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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1606038" data-attributes="member: 3146">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.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.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.</blockquote>

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