WayneLigon
Adventurer
SHARK said:
One of the reasons some people don't do it is that they're afraid it will create some hideous power imbalance that the players will exploit.
Another might be that most people never think of such things for their campaign.
I incorporate some changes like that but leave others alone, or as special things that never come into general use. Mainly because I think that it loses a lot of the flavor that I want to have in some campaigns, but because also I don't think of most magic-types as having the same kind of 'expand/exploit/follow through to the logical conclusion' mindset that most gamers (and to some degree most modern first world people) have. The only race that does have that kind of mindset (usually) is the dwarves, but they also have (in most campaigns) some severe cultural brakes that keep them from changing things that have always been done that way. They may have the knowledge but it might take them 100 years to implement a change that would revolutionize a human society.
Some wizard may discover, say, the steam engine and all that he does with it is pump water to his fish pond. When he dies, the knowledge dies with him. Every time I get tempted to put in some weird device or invention, I think about China having gunpowerder for centuries and never thinking of using it on a mass scale, or the Greeks discovering steam power and thinking of it as nothing more than a pretty toy, or Bill Gates saying that no-one will ever need more than 64k of memory.
I usually think of wizards, even the most benign, as being very secretive and jealous of their hard-won knowledge. Whereas in the modern world, if someone discovers something new they announce it so that they can share it with the world, most of a wizards work dies with him unless someone finds and reads his spellbooks. Thus they keep reinventing the wheel over and over again just like we did on Earth until about a hundred years ago or so.
Also, again in general, I think of the magical mindset as being oppossed to the technological 'expand/exploit' mindset. Wizards don't generally create permanent freezers because they don't think of them. If they do, then it's something they use for themselves. It never occurs to them that the butcher's guild in town would give them enough money to sink a ship to create a permanent walk-in freezer.
If I wanted to be heavy-handed about it, I might use the Wizard Guild rationale that Tunnels and Trolls used: the wizard don't want technological progress because it might mean that they get pushed off the top of the heap, so they kill anyone who comes up with something really revolutionary that could threaten their source of power and income.
It really depends on the kind of campaign world I want to present. If I use too much 'magical technology', I find that myself and my players might as well be playing in the modern era.
