inexcusable to some that many settings have long histories and are still medieval, but in terms of "still" being medieval, most settings haven't gone through more than maybe a couple hundred years of development since they released, right? The consensus seems to be that most D&D settings were never just medieval. :smallwink:

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-06, 03:27 PM
Depends whether you count only official playable content or include novels.

The consensus seems to be that most D&D settings were never just medieval. :smallwink:

I'll note that even during earth's medieval period, most of earth wasn't just medieval either.

Destro2119
2021-03-06, 03:31 PM
I disagree. There are a lot of XP based systems where the difference between a starting character and an end-of career character is still not all that huge. Or more detailed, there are a lot of xp systems where a starting character is some healthy young adult with rudimentary training in some career and an end of career character is some distinguished professional with world fame, maybe even in two or more fields but still far from superhuman anywhere.

XP don't tell you anything about what kind of abilities are on offer and how they compare to each other.


A better example would be those specific types of games I cited-- where societal progress should and has happened, but the specific leveling systems of those games (read: group intrigue/adventuring games) do not work well for "advancing the setting." D20 Modern is one, for example, so is Mage the Ascension. The types of games you cite are still probably centered around doing something other than "progressing society."

In essence, no game ever is going to have a good rules system for industrialization/research unless the entire game has been written around that goal. Trying to shoehorn, say, d20 rules/Call of Cthulhu rules into such a role is fitting a square peg into a round hole/

Destro2119
2021-03-06, 03:38 PM
Depends whether you count only official playable content or include novels.

The consensus seems to be that most D&D settings were never just medieval. :smallwink:

On time periods-- the problem isn't that the world is medieval for centuries, it is when "thousands of years" pass and no change, not even political change, happens.

On a another note, paraphrasing a different poster on another thread, most gaming worlds tend to drag so many assumptions on literacy, creature comforts, and morality into them that if you assume that everyone is actually as poor a medieval farmer you will quickly realize you have made a nonsense world.

It's kind of like Tolkien's hobbits completely unexplained standard of living; where you get people being basically universally literate in the world and even basic knowledge of germ theory/sanitation (otherwise any attempts to use the Heal skill would quickly result in the death of the patient, plus you would be making saves vs filth fever every other round in a city :smalltongue:)

Clistenes
2021-03-06, 06:00 PM
I mean, this is a good way to justify it, but in the end the magic of DnD 3.X, even in-lore, was always more Magic is A Science (Net Wizard's Handbook) than anything else. I mean, large die offs of population in an apocalypse impact even technological societies.

It's kinda is a science, but in the way ancient astronomy was a science: They had observed the stars for generations, had a ton of accumulated knowledge about their movements and they could predict eclipses, conjunctions...etc., but they didn't know WHAT the stars were...

Or ancient architecture: They could make amazing stuff using their accumulated knowledge, but while they knew how to make, say (roman) pozzolanic ash concrete or (chinese) glutinous rice mortar, they didn't know WHY that worked.

Or hell, like medicine until yesterday... Edward Jenner created the first vaccine without even knowing diseases were caused by viruses and bacteria; Ignaz Semmelweis created a protocol to avoid puerperal fever in mothers by using disinfectants without knowing that germs were its cause; Louis Pasteur created the vaccine against rabies without knowing about viruses, and Alexander Fleming discovered antibiotics by chance due to a lab accident... Medicine was for a long time based on purely empirical trial and error method... but it was still a science in the modern sense, based on the experimental method.

That's how I see Wizards in our homebrew setting: Like doctors who still don't know about DNA and lack electron microscopes, working using the trial and error method, slowly building up efficient techniques over the generations...

Mechalich
2021-03-06, 06:20 PM
I'll note that even during earth's medieval period, most of earth wasn't just medieval either.

Well, that depends on how you define 'medieval,' but while the most technologically advanced societies on the planet from 500 - 1500 CE were distinctly not located in Europe, they were at best very modestly superior in terms of technology. The Islamic World and China certainly had some things Europe did not, like widespread block printing and porcelain, but they were not so advanced as to preclude rapid adoption by European societies when those technologies were transported to Europe.

Now, there were definitely large areas of the planet that occupied a lower technological level during that timeframe, but a lot of that is due to geographic and environmental factors.

That's actually an important sub-point regarding magitech fantasy development. Because advancement via magic is not especially tied to any specific natural resources (at least not in D&D) there's no reason why societies in areas where technological development is normally impeded by environmental pressures should have any sort of the same difficulties advancing via magic.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-06, 08:23 PM
I'll note that even during earth's medieval period, most of earth wasn't just medieval either.

That seems like semantics, really. Like, yeah, not everything was the "crap-covered medieval peasantry" you see in a King Arthur or Robin Hood movie, but even the advanced societies were pretty far removed from anything you'd consider modern. Even relatively advanced and sophisticated societies at the time still had the overwhelming majority of their population employed in agriculture. I think a lot of people tend to over-correct against the traditional view of the Middle Ages. Yes, it's Eurocentric, and yes it exaggerates the lack of sophistication. But the gap between "modernity" and "the actual Middle Ages" is still way, way bigger than the gap between "the actual Middle Ages" and "cultural perception of the Middle Ages".

Also, there's the whole question of what time period D&D (and fantasy in general) is really reflective of, but that's a whole other can of worms.


That's actually an important sub-point regarding magitech fantasy development. Because advancement via magic is not especially tied to any specific natural resources (at least not in D&D) there's no reason why societies in areas where technological development is normally impeded by environmental pressures should have any sort of the same difficulties advancing via magic.

That's a complicated issue. The things that effect magical advancement aren't going to be the same as the things that effect technological advancement, but there are still going to be things that effect it. What exactly depends on how closely you hew to RAW. For example, in a setting that follows XP-based advancement, something like the Fremen Mirage (https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/) is basically true: if your society survives in a place that is full of horrible monsters, your people really are demonstrably more badass than people who live in comparably nicer places.

