Elder-Basilisk said:
Assuming that all other things are equal. But they aren't. The key difference is that technology is impersonal. A gun works perfectly well for anyone who picks it up. A light switch works every time someone flicks it on and if the guy at the light bulb factory quits, he can be replaced too. Magic, OTOH, is personal. A noble can hire a wizard to fireball his rioting peasants. But if the wizard decides not to (maybe because he has a pang of conscience or maybe because he wants to wait until the chaos really starts and loot the whole treasury, who knows), the noble can't grab his fireball wand and start doing it himself. Nor can he (generally) tell his other wizard to magically deal with the traitor. The magical power is intimately connected to the wizard or sorceror and can't be transferred to someone else. If the wizard decides to stop making continual flame torches, you can't just hire someone off the street and tell them to do the wizard's job.
A gun certainly works just as well for anyone who uses it. So do
wings of flying. So does an
everburning torch.
A person able to use a gun is not necessarily a person able to create or implement an improved design. That requires specialized knowledge and skills. Likewise, a Fighter capable of using
wings of flying does not know how to make them. That requires specialized knowledge and skills.
If the Wizard decides to stop making
everburning torches, you cannot hire just anyone off the street to replace him/her. Likewise, if a skilled munitions designer quits, you cannot expect to pull someone off the street to do that job, either.
Magic, as far as Wizards go, is training-based. In the core rules, any character with sufficient Intelligence can learn the rudiments. Likewise, any person in the modern world can be educated to be able to operate and even fabricate technology.
Elder-Basilisk said:
Divine Magic has another dimension--it's generally conditional (if granted by a god as it usually is). So, not only is it personal, its use is restricted by the need for agreement between two people: the cleric and his deity.
Divine magic is, indeed, a somewhat different "kettle of fish". It does have more non-training related limitations. However, while an individual practicioner may "fall from grace", it is fairly that doesn't stop healing potions from being the penicillin of the D&D world. The social changes may begin with one person, but they become independent of that person fairly quickly.
Elder-Basilisk said:
So, while the magic of the D&D world should have social effects, those will necessarily be different than they would be if technological innovations produced the same effects. And, for that matter, technology has not followed any set path of effecting society in our world either. The introduction of gunpowder to China, Japan, and western Europe had dramatically different social reprecussions. There are very significant differences between the ways in which the various tribal peoples of South America have adapted their societies to modern technology as well. So, just because they have cheap efficient lighting would not turn the inhabitants of D&D-land into modern Europeans or Americans. They could develop in different and surprising ways or appear not to change at all.
I am not saying they would be exactly the same. I am saying that the closer the parallel in the discovery, the more likely it is that the results would be same. Certainly, existing cultural situations, the order in which things are discovered, and the method of dissemination would all play a role. However, given that core D&D is loosely modeled on "medieval Europe", it is my contention that magic-as-technology would long-since have caused enough social changes that the core D&D setting cannot plausibly still exist with magic as it is presented in the core rules.
Even the 3.5 designers hint at this, when they admonish people that having peasants who do not readily recognize magic is "a mistake." (DMG 3.5, Chapter 5: Campaigns, Heading: Magic In Your World) I happen to despise that particular part of the 3.5 DMG; I dislike being told I am making "a mistake" in wanting magic to be unfamiliar to the common folk.