Why is D&D still Medieval?

[Clistenes]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[PhoenixPhyre]

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.

I'll note that even during earth's medieval period, most of earth wasn't just medieval either.

[Destro2119]

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]

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.

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 )

[Clistenes]

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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?