Quote Originally Posted by sktarq View Post
Exactly. . . That to me proves the system is broken quite possibly beyond repair. Not that it is in any way good. It's a system that requires definition, gives partial definitions, and then promptly disagrees with itself. The system can't break free of a monotheist base but added in polytheistic framworks and trys to simplfy the range of human behavior in order to keep the game mechanics simple enough to use....Which is fine as long as everyone promises to play nice and not look at it too hard.
My point wasn't that Good PCs get away with murder, it was that in D&D, violence is actually a good solution to your problems. In the modern real world, someone being murdered is a horrible thing that happens occasionally because some unstable psychopath is committing a crime; in D&D and in the ancient real world, people dying to violence is something to be expected and taken for granted. Killing someone is not incompatible with being Good in a world where a big evil monster can and will eat your neighbors and reanimate their corpses to kill you if you don't kill it first. That's not a matter of monotheism vs. polytheism, that's a matter of Iron Age values vs. Information Age values.

But the age of the planet is not more important. Never has been-it has always been the age of civilization-no matter what beings are making that civilization.
The age of other civilizations is exactly what I'm talking about. The original complaint was that having a 100,000-year history for various civilizations doesn't make sense, and I said that while it doesn't make sense in the context of humans it makes sense in the context of whatever beings came before them.

The flying cities while humans still learning to spell your name type stuff has always struk me as A: interesting but why would humans survive when these folks didn't B:Why didn't humans raid the ruin LONG before now and get a huge leg up on their development -you'd only need a couple tribes pulling it off and either they'd be copied or would grow.
It's case B. What do you think adventurers are for? Your party isn't the first one to go off, find a bunch of priceless magic items and dump them on the market for people to study and reverse-engineer because they don't kill monsters fast enough for you.

And there are several more problems just as bad. Furthermore while yes a 100K year history using non humans may get something of a pass (even if I overlook the enviromental and physical effects of that long of a civilization which is a whole kettle of fish just as bad-or wonder why in their 40K year history as great and powerful empires the *insert non-human race of great age and drama* never got beyond 14th century europe human technology-which looking at the ruins of, say, the Age of Deamons you never seem to) that isn't what annoys me as much as the very common 100K histories of HUMAN and near human histories. And this a thread of what annoys us in homebrews. Like I said above it's possible to make almost anything I dislike work with proper backing information and working that into the setting. I'm not saying they could NEVER work it is just that 95% don't and should be avoided as a general rule.
What settings have 100,000-year human histories? Pretty much every 'brewed setting I've read starts off with "A bazillion years ago, gods created stuff" then moves onto monsters and dragons, then gets down to elves and dwarves, and then has humans show up relatively recently. It's entirely possible that I haven't seen many of those because the ones that do that are bad enough that I don't make it to the human part of the timeline, I suppose.

No my issue is when a party goes plumbing a ruin from the age of Deamons, From the Hobgoblin Empire etc there is same basic menu of weapons that have had to redeveloped who knows how many times....except they haven't. Those same tech's are being used by Galifar, Karrn the Conquerer, or even you local PC. The relics of the time of Galifar (the first) wouldn't be as strong as modern weapons, or farming techniques etc. Yet every treasure haul (as found in the books) seems up to date and just ready to fit in with modern campighn world like the last 1000 years of growth didn't matter. It is FAR worse in most published worlds and far far worse in most homebrews. On a general scale technology either dies in it's infancy because a use can't be found, too expensive, government doesn't like it etc or it starts to spread. And once it does-the idea of it-the understanding of the principals that make it work those are VERY hard things to kill off. The genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Sure there are counter examples but to have that happen on the scale that it would have to have happened in the "Book" histories of most Commercial Settings much less homebrew I think ripps a big hole in their logic and feel.
That's not really as far-fetched as you'd think. If you look at modern technology and picture what would happen if our civilization collapsed, give it a few thousand years and all of our written works, all of our digital technology, and pretty much everything else that's fragile or biodegradable would be completely gone. Only the sturdy mechanical, non-degradable stuff would survive. Now look at magic items: enchantments don't fade over time, and they're not biodegradable, so if you dig up an ancient hobgoblin sword it'll work just fine. Basic Medieval/Renaissance weapons are the substrate for Age of Demons magical technology, with only the materials and enhancements changing over time, just like how the basic car body hasn't changed much in shape and layout since the Model T--we still have four wheels, an engine, a steering wheel, etc.--and it's the body shapes, the materials used in the body, the computerized systems, and other "under the hood" technologies that are really where the advancement lies.

Once you get past Medieval-/Renaissance-level tech, you're getting into guns (which they wouldn't develop and which wouldn't last), so finding a sword in the ancient crypts that looks only a bit different from a modern sword but glows like the sun under Detect-Magic-O-Vision makes sense. And since all of the enchantments in use are pretty obvious ("hit stuff better" or "fire everywhere!" or "make shooty thing shoot farther") I don't see why finding a flaming longsword in the ruins that works like a modern flaming longsword would be out of the ordinary.

Yes as a trade language, a scholars language etc. In the majority of the area it was used it was a secondary language or a national language of the post Alexander states and greek colonies. And that's fine to translate. What I think most of us take umbrage with it the A: World spanning nature of the language. B: That most people speak it as their first language-even if the "common" originates in a far off land.
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Or at least that's my issue with how common is most often found. It's a pretty easy fix though.
In my settings, no one gets Common as a default language; there's a Human language for humans if we're going with racial languages or regional languages for everyone if we're going with more logical languages, and everyone gets Common or the equivalent on their bonus language list. It's worked out well so far.