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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harzel" data-source="post: 7471528" data-attributes="member: 6857506">I have several comments which might head one off in disparate directions, but, for what they're worth, here they are.1) You get to decide how you spend your time.  Incorporating someone else's ideas into your world takes effort and particularly if you have not started the campaign, you are within your rights to eliminate things, even from the PH, that you think don't fit.2) I don't know what the level of tech in your world is exactly, but, as you note, medieval Europeans (not to mention the rest of the world) were not lacking resourcefulness.  Although it seems often overlooked in D&D, historically, they certainly had a variety of tech based on pulleys, levers, springs, and gears - they just tended to be, in comparison to clockworks (whatever you take that to mean, exactly), relatively large and simple.  It might be worth a few moments to consider how (or whether) that level of mechanical tech fits in your world and what the consequences of that are and how that might relate to clockworks.3) My reading of the Rock Gnome 'Tinker' feature in the PH (which is what I assume you are referring to) is that clockwork devices are somewhat limited in capability and definitely fragile - requiring an hour of daily maintenance just to keep one functioning.  For me, this must reflect some underlying weakness or limitation.  The thing that seems most likely to me is that the level of metallurgical and machining technology available is just not sufficient to allow the production of small, reliable precision parts.  Perhaps inclusions, impurities, and other flaws just render the metals unable, at that scale, to withstand sustained use.  (Caveat: I am neither a mechanical engineer, nor a materials specialist.  If you are, feel free to jump in, but try not to be unkind. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)4) QFT:I find this to be a very valuable approach.  Credit to @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=97077" target="_blank">iserith</a> for crystallizing it (and repeating it enough times so that I finally got the idea <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />).  I now consider it one of the primary items in my toolbox.Much different than my resolution (#3), but I think that just shows the approach can take you to a lot of different places.  I will add, though, that IMO this is still subject to #1: there are an infinity of things that you could add to your world and doing so takes energy - there's no reason to be shy about rejecting stuff that you feel doesn't fit or just falls too far down your priority list.  I give first priority to ideas from myself and my players; unnecessary cruff that WoTC includes in their materials for unknown reasons not only isn't high on my list, it frequently annoys me as well (but I guess that's obvious from the first part of that sentence) - see next point.5) Yes, one of the things that really grinds my gears (so to speak) about 5e materials is the authors' apparently carefree attitude about including amongst fairly generic D&D world assertions things that are notably less common takes on how the world works.  To be sure, there is a continuum that extends from the precise mechanical rules that pretty much everyone would agree constitutes RAW through traditionally generic assumptions (e.g., in most towns you can buy a sword and leather armor) toward things that are true in many but definitely not all D&D worlds, and that makes it difficult to draw a bright line.  However, in the context of the PH and other places that players expect to be able to treat as "the rules of the game", WoTC have included enough things that are at the questionable end of the aforementioned continuum, without marking them in anyway as "you need to ask your DM if this is the case or not", that it causes IMO an unnecessary amount of confusion and conflict. But I guess that is probably grist for a different thread.</blockquote>

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