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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imret" data-source="post: 2810248" data-attributes="member: 991">DISCLAIMER: I am not a scientist, anthropologist, historian, or any of those things. I do, however, watch a lot of PBS and History Channel stuff, so what follows are my quick answers based off what those have taught me. No, but very few wars between cultures are settled by the virtues of a handful of spellcasters; they are still, with magic as presented in D&D, settled by armies.Primitive cultures - hunter/gatherers, nomads, and the like - have very little free time to do things other than feed themselves; find edible plants, hunt animals, bring them back to camp, process them, eat them, do it all again tomorrow, or at most in a week or two. It's an awful system for supporting yourself. They cut tools from wood, stone, and animal parts, and because these tools break more easily, they have to make them more often.On the other hand, a culture that builds farms, grain silos, and animal pens now has more time to do other things. Their food is just outside their homes, so not everybody has to work to produce food, so Iglug can work with this "copper" the hunters found. This leads to metal tools, armor, weapons, all of which make tool-making and food-gathering easier and easier. This means more people can eat, which means population gets bigger, and it keeps growing thusly.As a result, a more modern society can field more soldiers with better equipment, and they're often disciplined and trained. They may even be professional soldiers, so while they're at war food is still grown, weapons are still manufactured, children are still born and raised. The more primitive society, being smaller in numbers thanks to their poor food gathering techniques, must rely on its hunters and craftsmen to wage war. When they die, there is no food being found, no tools being made, no children being taught the ways to get food and fashion food, unless you let old men, cripples, and women do these things.A spellcaster might even the field in the short term, but eventually weapons technology and mass of numbers will win out. And, as discussed above in greater population support, they could even bring more spellcasters to the fray.The barbarian vanishes when a culture hits a certain point, but that has a lot to do with over-niching the barbarian rather than anything to do with the archetype of "berserker". Most classes are never "out of date" or "too advanced" as long as the culture has a few basic things (tools, language, spirituality), though I could see some cultures being too primitive/natural to separate between "barbarian", "fighter", and "ranger"; this self-same culture would have a very different paladin, also.To avoid threadjack, I'll not discuss the monk here.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/nervous.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":heh:" title="Nervous Laugh    :heh:" data-shortname=":heh:" /> Probably. Protection from Arrows is a Sor/Wiz spell, and bullets hurt like hell.</blockquote>

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