Destro2119
2021-03-06, 08:25 PM
That's how I see Wizards in our homebrew setting: Like doctors who still don't know about DNA and lack electron microscopes, working using the trial and error method, slowly building up efficient techniques over the generations...

Well then this is a very good basis for a Magic is a Science setting. In fact, what you propose fits perfectly into the Magic is a Science (Normal) level of development in the Net Wizard's Handbook.

As an interesting note, I simulated the advancements in magical knowledge over time by allowing players to utilize the some of the more streamlined spells of Starfinder, making minor modifications to old spells to make them more useful, and finally the development of the Legendary Games's versions of the Cleric, wizard, etc.

Mechalich
2021-03-06, 09:50 PM
That's a complicated issue. The things that effect magical advancement aren't going to be the same as the things that effect technological advancement, but there are still going to be things that effect it. What exactly depends on how closely you hew to RAW. For example, in a setting that follows XP-based advancement, something like the Fremen Mirage (https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/) is basically true: if your society survives in a place that is full of horrible monsters, your people really are demonstrably more badass than people who live in comparably nicer places.

Point, and of course D&D magical advancement is specifically weird because the path to founding a magitech empire is getting one, just one, extremely high-level Tier I caster who is willing to devote themselves fully to this particular effort - as opposed to galivanting around the multiverse or simply building themselves a personal Xanadu and leaving everyone else to starve - and I'm really not sure anyone has a good idea which conditions would effectively foster that. Some kind of rigid childhood indoctrination for all spellcasters might work (the Tsurani Empire, of Raymond Feist's Riftwar Setting has a practice like this), but it doesn't seem guaranteed.

As far as the XP issue, well, I think that has to be acknowledged loosely if at all, otherwise any D&D world becomes very vulnerable to isekai-style shenanigans.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-06, 09:59 PM
Point, and of course D&D magical advancement is specifically weird because the path to founding a magitech empire is getting one, just one, extremely high-level Tier I caster who is willing to devote themselves fully to this particular effort

Well, a path. You certainly can build an empire on the back of a larger number of low level casters, particularly if you're willing to employ necromancy. Honestly, at lower levels of optimization, a single high-level caster is less useful in D&D than many other settings. You don't actually gain that many more spell slots for leveling (particularly relative to XP), and magic item crafting (in some editions) doesn't scale at all. You can build a pretty compelling magitech empire without any casters over 10th level, and can get meaningful improvements over medieval society with just 3rd level spells (most notably Plant Growth).


As far as the XP issue, well, I think that has to be acknowledged loosely if at all, otherwise any D&D world becomes very vulnerable to isekai-style shenanigans.

Frankly, there's just a fundamental mismatch between how fast the game wants to advance and how fast the setting can tolerate people advancing. Unless you either shift to norm of having multi-year breaks between adventures, enshrine a degree of "PCs are special" that probably breaks people's suspension of disbelief, or dramatically nerf top power levels (more than 5e does, even), the setting starts getting really unstable.

Telok
2021-03-07, 12:50 AM
Something interesting as a long term project would be to run campaigns in/around a single city. Specifically D&D style 1 to 20s without the "travel downtime" and artificial slow downs. You should be able to get three 1-20s in an in-game calendar year. Then stop and think about what that level of activity and mayhem looks like from outside.

I think that any setting short of already insane gonzo (Dark Sun? Spelljammer? Sigil?) probably can't even keep to fridge logic levels of coherent civilization if you have anyone actually experiencing pc style advancement and power more often than... once per generation per continent?

I mean, figure the encounters for a party to go from levels 11 to 20. Have them all happen in one city over the course of two months. Repeat with different encounters and heroes two months later.

Sound unlikely for a set of (super)heroes to stick around one city for more than a week or two? Ok, have them travel a lot, enough to cut their xp rate by 2/3rds. Over a span of 6 months they have fights (because honestly, xp for gp, noncombat xp encounters, and story rewards aren't enough to matter these days) in various cities covering the 11 to 20 encounter range. Unless the vast majority of mid-high level adventuring takes place outside of civilization or on other planes, or these events are once-a-generation at most, the direct damage and the side effects will warp civilization beyond what we'd expect.

Lets see... what is each party on the 10 to 20 train likely to fight at least once? Ancient dragon, with treasure recovered. Major demon/devil. Lich. High priest of a majorly evil cult. Each one has a fairly long back trail or a big side effect. The dragon has looted and gathered for centuries then the pcs will be spending the gold. Major demons don't pop up on the material plane without either serious prep & sacrifices or nasty piles of other demons wandering around too. Liches are a function of a small fraction of high end magic users going in for horrible murder magic to extend their lives, so there's a fair number of high end casters wandering around. Evil cults big enough to field a "credible threat to high end pcs" priest are usually quite large, made of numbers of high power individuals, or go in for necromancy/demons in a pretty big way.

So how much of this is going on in a setting? One level 15 party every 50 years? Even assuming a party only fights a single ancient dragon once ever, how many dragons at their slow growth & population rates does that require? And how much are all those dragons raiding & looting to build their treasure piles? What does that many dragons and that much raising do to a setting? Repeat for the required number of liches, of evil cults, of demon incursions.

Yeah, the pc xp rates have to be a game construct to reward players at frequent intervals. If npcs worked on pc xp rules and you had even one high level party in 50 years the amount and power of their required encounters will have affected the setting. Heck, there's probably elves running a calendar based on it. "It's the decade of the stone goose again already? My, how time flies. Wait a sec, there was a big dragon rampage two kingdoms over last year and that one city is being run by a evil cult. Crud, it means it's about time for the big demon invasion again. Better check the bards to see who the current heroes are and where they are. I may be taking my twice a century vacation to a desert island a couple years early this time."

Actually, that could be a fun setting to work out. Everyone knows about the hero cycle and plans around it because of all the collateral damage their "level appropriate" encounter path causes getting powered up or being taken down. You'd have history sages working out who the next set of heroes will be and what they'll fight based on historic parallels and patterns.

