Magic & Social Development

[Quertus]

My experience with illiterate characters is generally negative, and they were IMO, often played by the worst sorts of obnoxious minmaxers who would use "I can't read derp de derp!" as some kind of self-amusement tool and get in the way of other characters actually trying to resolve situations that didn't involve punching.

I'm glad it was removed for the simple fact that those people are almost non-existent now.

I mean, we're talking about things like "social development" in this thread, and general illiteracy mandated that shops have catchy names that can be represented pictorially. You don't get "Safeway" and "IGA" and "Wal-Mart", you get "the Prancing Pony", "the Flaming Cauldron", "the Blue Minotaur", and "the Dripping Vampire". And that little bit of world-building flare simultaneously makes the world more colorful, and helps sell the setting.

I don't know what type of idiots you've played with - I've played with more than my fair share of idiots, but none like you've described that I can remember (darn senility) - but I only recall once that literacy or lack thereof actually mattered to a well-built setting.

So there we were, at the end of a year-long campaign, and my character had acquired a Ring of Wishes. He of course was willing (and eager) to use one Wish as the McGuffin to solve The Plot. And, given how everyone had spent the whole year talking about how much better their world was than the one we were on (we were in Ravenloft, a paradise from the PoV of my character from Not!Athas), he was even willing to concede a single Wish at an attempt to transport the party to their supposedly even better homeworld. But only 1 (after all, if all 3 wishes from this item which was "my share of the treasure" were used for the party, then it wasn't really my share, was it?). If this 1 attempt failed, tough luck, so debate the wording among yourselves. They did. They labored over the wording, wrote it down, edited it, rewrote it, and handed my character the final draft.

It was only at this point, after an entire IRL year of the campaign, that they learned that my character couldn't read. He was, however, an actor by trade, quite adept at memorizing his lines, so long as they were spoken to him in the first place. So it all worked out (despite the Thief's rage), and they spent orders of magnitude more time wording the wish than I spent explaining the flaw in their plan. Well, it all worked out except for the part about getting out of Ravenloft - 9th level spells aren't powerful enough to escape the realm's clutches, or so the GM informed us while talking about people "back home" throwing a party for us.

Personally, I find fantasy worldbuilding that doesn't account for general illiteracy to be comparatively dull and immersion-breaking, and I lack experience with the type of problems you describe to appreciate them beyond "play with better people?". But if that kind of flavor isn't your thing, it's just a preference for chocolate vs vanilla kinda thing. Shrug.

[Ionathus]

You could always do a bit of worldbuilding where you say that magic has scrambled everyone's memories and inflated the timescale, and it's like that one New Doctor Who episode where the two alien factions think they've been battling for centuries but it's really been a week and a half.

"This entire geopolitical region has stayed stable for 800 years" is a lot more plausible.

[Satinavian]

I mean, we're talking about things like "social development" in this thread, and general illiteracy mandated that shops have catchy names that can be represented pictorially. You don't get "Safeway" and "IGA" and "Wal-Mart", you get "the Prancing Pony", "the Flaming Cauldron", "the Blue Minotaur", and "the Dripping Vampire". And that little bit of world-building flare simultaneously makes the world more colorful, and helps sell the setting.

Actually illiterarcy was brought up as a limiter to magic users sharing their knowledge. No copying spell, no sharing/using books, no discovery of ancient knowledge in ruins in written form etc. Only personal, oral transmission of knowledge and preservation dependend on memory alone.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The "world in stasis" trope is one I've thankfully avoided. In part by letting PCs change things and carrying that change through the setting. None of the nations in the core area (the part I've actually detailed) are more than a few generations (~200 years at most) old and much are much younger. And there's change fairly frequently.

I do agree that D&D, in particular, works best in a vaguely post-apocalyptic (ie post fall of a big empire) era. Where there is wreckage of older, grander civilizations floating around that hasn't all gotten found yet, where civilizations are not exactly thick and comfortable. Where there's plenty of borderland. It's one reason I really liked the idea behind the 4e Points of Light setting idea. Implementation...well...like many things WotC was spotty. But the idea was great!

