Because things die slow, especially in less developed areas.
Viola, we've explained the persistance of feudalism despite guns, and also despite pikes, longbows, or crossbows. That would seem to argue against your point.
Someone else has answered this.
Rather, someone else quoted the very sections of the DMG I was thinking of when I made the statement. I'm not sure if thats an 'answer' so much as a validation. Clearly Gygax (or anyone else) didn't exclude guns in order to ensure feudalism. We have no evidence of it.
Uh, no.
If anything the existance of fireballs would demolish feudalism. It was destroy it. There would be no medieval warfare, and kings would die like chumps left and right. Invisibility means there is no precaution against assassins. Cloudkill and the ability to literally summon food and water ends the concept of a prolongued siege. A single wildshaping druid can more or less demolish a whole supply caravan.
So? So all this would mean is that magicians and druids would be drafted into the medieval heirarchy in some fashion. Moreover, why would kings die like chumps left and right? Under or new model, kings aren't merely guys who can afford nice armor, but 10th level fighters (or whatever arbitrarily high level).
Kings and their peers are the only guys who can survive the fireballs or cloudkills! If anything, magic enshrines if not the reality of medieval warfare, then at least the mythic concept of it - war waged or at least determined by a small unit of heavily armored elite warriors. If the large standing army is obseleted by cloudkill or fireball, then by your own argument why would pikes and crossbows lead to the dominance of monarchies fielding large standing armies of professional mercenarcies? Perhaps the ability to summon food and water ends the concept of a prolonged siege, but only if the beseiged parties are a small elite group thus able to feed themselves. This doesn't in fact however 'end medieval warface' - it creates the necessity of it. After all, it was the far east where we saw 'castles' normally reduced primarily by seige. In the West, seigecraft was developed into the art of reducing walls to prevent a long seige precisely because the trebuchet and the cannon rendered destruction of the walls practical AND castles were already so successful at resisting being starved out anyway in part because they often had garrisons of a few dozen anyway. So what if we add Earthquake to the list of seigecraft techniques? We are already anticipating a short seige under the Western medieval model anyway.
That's the problem. People want firearms to make drastic changes that they never did in the first place...
Whoa there. Just because I don't believe that weapons led to the end of feudalism, doesn't mean that I think firearms didn't cause drastic changes in society.
but don't want magic to make the massive changes they very well would.
It's an open question exactly what the impact of magic would be, and the answers you get depend heavily on campaign assumptions. Certainly there would be some impact, but I'm not prepared to say in general 'this is wrong' any more than I'm prepared to say that the existance of pikes, crossbows, longbows, or rifles ends feudalism. Pakistan's rural regions have effectual feudalism to this day, right down to the guy who mills your grain also being your tax collector, and it has a coexisting rifle based militia culture that is in the USA associated (for historical reasons) with democracy. I'm very hesitant to draw easy inferences that social change is due solely or even primarily due to introduction of particular technologies. And frankly, I think if your reading in medieval history is more modern than Charles Oman, you aren't going to have that point of view anyway.