Yora
2021-03-07, 05:00 AM
Something interesting as a long term project would be to run campaigns in/around a single city. Specifically D&D style 1 to 20s without the "travel downtime" and artificial slow downs.
That's Ptolus. At least as I understood the sales pitch.

Tanarii
2021-03-07, 10:11 AM
That's how I see Wizards in our homebrew setting: Like doctors who still don't know about DNA and lack electron microscopes, working using the trial and error method, slowly building up efficient techniques over the generations...
That's not necessarily a barrier to development of a magictech empire over a long enough time span, provided it's about the level of steampunk.

Destro2119
2021-03-07, 10:39 AM
That seems like semantics, really. Like, yeah, not everything was the "crap-covered medieval peasantry" you see in a King Arthur or Robin Hood movie, but even the advanced societies were pretty far removed from anything you'd consider modern. Even relatively advanced and sophisticated societies at the time still had the overwhelming majority of their population employed in agriculture. I think a lot of people tend to over-correct against the traditional view of the Middle Ages. Yes, it's Eurocentric, and yes it exaggerates the lack of sophistication. But the gap between "modernity" and "the actual Middle Ages" is still way, way bigger than the gap between "the actual Middle Ages" and "cultural perception of the Middle Ages".

Also, there's the whole question of what time period D&D (and fantasy in general) is really reflective of, but that's a whole other can of worms.



That's a complicated issue. The things that effect magical advancement aren't going to be the same as the things that effect technological advancement, but there are still going to be things that effect it. What exactly depends on how closely you hew to RAW. For example, in a setting that follows XP-based advancement, something like the Fremen Mirage (https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/) is basically true: if your society survives in a place that is full of horrible monsters, your people really are demonstrably more badass than people who live in comparably nicer places.

Frankly, I feel as if any attempt to compare DnD to RW medieval societies is a lost cause. As referenced many, many times in this thread before, Dnd worlds resemble nothing like RW medieval societies.

I mean, this isn't even just talking about "feudalism" anymore, its talking about how there are TONS of modern assumptions/sensibilities like sanitation, literacy and more transplanted into a fantasy world with medieval paint job no matter how much those sensibilities and assumptions would change the world/be products of a world very different from the "medieval standard."

Because it is ultimately a GAME WORLD made to pander primarily to people living in modernized, developed countries, so the whole "past is a foreign country*" thing is plastered over for the most part, exceptions being horses/swords/tropey things.

*When I say this, I literally mean things like thee is no evidence we even slept 8 hours at a go b/f the invention of the lightbulb, not even just horses instead of cars (which, incidentally, was the case from freakin' Ancient Egypt to 1890s London).

Anonymouswizard
2021-03-07, 10:53 AM
We have gone so far off the road the OP began it's untrue, although it's probably a more interesting discussion than 'why isn't D&D SF'.

At the end of the day, it comes down to taste and suspension of disbelief. For some people the level of progression in published D&D settings is fine, in others it's not. I personally fall on the 'wizards are supposed to spend decades poking the universe with a stick, why is everything moving so slowly'.


On the other hand to me, it doesn't matter in the session itself as long as the GM allows my character to develop and spread new ideas, technology, or spells. But it does make ma a little bit wary of starting games in certain settings.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-07, 01:18 PM
Frankly, I feel as if any attempt to compare DnD to RW medieval societies is a lost cause. As referenced many, many times in this thread before, Dnd worlds resemble nothing like RW medieval societies.

That's not a D&D problem, that's a fantasy problem. The typical fantasy setting is aesthetically medieval, but is culturally a hodge-podge of Iron Age, Classical, Medieval, and Age of Exploration tropes. Very few stories, particularly ones involving any substantive amount of magic, look very much like the historical periods they nominally draw on.

Destro2119
2021-03-07, 01:42 PM
We have gone so far off the road the OP began it's untrue, although it's probably a more interesting discussion than 'why isn't D&D SF'.

At the end of the day, it comes down to taste and suspension of disbelief. For some people the level of progression in published D&D settings is fine, in others it's not. I personally fall on the 'wizards are supposed to spend decades poking the universe with a stick, why is everything moving so slowly'.


On the other hand to me, it doesn't matter in the session itself as long as the GM allows my character to develop and spread new ideas, technology, or spells. But it does make ma a little bit wary of starting games in certain settings.

"taste and suspension of disbelief"

The problem with suspension of disbelief for me isn't that the society is initially medieval, it is how there are heavily modern times influenced sensibilities and assumptions in those "medieval" societies that could have only been present in times that are far from the medieval era. Or things that would quickly make a medieval Dark Ages era stop being medieval.

Destro2119
2021-03-07, 01:45 PM
Well, a path. You certainly can build an empire on the back of a larger number of low level casters, particularly if you're willing to employ necromancy. Honestly, at lower levels of optimization, a single high-level caster is less useful in D&D than many other settings. You don't actually gain that many more spell slots for leveling (particularly relative to XP), and magic item crafting (in some editions) doesn't scale at all. You can build a pretty compelling magitech empire without any casters over 10th level, and can get meaningful improvements over medieval society with just 3rd level spells (most notably Plant Growth).



Frankly, there's just a fundamental mismatch between how fast the game wants to advance and how fast the setting can tolerate people advancing. Unless you either shift to norm of having multi-year breaks between adventures, enshrine a degree of "PCs are special" that probably breaks people's suspension of disbelief, or dramatically nerf top power levels (more than 5e does, even), the setting starts getting really unstable.

"Well, a path. You certainly can build an empire on the back of a larger number of low level casters, particularly if you're willing to employ necromancy. Honestly, at lower levels of optimization, a single high-level caster is less useful in D&D than many other settings. You don't actually gain that many more spell slots for leveling (particularly relative to XP), and magic item crafting (in some editions) doesn't scale at all. You can build a pretty compelling magitech empire without any casters over 10th level, and can get meaningful improvements over medieval society with just 3rd level spells (most notably Plant Growth)."

One of my personal problems with most settings is when there are actually really high levels of magic (pro tip: if a museum curator in a town not renowned to have many mages is a 13th level wizard/expert, then magic isn't that rare in your setting at all) but nothing is really affected by it, beyond "lol fireballs."