[Batcathat]

It feels like a lot of writers of fantasy (and science fiction) really likes big numbers when it comes to history. It seems like backstory elements frequently happen 2 000 years ago (and often in a world suspiciously similar to the present), when they could just as easily have happened 200 years ago. I give an automatic gold star to writers whose worlds seem to actually progress at a similar rate to the real world.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It feels like a lot of writers of fantasy (and science fiction) really likes big numbers when it comes to history. It seems like backstory elements frequently happen 2 000 years ago (and often in a world suspiciously similar to the present), when they could just as easily have happened 200 years ago. I give an automatic gold star to writers whose worlds seem to actually progress at a similar rate to the real world.

One thing to worry about here is that history (as opposed to time) doesn't progress linearly. The amount of societal and technological change over the last ~250 years is huge compared to most 250 year periods in a lot of areas. Sure, there was change. But not as fast as it is modernly.

[warty goblin]

The size of the coincidence necessary for the magic and the monsters to basically balance each other out perfectly, so that neither really impacts civilization (not to mention having done so throughout the setting's entire history) feels like it would be bad for the suspension of disbelief.

You'd think giant hexapod thermodynamically impossible aerodynamically implausible incendiary reptiles would also seriously damage suspension of disbelief. Yet we all show up for dragons, because dragons are cool. Well, hot. Except for the cold ones.

It's fantasy. One of my more pivotal realizations is that all fantasy is rule of cool but rule of cool is not one thing. Different things are cool to different people in different ways. Its all aesthetic. Gritty low magic with logical world building isn't realistic in any meaningful sense if Alice the Wizard is still setting people on fire with her mind because physics still doesn't work like that no matter how plausible the development of a society where .001% of people are psychic flamethrowers is.

To me, it also seems like such a waste from a world-building standpoint to add all these supernatural elements, only for them to have basically zero impact on the world. Like adding ten different spices to a dish that end up canceling each other out to the point that you might as well not have added spice at all.

Nearly all fantasy that's anywhere near to high or heroic is massively different to historical reality already. Most children don't die before the age of five, very few people sleep in the same building as the pigs (let alone the same bed as their parents), birth control apparently exists because the sexual mores are pretty liberal and anyway even the married couples aren't all popping out 12 kids, animal cruelty is frowned on, as is the wide variety of domestic abuse that was basically normal in most times, and so on. Most people don't find stories about massive infant mortality fun, so its not there. Perfectly sensible aesthetic preference.

And sure you can say that this is just sloppy world building. Or it could be magic that isn't discussed because it isn't relevant to the plot and/or mechanics. Sure you could spend 10 pages in the PHB talking about how birth control magic works and everyday cures for smallpox that every peasant apparently knows, but most people aren't going to read it because they need to look up Fireball.

Again, any sort of fantasy is an aesthetic preference. The relevant questions are basically what that aesthetic is, how well it executes it, and whether it's one that you like.

[Batcathat]

One thing to worry about here is that history (as opposed to time) doesn't progress linearly. The amount of societal and technological change over the last ~250 years is huge compared to most 250 year periods in a lot of areas. Sure, there was change. But not as fast as it is modernly.

True, but I doubt there have been centuries in the real world with as little change as millennia in some fictional worlds. Doing it completely "realistically" would probably be more trouble than it's worth, but I'd be happy to see more authors overestimating the amount of progress instead of underestimating it.

Though I suppose there are some examples of that too, usually works from a few decades ago taking place in the "near future" and like having flying cars and FTL in the year 2000.

You'd think giant hexapod thermodynamically impossible aerodynamically implausible incendiary reptiles would also seriously damage suspension of disbelief. Yet we all show up for dragons, because dragons are cool. Well, hot. Except for the cold ones.

It's fantasy. One of my more pivotal realizations is that all fantasy is rule of cool but rule of cool is not one thing. Different things are cool to different people in different ways. Its all aesthetic. Gritty low magic with logical world building isn't realistic in any meaningful sense if Alice the Wizard is still setting people on fire with her mind because physics still doesn't work like that no matter how plausible the development of a society where .001% of people are psychic flamethrowers is.

I guess that's fair, but at that point there's no reason to wish for anything to be similar to the real world or in any way realistic. Personally, a lot of the draw about speculative fiction is, well, the speculation. What would happen if magic existed? What would happen if aliens invaded? What would happen if this random person got super-powers? If the world doesn't change (or changes in ways that seem too unlikely), the genre loses a lot of its appeal to me.

