S
Sunseeker
Guest
Things get "lost" IRL because documented memory get destroyed (which directly speaks to the issue of lost language as well).
Back when Zard first started this thread, I was going to ask if all of his points could not simply be summed up with "loss of knowledge". I mean, I doubt very many, if any of us know how to build a microchip. Or make plastic. Or even glass for that matter. Were modern civilization stripped of that knowledge, we'd see a massive backward slide in our ability to develop things.
Apply this to a pesudo-medieval society where there are knowledge-hoarding dragons, knowledge-stealing demons, anti-knowledge gods, and the occasional inter-dimensional creature of pure chaos that drives a civilization to madness (and thus, strips it of it's knowledge) combined with a relatively high illiteracy rate and much of documented knowledge being stored away in great libraries, vaults and mage towers inaccessible to the average peon and yeah, it becomes pretty clear how a society could get "stuck" in a certain age.
@OP though I still think the biggest problem with technological development in D&D is magic. Most average settings possess enough magic to go beyond the aid of normal scientific development, to replacing it. I mean, who needs to develop a diving-bell when you can cast water-breathing? And if you don't invent a diving-bell, do you ever develop the diving suit? The submersible? Who needs the aeroplane when you can cast Fly? Or shapechange into a creature with wings? And these are the resources at the hands of some of the most intelligent people in society. Who needs to create the telephone or the television when you have Sending/Seeing Stones?
And then when The Great Catastrophe strikes, you have developed so little that isn't tied to magic, that you just end up with nothing.