Also, I am really interested by this concept. Could you elaborate?

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-08, 08:45 PM
Also, I am really interested by this concept. Could you elaborate?

As a disclaimer, most of this is specific to 3e (as that's the edition I'm most familiar with). Much of it is applicable to one degree or another in other editions, but there's no guarantee it translates directly. Also, I'm ignoring Artificers, because all they really do is let you do stuff at lower levels, which I regard as optimization more than interesting worldbuilding. I'm also trying to avoid any kind of rules abuse, because that's not really interesting world-building.

Anyway, let's start with necromancy. Specifically the classic "raise undead minions" necromancy, not the various curses and debuffs available to aspiring necromancers. There are, broadly, three tools available for low-level necromancers to control undead minions: rebuking, Command Undead, and Animate Dead. Rebuking is mostly interesting in that it's the first to come online, but the numbers are pretty unimpressive. Command Undead is interesting, because unlike other methods of control, it doesn't check hit dice at all. You just hit a mindless undead with it, and the undead does what you say. The limit is how many castings you can keep up at once, meaning that if you have some way of producing individual undead that are very hard core it lets you field them in very large numbers. That said, Animate Dead is going to be the staple of any necromantic civilization, because it lets you make undead. There are, of course, higher level undead-creation spells, but for the most part they're not as useful because A) they don't offer any particular control over the undead they make and B) most of the undead you'd want to use those spells to make can make more of themselves anyway.

So, you've got some undead minions (skeletons, in most cases). What do you do with them? The most obvious use is that you can replace draft animals. Instead of horses or oxen that need to be fed, and to sleep, and might die if you work them too much, you can have skeletal versions that are tireless and require no sustenance. A 5th level Cleric can control 20 HD worth of undead. If you make Skeleton Heavy Horses, that's a half-dozen working animals, before you consider figuring out some exotic critter that has better stats, or try to expand your control pool. Those undead horses let you move goods farther (because they don't need food, meaning you don't need to carry as much food in your caravan), move goods faster (because they don't need to sleep, meaning you don't need to stop to let them rest), and give you better agricultural yields (because they can plow a larger area -- note that in this context undead aren't quite pure upside as the manure produced by living animals was important for crops). There's a lot of value to be gained there, but there are limits. Mindless undead are, well, mindless. Even if you're animating Human (or Elven or Goblin) corpses, the labor you get out of Skeletons is pretty primitive.

Before we go further, a brief discussion of the relationship between undead and the living. Fiction often depicts necromancers as running around killing people to turn them into zombies, or vampires draining people dry of blood, or ghouls devouring humans alive. That's certainly scary, and if your goal is to establish the undead as bad guys, it's pretty effective. But it's not particularly smart or necessary (unless the mechanics of magic are such that it explicitly is, but in D&D they aren't). Necromancers, even flesh eating undead, have no rational incentive to kill people. Vampires actually have an incentive to keep people alive, because living people produce blood and dead ones don't (incidentally: the fact that D&D Vampires do Constitution Drain instead of Damage makes some of the world-building you'd like to do with them difficult). The number of corpses per person is one, and it's one whether you kill people in their prime or let them die of old age (necromancers do benefit from population turnover, so you'd expect shorter-lived races like Goblins to be the most interested). As such, if they're not trapped in short-term thinking, necromancers can be perfectly functional members of society, with undead doing difficult, unpleasant, or dangerous manual labor, resulting in a higher overall standard of living for society.

Back to the main topic: Skeletons may be good for extremely low skill manual labor, but they falter at any task that you can't accurately describe in a couple of sentences. There are a lot of tasks like that which you might want your undead doing, so what do you do? There are three basic approaches. Most obviously, you could simply make intelligent undead. Then they can do anything normal people can do, with most of the benefits of undeath. Alternatively, Awaken Undead will turn mindless undead into intelligent ones. Finally, Haunt Shift will turn your undead into "haunting presences". The rules for that are complicated, but basically it allows you to make undead-powered assembly lines.

That covers your basic economic applications of necromancy. But where necromancy really shines is warfare. Undead soldiers don't need food or rest, won't disobey orders, won't break in the face of overwhelming enemy firepower, don't suffer from disease or poison, and are immune to some seriously nasty battle magic (some of it even heals them). An army of undead has no logistics train, can march through the night, and can fight under spells like Cloudkill, Fear, and Stinking Cloud without concern. If, as they should be, your line troops are Skeletons, you can even rain down whatever cold-based blasting you want, including Uttercold spells that heal your troops. Also, you can stick Permanency'd Symbols of Fear or Death on your standards, which does a really good job of breaking enemy troops. Oh, and Skeletons have Darkvision, meaning they can operate freely at night.

The logistics aspect is worth exploring some more, because undead armies behave very differently from medieval ones. Since your troops don't need food, you don't need the baggage train that most armies do. However, food wasn't the only thing it transported. It also moved ammunition (e.g. arrows) and backup weapons of various sorts. Those things are useful, but total strategic mobility is better, so undead armies probably have a lot less archery than traditional ones (though use of spells like Fabricate can mitigate this). Conversely, they probably have a lot more cavalry, because the primary constraints on those are things that undead can ignore (food, tiredness). The fact that undead don't need food also allows them a much finer control over their interactions with the local population. While many armies needed forage to support themselves (which could drive tension with locals), undead can leave the local population entirely alone. Alternatively, because they don't need food or drink, they can burn the fields, salt the earth, and poison the water supply, crippling the operations of more traditional armies.

Necromancers also have access to spawn-creating undead, which are basically the magical equivalent of nukes. A peasant can't do anything to a shadow, and a shadow kills a peasant in something less than 30 seconds, at which point the peasant becomes a new shadow. Unless stopped immediately, this process spirals out of control and can depopulate entire regions. And undead themselves are immune to shadows, allowing them to operate unimpeded.