Nearly all fantasy that's anywhere near to high or heroic is massively different to historical reality already. Most children don't die before the age of five, very few people sleep in the same building as the pigs (let alone the same bed as their parents), birth control apparently exists because the sexual mores are pretty liberal and anyway even the married couples aren't all popping out 12 kids, animal cruelty is frowned on, as is the wide variety of domestic abuse that was basically normal in most times, and so on. Most people don't find stories about massive infant mortality fun, so its not there. Perfectly sensible aesthetic preference.

And sure you can say that this is just sloppy world building. Or it could be magic that isn't discussed because it isn't relevant to the plot and/or mechanics. Sure you could spend 10 pages in the PHB talking about how birth control magic works and everyday cures for smallpox that every peasant apparently knows, but most people aren't going to read it because they need to look up Fireball.

Again, any sort of fantasy is an aesthetic preference. The relevant questions are basically what that aesthetic is, how well it executes it, and whether it's one that you like.

Sure, we can all agree that most fantasy is closer to the Hollywood version of history than actual history, but I don't see how that's an argument against what I said, which was that it seems like a waste to add all these supernatural things to a world only to have it have basically no impact. And yes, I do consider the setting being the theme park version of history as magic basically not having an impact, since almost all fiction about such settings without the magic are basically the same way. It's more narrative convention than world building, I think.

[KorvinStarmast]

psychic flamethrowers

The name of my next band ...

[Mechalich]

One thing to worry about here is that history (as opposed to time) doesn't progress linearly. The amount of societal and technological change over the last ~250 years is huge compared to most 250 year periods in a lot of areas. Sure, there was change. But not as fast as it is modernly.

While long periods of societal and technological stasis are possible, that generally doesn't translate into political stasis, which is the real problem many fantasy worlds have. For example, the Han Dynasty of China presided over a relatively static society with at best modest technological changes for four hundred years, but the Han fought a truly epic series of wars with all of their neighbors (and in some cases their neighbor's neighbors) with the borders and allegiances shifting constantly throughout that time. And those wars involved a lot of ethnic displacement, so in terms of who was living where and even how they were living - Han colonists displaced the Xiongu and thereby transitioned a significant region of the Eurasian steppe from pastoralism to agriculture - turnover is constant.

The problem, from a setting design perspective, is that history with any sort of significant detail is really, really cumbersome, and most setting designers bite off way more than they can chew. Planets are big, polities are small, and generations are only 20-25 years. Here a world map for 1000 AD. Pretty much any one of those units, in terms of setting history, wants 10,000-20,000 words. Just trying to outline a fictional planet at a single moment in time means putting together an encyclopedia set sized series of documents (which, it should be noted, has been done, for settings like FR or Golarion), dealing with the issue that 100 years later the political map is going to look very different is an insurmountable challenge.

The general answer to this is constraining a setting in time, with the whole thing only designed to be utilized across a single generational span, usually either during or in the aftermath of some sort of massive upheaval. The problem fantasy has is that it often increases lifespans in a way that makes ignoring history more difficult. Living memory has a roughly 100 year max in humans, such that no one really cares about things that happened more than a century ago, but elves or dragons or vampires might have much longer memories and that's a problem. VtM, for example, had a big problem in that while the setting was intended to be ruthlessly modern and concerned with things that were happening 'right now!' there were all these thousand year old elders spitting on each other over stuff that happened in the 14th century dragging everything down.

In general, 'less is more' is an important world-building philosophy. Unfortunately for tabletop, the player base cries 'more, more, more!' all the time, placing these things very much in tension.

[warty goblin]

I guess that's fair, but at that point there's no reason to wish for anything to be similar to the real world or in any way realistic. Personally, a lot of the draw about speculative fiction is, well, the speculation. What would happen if magic existed? What would happen if aliens invaded? What would happen if this random person got super-powers? If the world doesn't change (or changes in ways that seem too unlikely), the genre loses a lot of its appeal to me.

There isn't any universal reason to, no. If being in some ways realistic is an aesthetic you like, there's every reason for you to want that. Aesthetics matter a great deal, but the pleasure found in them is entirely subjective. I'm not trying to say that everything is identical and nothing matters. My point is that there's no universal standard by which to judge <reality break X> as superior to <reality break Y> because they're all equally unreal. They can be very different types of unreal, suited to different stories and moods, and that's great. But fundamentally the fantastic elements are tools for creating stories and moods (or in the case of RPGs interactive game things), and should be evaluated mostly on how well they do that job.

So D&D's total kitchen sink approach is, from the perspective of reasoned out worldbuilding, a total nightmare. I don't think it's an existential flaw in the execution of D&D though, because D&D isn't really very interested in anybody who isn't either an adventurer, selling something to an adventurer, or getting stabbed by an adventurer. I don't find criticisms of D&D's magical peasant simulation very useful, because unless your game is very unusual, it simply doesn't matter. Yes, the authors could devote a lot of effort to figuring at least some of it out, but that's effort not spent elsewhere, and the product is something that like 90% of tables are going to ignore*. It's simply a waste of effort.

Sure, we can all agree that most fantasy is closer to the Hollywood version of history than actual history, but I don't see how that's an argument against what I said, which was that it seems like a waste to add all these supernatural things to a world only to have it have basically no impact. And yes, I do consider the setting being the theme park version of history as magic basically not having an impact, since almost all fiction about such settings without the magic are basically the same way. It's more narrative convention than world building, I think.

I don't think most fiction sans magic is strictly Hollywood history. A lot of explicitly genre fiction is (e.g. romance, mystery) because the point of really hardcore genre fiction is the execution of specific tropes, and the historical elements are set dressing. But historical fiction as a whole is quite varied, and often very well researched.

I also don't think that a person reason out the changes to the world due to magic at all thoroughly. You can get some gloss stuff sure, and getting it to the point where, if you're just reading/watching/playing along and not being deliberately nitpicky nothing jumps out at you as illogical or contradictory is entirely a good thing because that keeps the story more engaging. But that's pretty much first order effects, and probably not all of those. Anything much deeper is in practice pretty much out of reach.

Like sure, you have magic that prevents disease and magic that boosts crop yields. How affordable is either type of magic? You can pick any point on the spectrum between world of plenty and everybody is on the threshold of starvation because magic keeps mortality low and everybody has 12 kids and the enhanced crop yields cannot keep up and it's an eternal Malthusian nightmare. Now how does that effect everything else? Political structures? Social structures? Religion? Childcare? Manufacturing? Trade? Warfare? Technological development? You can come up with answers to each of those, and at least 10% of everybody will disagree with every single one of them. And unless your story is very much about the effects of material surfeit on land ownership, the three pages you've hashed out about how the +25% magical wheat yield per hectare impacts land ownership dynamics it probably don't matter. And if it does matter, and a bunch of the other changes also matter, then you have to spend time explaining all of them and now it isn't an RPG system or a novel, it's a treatise on fake economics.

So yeah, people pick the set of narrative conventions that suit the story they're actually telling, and go with that. And thank heavens, because I don't want to have to slog through 150 words on Atlantis' import/export balance to get why Bargal the Barbarian got hired to go pummel some pirates. If I wanted to read about import/export balance, I'd read about actual import/export balances.



*And the other 10% will read it and immediately start writing 100,000 word summaries of why it isn't congruent with modern macroeconomics or plate tectonics or geopolitical theory or evolutionary biology or whatever. Then they'll come up with their own version, which most of them were probably going to do anyway.

[Mechalich]

So D&D's total kitchen sink approach is, from the perspective of reasoned out worldbuilding, a total nightmare. I don't think it's an existential flaw in the execution of D&D though, because D&D isn't really very interested in anybody who isn't either an adventurer, selling something to an adventurer, or getting stabbed by an adventurer. I don't find criticisms of D&D's magical peasant simulation very useful, because unless your game is very unusual, it simply doesn't matter. Yes, the authors could devote a lot of effort to figuring at least some of it out, but that's effort not spent elsewhere, and the product is something that like 90% of tables are going to ignore*. It's simply a waste of effort.

If all you're doing is running a dungeon crawl or a low immersion campaign to pound on the BBEG because reasons, then yes, it doesn't matter, and it is entirely true that the overwhelming majority of D&D games play out this way. However, the problem arises if there is any attempt to go even a little bit deeper. D&D is so bent beyond reasoned out that really fundamental things start to break down. For example, the very idea of nation states makes little sense in a D&D context which can be rather problematic in say, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where the whole point of the module is to create one.

A fictional world in which the world-building hasn't been reasoned around at least far enough for the creators in question to hang some lampshades over the gaping holes that result has really massive storytelling limitations and a lot of people working in the space fail to grasp this, which means they place stories atop foundations that cannot support them and the resulting scenarios quickly become farce. Now, farce is certainly a viable option, and in fact many of the most famous TT-derived products lean heavily in that direction (D&D Honor Among Thieves being a notable recent example), but if you ever see someone try to produce something in a good faith effort to be seriously dramatic storytelling in one of these scenarios where the world-building can't even come close to handling it, it's painful.