Of course, you can also employ auxiliaries who have a somewhat less... absolute effect on the conflict. Undead have a wide swath of immunities that, beyond protecting them from your own magic artillery, protect them from the dangerous auras of various monsters. Most notably, dragons' Frightful Presence is a no-action AoE save-or-lose to which undead are completely immune. If your dragon allies are White, Silver, or some other Cold-breathing type, and your undead footsoldiers are Skeletons (which, again, they should be), the dragons can even let loose with their breath weapons with impunity. You can even take a page out of the Scourge's playbook and use dragons that are themselves undead. Note that this is a rare case where you actually want to make Zombies, because Zombie Dragons keep their breath weapons (and flight).

Then you've got your military leadership, which can be various forms of undead themselves. Turning (or more often, having them turn themselves) your senior officers into Ghosts, Liches, or Vampires modestly increases their combat capabilities, but more importantly makes them immortal and very, very difficult to kill in the field. Undead armies can field generals or even captains with hundreds or thousands of years of experience. That means that even if you can deal with all the horrors described above, you have to deal with the fact that the enemy's leadership is probably both smarter and better-trained than yours.

Given all that, people often ask the not-unreasonable question "why haven't undead conquered the world?". A common response is to assert that the gods won't allow it, but that's not really compelling. It's true that there are gods of Light and Life that might take objection to the necromancer-priests of Ermor riding forth and founding an empire of darkness and despair that lasts for all time, but there are also gods of Darkness and Undeath that are 100% on board with that happening (and remember, while I'm using provocative language, such an empire is probably an improvement over faux-medieval D&Dland, so it's unclear that the Good gods should oppose it). It's also a bad answer from the perspective of running a campaign, because "the gods heavily intervene in the setting to solve problems before they arise" is just about the most disempowering piece of worldbulding you can have. The better answer is realpolitik. Once they get going, necromantic empires are nigh-unstoppable juggernauts. But before they can get their battle-caster artillery, legions of undead, and other tricks going, they're just a regular empire that has a few auxiliaries that are slightly tougher and better than normal troops. And everyone knows that their power is only going to go up from there, meaning that the best time to attack them is right now. Any power that starts dipping its toes into necromancy is going to get smacked down hard by every one of its neighbors, not out of any moral opprobrium, but because that's the only chance those neighbors are likely to get. The first international treaties in D&Dland probably amount to "no necromancy".

In terms of broader magical advancement, most of the big stuff is in the 3rd to 6th level spell range, with the big hump at 5th level spells. There are a few low level spells that are kind of interesting, but their impact is pretty limited. Silent Image is convenient but not world-changing, Whispering Wind is neat but doesn't travel fast enough or far enough to do too much, Goodberry is a nice tool for increasing food yields but doesn't do too much, and Divinations are potentially impactful but depend heavily on how your legal system is structured.

At 3rd level, you get Animate Dead (discussed in some detail above), Create Food and Water (which can't replace farming, but does a lot to help supplies last through lean times or on campaign), Stone Shape (the volume isn't huge, but you can make decent-sized structures with repeated castings), and Plant Growth (a 33% productivity bump isn't the Green Revolution, but it's no joke and means a big bump in available non-farm labor). Noe of those are paradigm shifts, but they're all enough to offer real improvements over medieval standards of living. Plant Growth in particular is big enough deal that I would expect most societies to dedicate significant resources to ensuring it's cast appropriately.

4th level doesn't offer anything with as dramatic an impact as Plant Growth, but it has Minor Creation (the stuff it makes is temporary, but it can still be useful), Scrying (the potential impact is huge, but spell slots are limited enough to constrain it somewhat), Sending (fixes the issues with Whispering Wind, but a 4th level slot is a steep rate), Lesser Planar Ally (this is the first thing that lets you go dumpster-diving for outsiders, which is potentially very strong), and Restoration (interestingly, one of the most impactful uses of this is allowing you to safely feed Vampires).

5th level has basically everything you could want. Plane Shift (outer planes have all kinds of useful stuff lying around), Wall of Stone (this is what Stone Shape wishes it was), Lesser Planar Binding (like Lesser Planar Ally but easier to use), Teleport (instantaneous travel is good, but it's not instantaneous shipping, so the impact isn't as big as some think), Fabricate (this allows industrial-scale production of most goods, though as I noted a while ago it's vulnerable to individuals quitting or dying), and Permanency (this takes a lot of other spells from "neat" to "game-changing").

6th level stuff is largely just improvements on stuff you already had. Wall of Iron is like Wall of Stone, but made of iron, in case that's more useful for some reason. Planar Binding lets you get more stuff than its Lesser variant (ditto Planar Ally). Move Earth better in some respects than earlier earth-manipulating spells, but not fundamentally different.

It would probably also be worth going into the ways in which magical creatures likely impact D&D society (basically: it takes training and work for a Human to cast 4th level spells, for a Couatl it takes "being born"), but this post is already super long.

Destro2119
2021-03-09, 07:41 AM
As a disclaimer, most of this is specific to 3e (as that's the edition I'm most familiar with). Much of it is applicable to one degree or another in other editions, but there's no guarantee it translates directly. Also, I'm ignoring Artificers, because all they really do is let you do stuff at lower levels, which I regard as optimization more than interesting worldbuilding. I'm also trying to avoid any kind of rules abuse, because that's not really interesting world-building.

Anyway, let's start with necromancy. Specifically the classic "raise undead minions" necromancy, not the various curses and debuffs available to aspiring necromancers. There are, broadly, three tools available for low-level necromancers to control undead minions: rebuking, Command Undead, and Animate Dead. Rebuking is mostly interesting in that it's the first to come online, but the numbers are pretty unimpressive. Command Undead is interesting, because unlike other methods of control, it doesn't check hit dice at all. You just hit a mindless undead with it, and the undead does what you say. The limit is how many castings you can keep up at once, meaning that if you have some way of producing individual undead that are very hard core it lets you field them in very large numbers. That said, Animate Dead is going to be the staple of any necromantic civilization, because it lets you make undead. There are, of course, higher level undead-creation spells, but for the most part they're not as useful because A) they don't offer any particular control over the undead they make and B) most of the undead you'd want to use those spells to make can make more of themselves anyway.