[KorvinStarmast]

Actually illiterarcy was brought up as a limiter to magic users sharing their knowledge. No copying spell, no sharing/using books, no discovery of ancient knowledge in ruins in written form etc. Only personal, oral transmission of knowledge and preservation depended on memory alone.

If you can get your players to buy into this, it's a great way to establish the rarity and power of magic.

Spoiler: Han Dynasty

Show

For example, the Han Dynasty of China presided over a relatively static society with at best modest technological changes for four hundred years, but the Han fought a truly epic series of wars with all of their neighbors (and in some cases their neighbor's neighbors) with the borders and allegiances shifting constantly throughout that time. And those wars involved a lot of ethnic displacement, so in terms of who was living where and even how they were living - Han colonists displaced the Xiongu and thereby transitioned a significant region of the Eurasian steppe from pastoralism to agriculture - turnover is constant.

Nice example.

The problem, from a setting design perspective, is that history with any sort of significant detail is really, really cumbersome, and most setting designers bite off way more than they can chew.

You introduce the history of your world a little at a time as play continues. Grow from small to large, world.

Spoiler: Another nice example

Show

Planets are big, polities are small, and generations are only 20-25 years. Here a world map for 1000 AD. Pretty much any one of those units, in terms of setting history, wants 10,000-20,000 words. Just trying to outline a fictional planet at a single moment in time means putting together an encyclopedia set sized series of documents (which, it should be noted, has been done, for settings like FR or Golarion), dealing with the issue that 100 years later the political map is going to look very different is an insurmountable challenge.

The general answer to this is constraining a setting in time, with the whole thing only designed to be utilized across a single generational span, usually either during or in the aftermath of some sort of massive upheaval.

yes, defining a scope is an important part of Step Zero for a DM.

In general, 'less is more' is an important world-building philosophy. Unfortunately for tabletop, the player base cries 'more, more, more!' all the time, placing these things very much in tension.

Less is more is a good general principle. With that said, Tolkien spent his life's work making a whole world, but only part of it is reflected in what he wrote. He always left his fans hungering for more.

A fictional world in which the world-building hasn't been reasoned around at least far enough for the creators in question to hang some lampshades over the gaping holes that result has really massive storytelling limitations and a lot of people working in the space fail to grasp this, which means they place stories atop foundations that cannot support them and the resulting scenarios quickly become farce.

No small number of speculative fiction writers run into this.

[Satinavian]

If you can get your players to buy into this, it's a great way to establish the rarity and power of magic.
Nice example.

Sure. But it was not originally my argument and i personally have no interest whatsoever in rare+powerful magic. I personally prefer the opposite : common+ (relatively)weak.


As for really detailed worldbuilding with centuries of proper history : That is usually out of the scope of what a single GM can create for a single campaign. But some official settings do get big and dense enough, usually by having been expanded by hundreds of people over several decades. Unfortunately those usually carry some baggage in form of less though out elements that now can't easily be removed.

[warty goblin]

If all you're doing is running a dungeon crawl or a low immersion campaign to pound on the BBEG because reasons, then yes, it doesn't matter, and it is entirely true that the overwhelming majority of D&D games play out this way. However, the problem arises if there is any attempt to go even a little bit deeper. D&D is so bent beyond reasoned out that really fundamental things start to break down. For example, the very idea of nation states makes little sense in a D&D context which can be rather problematic in say, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where the whole point of the module is to create one.

Is it? The premise seemed fairly sensible to me, this lawless area sucks and we don't want to live next to it, now go fix it. Bandits make bad neighbors.

I suppose I could come up with some very long arguments about, I dunno, teleport circles erasing borders but it's both a reach and also utterly irrelevant to the thing the game is actually doing. The only thing that gets me is... now I can enjoy the thing less? It's not like I win a prize for being the most nitpicky smartest critic in the chicken coop.