So, you've got some undead minions (skeletons, in most cases). What do you do with them? The most obvious use is that you can replace draft animals. Instead of horses or oxen that need to be fed, and to sleep, and might die if you work them too much, you can have skeletal versions that are tireless and require no sustenance. A 5th level Cleric can control 20 HD worth of undead. If you make Skeleton Heavy Horses, that's a half-dozen working animals, before you consider figuring out some exotic critter that has better stats, or try to expand your control pool. Those undead horses let you move goods farther (because they don't need food, meaning you don't need to carry as much food in your caravan), move goods faster (because they don't need to sleep, meaning you don't need to stop to let them rest), and give you better agricultural yields (because they can plow a larger area -- note that in this context undead aren't quite pure upside as the manure produced by living animals was important for crops). There's a lot of value to be gained there, but there are limits. Mindless undead are, well, mindless. Even if you're animating Human (or Elven or Goblin) corpses, the labor you get out of Skeletons is pretty primitive.

Before we go further, a brief discussion of the relationship between undead and the living. Fiction often depicts necromancers as running around killing people to turn them into zombies, or vampires draining people dry of blood, or ghouls devouring humans alive. That's certainly scary, and if your goal is to establish the undead as bad guys, it's pretty effective. But it's not particularly smart or necessary (unless the mechanics of magic are such that it explicitly is, but in D&D they aren't). Necromancers, even flesh eating undead, have no rational incentive to kill people. Vampires actually have an incentive to keep people alive, because living people produce blood and dead ones don't (incidentally: the fact that D&D Vampires do Constitution Drain instead of Damage makes some of the world-building you'd like to do with them difficult). The number of corpses per person is one, and it's one whether you kill people in their prime or let them die of old age (necromancers do benefit from population turnover, so you'd expect shorter-lived races like Goblins to be the most interested). As such, if they're not trapped in short-term thinking, necromancers can be perfectly functional members of society, with undead doing difficult, unpleasant, or dangerous manual labor, resulting in a higher overall standard of living for society.

Back to the main topic: Skeletons may be good for extremely low skill manual labor, but they falter at any task that you can't accurately describe in a couple of sentences. There are a lot of tasks like that which you might want your undead doing, so what do you do? There are three basic approaches. Most obviously, you could simply make intelligent undead. Then they can do anything normal people can do, with most of the benefits of undeath. Alternatively, Awaken Undead will turn mindless undead into intelligent ones. Finally, Haunt Shift will turn your undead into "haunting presences". The rules for that are complicated, but basically it allows you to make undead-powered assembly lines.

That covers your basic economic applications of necromancy. But where necromancy really shines is warfare. Undead soldiers don't need food or rest, won't disobey orders, won't break in the face of overwhelming enemy firepower, don't suffer from disease or poison, and are immune to some seriously nasty battle magic (some of it even heals them). An army of undead has no logistics train, can march through the night, and can fight under spells like Cloudkill, Fear, and Stinking Cloud without concern. If, as they should be, your line troops are Skeletons, you can even rain down whatever cold-based blasting you want, including Uttercold spells that heal your troops. Also, you can stick Permanency'd Symbols of Fear or Death on your standards, which does a really good job of breaking enemy troops. Oh, and Skeletons have Darkvision, meaning they can operate freely at night.

The logistics aspect is worth exploring some more, because undead armies behave very differently from medieval ones. Since your troops don't need food, you don't need the baggage train that most armies do. However, food wasn't the only thing it transported. It also moved ammunition (e.g. arrows) and backup weapons of various sorts. Those things are useful, but total strategic mobility is better, so undead armies probably have a lot less archery than traditional ones (though use of spells like Fabricate can mitigate this). Conversely, they probably have a lot more cavalry, because the primary constraints on those are things that undead can ignore (food, tiredness). The fact that undead don't need food also allows them a much finer control over their interactions with the local population. While many armies needed forage to support themselves (which could drive tension with locals), undead can leave the local population entirely alone. Alternatively, because they don't need food or drink, they can burn the fields, salt the earth, and poison the water supply, crippling the operations of more traditional armies.

Necromancers also have access to spawn-creating undead, which are basically the magical equivalent of nukes. A peasant can't do anything to a shadow, and a shadow kills a peasant in something less than 30 seconds, at which point the peasant becomes a new shadow. Unless stopped immediately, this process spirals out of control and can depopulate entire regions. And undead themselves are immune to shadows, allowing them to operate unimpeded.

Of course, you can also employ auxiliaries who have a somewhat less... absolute effect on the conflict. Undead have a wide swath of immunities that, beyond protecting them from your own magic artillery, protect them from the dangerous auras of various monsters. Most notably, dragons' Frightful Presence is a no-action AoE save-or-lose to which undead are completely immune. If your dragon allies are White, Silver, or some other Cold-breathing type, and your undead footsoldiers are Skeletons (which, again, they should be), the dragons can even let loose with their breath weapons with impunity. You can even take a page out of the Scourge's playbook and use dragons that are themselves undead. Note that this is a rare case where you actually want to make Zombies, because Zombie Dragons keep their breath weapons (and flight).

Then you've got your military leadership, which can be various forms of undead themselves. Turning (or more often, having them turn themselves) your senior officers into Ghosts, Liches, or Vampires modestly increases their combat capabilities, but more importantly makes them immortal and very, very difficult to kill in the field. Undead armies can field generals or even captains with hundreds or thousands of years of experience. That means that even if you can deal with all the horrors described above, you have to deal with the fact that the enemy's leadership is probably both smarter and better-trained than yours.