A fictional world in which the world-building hasn't been reasoned around at least far enough for the creators in question to hang some lampshades over the gaping holes that result has really massive storytelling limitations and a lot of people working in the space fail to grasp this, which means they place stories atop foundations that cannot support them and the resulting scenarios quickly become farce. Now, farce is certainly a viable option, and in fact many of the most famous TT-derived products lean heavily in that direction (D&D Honor Among Thieves being a notable recent example), but if you ever see someone try to produce something in a good faith effort to be seriously dramatic storytelling in one of these scenarios where the world-building can't even come close to handling it, it's painful.

Not all tools are good for all tasks, and not everybody uses those tools well. So?

[gbaji]

Like yeah, a druid's plant growth would be a boon for farming... But druids of 5th level and above are pretty rare. And they're more often than not recluses. And they concern themselves with natural balance. So one might swing by and plant growth some land that was desolated by some kind of disaster but it's not like normal people have them on call.

Same with wizards and clerics. Like, any big sweeping world changing magic the user of likely has better things to do with it than helping out the locals. They're off preventing demon lords from invading the land, or stopping Tiamat from being brought into the world. Or they're secluding themselves to focus on their studies.

This is somewhat how I see things in most settings. For a D&D setting, maybe one in 100 people actually have PC levels. Of those, probably 95% never reach a level higher than 3rd. The remainder are the rare and poweful folks, who probably aren't spending all of their time increasing crop yields, or building animal pens, or whatnot.

So yeah. Most day to day things can work pretty much as one might expect.

Sure would be nice to have gunpowder or advanced machinery, too bad the place got burned down, overrun by zombies, invaded by evil forces, etc etc.

Like, in my mind it's a wonder the world and it's populace -survived- to get to a sort of post medieval society at all.

Yeah. Super powerful monsters should be somewhat rare, and located "out there" as well. I've often commented on the absurdity of game settings where 8-12th level PC parties are running into random encounters that are challenging to them, while merely traveling from one town to another. Um... How does any trade work here? How do people survive to farm, or herd their animals, or mine in the hills, or... well... anything?

Sure, we can all agree that most fantasy is closer to the Hollywood version of history than actual history, but I don't see how that's an argument against what I said, which was that it seems like a waste to add all these supernatural things to a world only to have it have basically no impact. And yes, I do consider the setting being the theme park version of history as magic basically not having an impact, since almost all fiction about such settings without the magic are basically the same way. It's more narrative convention than world building, I think.

I think it's possible to handwave a bit away for the sake of playability and whatnot. But I also think you can create some basic "rules" that will allow for a somewhat manageable game setting.

Another thing people tend to forget is that if magic is sufficiently powerful and common, then it may actually replace a lot of technology. If spells to increase crop yields exist, then how many populations are going to develop irrigation and the plow. Heck. Maybe they just make the stuff they used to gather "grow faster/better", and never start cultivating and planting crops in the first place? if wizards can create walls of stone and that's "common", then how many people are going to learn stonemasonry?

I actually tend to put "ancient fallen civilizations" into my settings, as a cautionary tale of what happens when people become too dependent on magic. Basically, imagine a society in which there is tons of magic, and instead of it being rare and used by the occasional hero to fight off "bad things", it's used as part of the day to day infrastructure of the civilization itself. But over time, people forget how to do "normal" things (like grow crops, build structures, take care of their health, etc). And, of course, inevitably something happens which will cause that failure to result in total epic collape.

The ruins of said civilization, however, may still hold wonderous items for those willing to search. Of course, the construct butler may just take exception to you stealing the magic silverware and everful pantry or something...

I actually put a civilization in a game setting where the people had eventually created automated magical "factories", that built constructs, which in turn built more things for them, and provided for their every needs. Of course, over time, the constructs realized that "the people" not only weren't necessary for the maintenance of this "perfect society", but were actually the problem (they kept messing up the perfect lawns, breaking stuff, and consumed food that had to be grown, and waste which had to be cleaned up). You can absolutely see where this leads. The whole area is cursed and ruined now, with strange lights (hey, magical lamposts might still be working), and sounds, and things moving around (some constructs still trying to fulfill their automated tasks). And yeah, some areas just kinda glasssed over (where the powerful wizards of the age had to step in and just nuke whole cities of constructs run amok). Not much in the way of magic weapons and armor and whatnot (cause the people didn't use them), but some interesting magical tools of various types that could be found, for those willing to risk it.

[King of Nowhere]

For example, the Han Dynasty of China presided over a relatively static society with at best modest technological changes for four hundred years, but the Han fought a truly epic series of wars with all of their neighbors (and in some cases their neighbor's neighbors) with the borders and allegiances shifting constantly throughout that time. And those wars involved a lot of ethnic displacement, so in terms of who was living where and even how they were living - Han colonists displaced the Xiongu and thereby transitioned a significant region of the Eurasian steppe from pastoralism to agriculture - turnover is constant.

The problem, from a setting design perspective, is that history with any sort of significant detail is really, really cumbersome, and most setting designers bite off way more than they can chew. Planets are big, polities are small, and generations are only 20-25 years. Here a world map for 1000 AD. Pretty much any one of those units, in terms of setting history, wants 10,000-20,000 words. Just trying to outline a fictional planet at a single moment in time means putting together an encyclopedia set sized series of documents (which, it should be noted, has been done, for settings like FR or Golarion), dealing with the issue that 100 years later the political map is going to look very different is an insurmountable challenge.

on the other hand, how much of that is actually relevant to anything?
In the last 1000 years hundreds of nations rise and fell, and yet 99% of that didn't have any impact on the world today. maybe the people living in it managed to leave something behind, but even then, knowing the history of their nation is irrelevant.
So, you can get away with handwaving thousands of years of history.

as for current politics, sure, there are 200 nations on our planet currently; but how many of them matter enough? there's a half dozen political entities big enough to have worldwide influence; aside from that, you only need to worry about your immediate neighboors. So (in this thought experiment where the real world is a campaign world) if the party starts in china, they only need to know about china, japan, russia, the european community, the usa. the dm wouldn't have to characterize each small nation; he wouldn't even need to distinguish europea states.

in my campaing world I left large parts of the world map unstatted, with a tag "here there are nations, but they are not relevant to the current plots. please, do not explore there". And if I really have to, I can invent a new nation to place there. but it let me keep the world coincise enough; there were maybe 10 political powers that influenced the campaign.
of course, I can do that because I can make an agreement with the players that they are not going in the blank areas of the map. A published module cannot.

As for medieval stasis, I find that magic is actually the perfect justification for it.
In our world we have technology, and it led to mass production and a radical change in the way of living.
Magic cannot be mass produced (ok, in my world magic cannot be mass produced, and there's no X of endless Y; I suppose it does not apply to every setting). So, while a supremely skilled wizard may invent a new spell that does something useful, when that wizard dies of old age (ok, in my world cheating age is almost impossible; again, it does not work for every setting) you will need an equally skilled wizard to cast the same spell. And the only way to double production of magic items is to double the amount of trained wizards.
which means that while magic exhist and is rather commonplace, it never led to something akin to the industrial revolution. Progress exhist - several backstory points hinge on it - but it is slow.
And the fact that most of the smart people in the world are studying magic instead of science means that scientific progress is very slow too.
So magic is a crutch that prevents the world from developing much technology. it is much easier, and in some regards much more powerful than technology, especially primitive technology. but it also has a much lower ceiling. societies in this world invested in magic because it provided more immediate benefits, they hit the ceiling, now progress is slow.

[Mechalich]

on the other hand, how much of that is actually relevant to anything?

Here's a linguistic map of SE Asia. It terms of who lives where, what they speak, what their cultural practices are, and even what foods they eat, all that political perturbation matters immensely.

as for current politics, sure, there are 200 nations on our planet currently; but how many of them matter enough? there's a half dozen political entities big enough to have worldwide influence; aside from that, you only need to worry about your immediate neighboors. So (in this thought experiment where the real world is a campaign world) if the party starts in china, they only need to know about china, japan, russia, the european community, the usa. the dm wouldn't have to characterize each small nation; he wouldn't even need to distinguish europea states.

in my campaing world I left large parts of the world map unstatted, with a tag "here there are nations, but they are not relevant to the current plots. please, do not explore there". And if I really have to, I can invent a new nation to place there. but it let me keep the world coincise enough; there were maybe 10 political powers that influenced the campaign.
of course, I can do that because I can make an agreement with the players that they are not going in the blank areas of the map. A published module cannot.

That was the point I was making. Many published settings, especially the famous ones, are far too large, which means they end up being impossibly unwieldy. A fictional setting that is just one ethnically homogenous sovereign state (Japan is generally the go to example here) is more than enough to grapple with at the design level. The problem is that magic tends to remove the kinds of barriers that historically divided up the map and allowed designers to leave it blank. A good example is found in the design of Exalted. The setting designers of that system tried to design it initially as a quasi-points-of-light setup, with descriptions of city states that were hundreds of miles apart. The problem was that starting parties had access to a spell called Stormwind Rider that allowed them to cruise across the map at 100 mph, so there was no reasonable way to confine the game to a manageable region.