Given all that, people often ask the not-unreasonable question "why haven't undead conquered the world?". A common response is to assert that the gods won't allow it, but that's not really compelling. It's true that there are gods of Light and Life that might take objection to the necromancer-priests of Ermor riding forth and founding an empire of darkness and despair that lasts for all time, but there are also gods of Darkness and Undeath that are 100% on board with that happening (and remember, while I'm using provocative language, such an empire is probably an improvement over faux-medieval D&Dland, so it's unclear that the Good gods should oppose it). It's also a bad answer from the perspective of running a campaign, because "the gods heavily intervene in the setting to solve problems before they arise" is just about the most disempowering piece of worldbulding you can have. The better answer is realpolitik. Once they get going, necromantic empires are nigh-unstoppable juggernauts. But before they can get their battle-caster artillery, legions of undead, and other tricks going, they're just a regular empire that has a few auxiliaries that are slightly tougher and better than normal troops. And everyone knows that their power is only going to go up from there, meaning that the best time to attack them is right now. Any power that starts dipping its toes into necromancy is going to get smacked down hard by every one of its neighbors, not out of any moral opprobrium, but because that's the only chance those neighbors are likely to get. The first international treaties in D&Dland probably amount to "no necromancy".

In terms of broader magical advancement, most of the big stuff is in the 3rd to 6th level spell range, with the big hump at 5th level spells. There are a few low level spells that are kind of interesting, but their impact is pretty limited. Silent Image is convenient but not world-changing, Whispering Wind is neat but doesn't travel fast enough or far enough to do too much, Goodberry is a nice tool for increasing food yields but doesn't do too much, and Divinations are potentially impactful but depend heavily on how your legal system is structured.

At 3rd level, you get Animate Dead (discussed in some detail above), Create Food and Water (which can't replace farming, but does a lot to help supplies last through lean times or on campaign), Stone Shape (the volume isn't huge, but you can make decent-sized structures with repeated castings), and Plant Growth (a 33% productivity bump isn't the Green Revolution, but it's no joke and means a big bump in available non-farm labor). Noe of those are paradigm shifts, but they're all enough to offer real improvements over medieval standards of living. Plant Growth in particular is big enough deal that I would expect most societies to dedicate significant resources to ensuring it's cast appropriately.

4th level doesn't offer anything with as dramatic an impact as Plant Growth, but it has Minor Creation (the stuff it makes is temporary, but it can still be useful), Scrying (the potential impact is huge, but spell slots are limited enough to constrain it somewhat), Sending (fixes the issues with Whispering Wind, but a 4th level slot is a steep rate), Lesser Planar Ally (this is the first thing that lets you go dumpster-diving for outsiders, which is potentially very strong), and Restoration (interestingly, one of the most impactful uses of this is allowing you to safely feed Vampires).

5th level has basically everything you could want. Plane Shift (outer planes have all kinds of useful stuff lying around), Wall of Stone (this is what Stone Shape wishes it was), Lesser Planar Binding (like Lesser Planar Ally but easier to use), Teleport (instantaneous travel is good, but it's not instantaneous shipping, so the impact isn't as big as some think), Fabricate (this allows industrial-scale production of most goods, though as I noted a while ago it's vulnerable to individuals quitting or dying), and Permanency (this takes a lot of other spells from "neat" to "game-changing").

6th level stuff is largely just improvements on stuff you already had. Wall of Iron is like Wall of Stone, but made of iron, in case that's more useful for some reason. Planar Binding lets you get more stuff than its Lesser variant (ditto Planar Ally). Move Earth better in some respects than earlier earth-manipulating spells, but not fundamentally different.

It would probably also be worth going into the ways in which magical creatures likely impact D&D society (basically: it takes training and work for a Human to cast 4th level spells, for a Couatl it takes "being born"), but this post is already super long.

Plane Shift is not a 5th level spell. It is a seventh level spell.

My personal take on this whole thing is that while these are great suggestions that you can do from only core, it isn't looking at logical extrapolations and not-RAW things. Things like developing Starfinder UPBs or magical industrial devices or using magic to research and mass produce a fertilizer that replicates plant growth or other useful things, or in Pathfinder, casting ceremony buffed by like 20 level 1 clerics to cover huge areas with plant growth a la this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/hszq0s/earth_domain_ceremony_massve_agricultural/

Frankly, the thing we need to look at is how the initial society is even formed. I mean, if your populations are so small that you are counting 25000 people as a metropolis (and the largest city in your 1000s of miles wide nation state is 160000 people), then you do not have a nation state. There is simply not enough people to govern it effectively like nation state. I mean, Paris in medieval times had a pop of 200000+. Also, the whole universal literacy thing ALREADY requires a huge surplus of food/time to even teach anyone to be literate, to the point where many medieval lords were not literate. This is something that is never addressed in any setting I have read.

So my point is there are ALREADY a ton of "modern" things these so called "medieval" kingdoms must be doing in order to have such developments be present.

NigelWalmsley
2021-03-09, 08:19 AM
Plane Shift is not a 5th level spell. It is a seventh level spell.

Plane Shift is a 7th level Wizard spell. It's a 5th level Cleric spell.


it isn't looking at logical extrapolations and not-RAW things.

Why would you need to? As demonstrated, you can get pretty far with "basically RAW". If you want to go further the thing you want isn't so much new effects as better rules for managing the existing ones. D&D doesn't have a good framework for modeling any of the tools discussed, which is a far bigger issue than what specific tools you have.


I mean, if your populations are so small that you are counting 25000 people as a metropolis (and the largest city in your 1000s of miles wide nation state is 160000 people), then you do not have a nation state.

Why would you expect people to have nation-states? That's a relatively recent political development, and certainly far beyond medieval society (let alone the Iron Age civilizations that are a better match for D&D in many ways).


Also, the whole universal literacy thing ALREADY requires a huge surplus of food/time to even teach anyone to be literate, to the point where many medieval lords were not literate.

That seems like a really minor detail to get hung up on. Also one that's not at all essential. If you just give the NPC classes (except maybe Adept and Aristocrat) the Barbarian's Illiteracy class feature, that fixes the problem. Hell, if you use Unearthed Arcana's Traits, you don't even have to homebrew.

snowblizz
2021-03-09, 09:00 AM
Also, the whole universal literacy thing ALREADY requires a huge surplus of food/time to even teach anyone to be literate, to the point where many medieval lords were not literate. This is something that is never addressed in any setting I have read.