As for medieval stasis, I find that magic is actually the perfect justification for it.
In our world we have technology, and it led to mass production and a radical change in the way of living.
Magic cannot be mass produced (ok, in my world magic cannot be mass produced, and there's no X of endless Y; I suppose it does not apply to every setting). So, while a supremely skilled wizard may invent a new spell that does something useful, when that wizard dies of old age (ok, in my world cheating age is almost impossible; again, it does not work for every setting) you will need an equally skilled wizard to cast the same spell. And the only way to double production of magic items is to double the amount of trained wizards.
which means that while magic exhist and is rather commonplace, it never led to something akin to the industrial revolution. Progress exhist - several backstory points hinge on it - but it is slow.
And the fact that most of the smart people in the world are studying magic instead of science means that scientific progress is very slow too.
So magic is a crutch that prevents the world from developing much technology. it is much easier, and in some regards much more powerful than technology, especially primitive technology. but it also has a much lower ceiling. societies in this world invested in magic because it provided more immediate benefits, they hit the ceiling, now progress is slow.

This requires structuring magic in a very specific and careful fashion. It's possible, but hard to do, and it's going to be a lot less magic than any edition of D&D has ever had.

[King of Nowhere]

This requires structuring magic in a very specific and careful fashion. It's possible, but hard to do, and it's going to be a lot less magic than any edition of D&D has ever had.

I only did structure it to avoid abuses of infinite loops, like the well known wall of iron or self-resetting wish traps.
I only add two clauses, one for infinite loops and one for agelessness.
- you can't create something permanent out of nothing without a cost. A wall of magically-conjured iron that will melt in a few days? sure, no problem. Using magic to extract actual iron from its ores? works fine. conjuring out of nowhere iron that will stay like that forever? you've got to pay xp, or burn diamonds, or something like that. If a published spell says otherwise, consider it authomatically revised to abide by this law. zero impact on the actual gameplay, but it explains why nobody broke the economy and made a tippyverse.
- the gods don't want mortals to become immortal, they fear an immortal may get too powerful and be a competitor. so they made the laws of magic to forbid agelessness. And since magic is complex and gods are not omniscient it is absolutely possible that somebody manages to find a loophole and become immortal. but then the gods revise the laws of magic so that whatever this guy did won't work anymore for anyone else. again, zero impact on the actual gameplay, but it explains why there aren't a million ancient immortals cluttering the campaign world, as by the rules as written any spellcaster around 10th level can become immortal in some way. while leaving the option to introduce some immortals where needed. This became somewhat of a plot point in a few circumstances.

I suggest adding those caveats to the magic system in any normal d&d game, because they fix some of the most glaring issues with magic as published and worldbuilding.

and it's not going to result in less magic. my world is high magic. it has skeleton workers doing the heavy work in farming. trains pulled by golems. wizards with a dozen bags of holding that teleport people between cities acting similarly to airplane transportation today. none of that stuff goes against the rules. but it's also a lot more difficult to mass produce than technology. making an undead worker requires to burn gems. you want a double number of undead or golem workers, you've got to pay twice the gems and xp. you can't set up a production line that can fast produce them at a fraction of the cost. And so you can have an advanced magic society that still has a low rate of progress.

[Psyren]

The simplest answer is that, if you want to explore a setting where magic drastically revolutionizes people's lives and technology, go for it! Part of the fun of fantasy (and by that I don't just mean RPGs) is to think about things like that, take them to their logical or narrative conclusions, and challenge yourself with new sources of conflict in such a progressive

If you're asking why the printed D&D settings stay largely static for centuries... I mean, aside from the Doylist reasoning of these settings being designed for swords-and-sorcery adventure rather than playing SimCivilization Faerun, anyway - I'd say the Watsonian reasoning is the fact that most of these settings have deities or other powers with a vested interest in keeping things from advancing too far. Between the ones who want things to stay largely the same, the ones who want things to regress even further into a primitive dark age, and the ones who outright want to destroy literally everything like Shar or Rovagug, I'd imagine the voices of the ones who want things to progress to modern or futuristic technology are a vanishing minority.