It really doesn't. The last great famine occurred in Sweden in the late 1860s, 1867-69 IIRC. That is at least a hundred years after effectively basic universal literacy existed in the country (about 200 years earlier a basic system for teaching basic literacy and religion existed all over the nation) and 20 years after compulsory public schools were introduced for children. Teaching the public to read and providing adequate sustenance oddly enough are two different skill sets.

The illiteracy of medieval and earlier ages is vastly overblown. There is an argument made by historians and scholars about rune inscribed stones that they are rather pointless without a significant portion of the populace being able to read them. Since they convey rather mundane glorification of the subjects and erectors.

Public schools existed in many cities in the early to middle Middleages, open to boys and girls alike.

I don't remember exactly but I think historians were suggesting that a significant portion of the public were able to do some basic reading, with difficulty of course. The truth is probably that the Victorians who thought themselves above the so called Dark Ages, Middle ages and the Renaissance were probably as literate on average as the earlier periods. Remember the Dark Ages were never as dark as the Victorians would have us believe, the Middle Ages were not a vast nothing in between and the Renaissance didn't exactly reborn culture as they supposed. Nor were the Victorians the crowning achievement of all civilization before them.

Max_Killjoy
2021-03-09, 09:39 AM
It really doesn't. The last great famine occurred in Sweden in the late 1860s, 1867-69 IIRC. That is at least a hundred years after effectively basic universal literacy existed in the country (about 200 years earlier a basic system for teaching basic literacy and religion existed all over the nation) and 20 years after compulsory public schools were introduced for children. Teaching the public to read and providing adequate sustenance oddly enough are two different skill sets.

The illiteracy of medieval and earlier ages is vastly overblown. There is an argument made by historians and scholars about rune inscribed stones that they are rather pointless without a significant portion of the populace being able to read them. Since they convey rather mundane glorification of the subjects and erectors.

Public schools existed in many cities in the early to middle Middleages, open to boys and girls alike.

I don't remember exactly but I think historians were suggesting that a significant portion of the public were able to do some basic reading, with difficulty of course. The truth is probably that the Victorians who thought themselves above the so called Dark Ages, Middle ages and the Renaissance were probably as literate on average as the earlier periods. Remember the Dark Ages were never as dark as the Victorians would have us believe, the Middle Ages were not a vast nothing in between and the Renaissance didn't exactly reborn culture as they supposed. Nor were the Victorians the crowning achievement of all civilization before them.


There's also perhaps a little quirk in what was meant by "literacy" -- in certain times and regions, it specifically referred to literacy in Latin or some other elite and/or scholarly language.

So when some sniffy philosopher in 1000 CE describes the masses as "illiterate", maybe they didn't care that the people in question were quite capable of writing and reading everyday notes in their "vulgar" language.

Tanarii
2021-03-09, 09:57 AM
Frankly, the thing we need to look at is how the initial society is even formed. I mean, if your populations are so small that you are counting 25000 people as a metropolis (and the largest city in your 1000s of miles wide nation state is 160000 people), then you do not have a nation state. There is simply not enough people to govern it effectively like nation state. I mean, Paris in medieval times had a pop of 200000+. Also, the whole universal literacy thing ALREADY requires a huge surplus of food/time to even teach anyone to be literate, to the point where many medieval lords were not literate. This is something that is never addressed in any setting I have read. The Carolingian empire had a pop of about 15 million and area the size of France (equivalent to about 1000x500 miles) and was one of the more powerful nations of the time. According to Wikipedia it's cities were around 20-25k.

"Medieval" was a wide time period, and conjures up pop-culture ideas based on a wide variety of IRL times, from Carolingians and Viking raiders, to The Flower of French Chivalry dying to artillery in the form of English Longbows.

snowblizz
2021-03-09, 10:17 AM
There's also perhaps a little quirk in what was meant by "literacy" -- in certain times and regions, it specifically referred to literacy in Latin or some other elite and/or scholarly language.

So when some sniffy philosopher in 1000 CE describes the masses as "illiterate", maybe they didn't care that the people in question were quite capable of writing and reading everyday notes in their "vulgar" language.

I was very much think about that also. And it's true, for a long period educated and literate tended to be assumed to mean reading and writing Latin.

Also the ability write was much less widespread, which also tend to colour our view of earlier literacy. But it also means that just because kings and nobles had scribes doesn't mean they were themselves unable.

If I can spend my time hunting boar and fair maidens you can be sure some commoner scribe who can't form his own power-base is doing my correspondence.

That said am sure in 200 years people will look back at the illiterate and barbaric 2000s where most people could not program in a language not yet invented for a device we can't even imagine.

Tanarii
2021-03-09, 10:24 AM
That said am sure in 200 years people will look back at the illiterate and barbaric 2000s where most people could not program in a language not yet invented for a device we can't even imagine.Heck, programmers already do that.

Nifft
2021-03-09, 10:44 AM
That said am sure in 200 years people will look back at the illiterate and barbaric 2000s where most people could not program in a language not yet invented for a device we can't even imagine.


Heck, programmers already do that.



Yeah this is unironically Scala, where I can write code for the JVM (an emulator for a device not invented yet) in a dialect which is created as I write it.

And two weeks later, I will indeed feel illiterate as I gaze over what my hands have wrought.

PhoenixPhyre
2021-03-09, 11:54 AM
Yeah this is unironically Scala, where I can write code for the JVM (an emulator for a device not invented yet) in a dialect which is created as I write it.

And two weeks later, I will indeed feel illiterate as I gaze over what my hands have wrought.

Doesn't even take doing things like that. I frequently have the "what idiot wrote that? And what the heck is that doing? And why?" feeling. 99% of the time, the answers were "Me, a week ago. No clue. And because that worked." And my work isn't all that complex. Knowledge is fragile, and complex knowledge is even more fragile. Even a good interruption when I'm in the flow will leave me struggling to pick back up the pieces when I come back. Context switches are awful.