D&D 5E Poor Old Mystic The AD&D Legacy Trampled On!!!!

[Hussar]

/snip

The functions of my smartphone would seem "magical" to an observer from 1917. He can probably guess with confidence that it's a product of human technology rather than sorcery -- heck, we can say he's H. G. Wells himself, has a utopian outlook that makes Clarke look like Harlan Ellison, and is ecstatic to see this evidence of the triumphal march of science into the future. But he'd have no idea how any of it worked. If in fact it were the product of sorcery and his optimism about science were misplaced, he would be none the wiser. It would thus be "indistinguishable from magic".

Just a point. H. G. Wells was most certainly did not have a utopian outlook on science and in fact was the very opposite. In Wellsian fiction, science doesn't solve problems. One only has to look at War of the Worlds to see this - Earth's science is totally ineffective against the Martians and it's only bacteria, lowly, low tech influenza or whatever, that defeats the aliens.

You're confusing Wells with Verne.

I don't. I reject one of the principle ideas that started in the 1950's, and that was the idea that progress was exponential. I reject both the negative fearful claims of that - say 'Future Shock' - and the positive utopian claims of the Golden Age authors. I believe that the long term progress line is linear, and that invariably, people imagine that it is exponential by focusing on very new emergent technologies that are in the process of maturing. The truth is, individual technologies don't even follow linear progress. It's worse than that. Emergent technologies follow a logarithmic curve. "Moore's Law" if you actually bother to graph the line, describes a logarithmic rather than an exponential curve. The longer the time that transpired since the birth of computing, the slower the time span between doubling of computational power. Once we get out of the initial emergent phase, and get into the long tail, growth will be almost flat.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=7055602#ixzz4bjWmWRbJ

Now, this, I disagree with. Well, sort of. If you only look at that single technology, in a vacuum, then, yes, I can see your point. But, technological advances are never done in a vacuum. They influence everything around them, which in turns spurs greater changes. Refrigeration technology, for example, hasn't really massively changed in the last 100 years. Yes, there have been advances, but, by and large, if you took your refrigerator back 50 years, no one would look at it like it was out of this world (well, unless your fridge talks I suppose ).

But, the advent of refrigeration completely reshaped all of humanity. It allowed for the explosive growth of population that we have seen in the past century or so. Without refrigeration, you have a maximum limit on the size of cities. With refrigeration, we have cities today that are more populous than entire countries were at one time.

And that of course, reshapes all sorts of elements of civilization. We live closer together than ever before, allowing freer interaction between people. We have the explosive growth of educational facilities. On and on and on. If you were to compare, say, Paris in 1250 with Paris in 1450, they aren't really all that different. Styles, sure, but, by and large, they would be instantly recognizable. Compare Paris of 1817 with Paris of today and no one would even be able to recognize the city outside of a few landmarks. I mean, Paris in 1817 had a population of 713, 966 (according to a quick Google search). It's now about 2.5 million people in Paris proper and about 10 million if you include the suburbs.

That's what the whole "future shock" theme refers to. That life within a single generation can advance at such a rate as to be virtually unrecognizable. So, while Moore's Law seems to be limiting advances in computer speeds, the rate at which computing is reshaping our world continues at a massively rapid pace.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Just a point. H. G. Wells was most certainly did not have a utopian outlook on science and in fact was the very opposite. In Wellsian fiction, science doesn't solve problems. One only has to look at War of the Worlds to see this - Earth's science is totally ineffective against the Martians and it's only bacteria, lowly, low tech influenza or whatever, that defeats the aliens.

You're confusing Wells with Verne.

Have you read The Open Conspiracy or The Shape of Things to Come? Wells was not shy about his vision for the future.

 

[Tony Vargas]

A class from a 1982 issue of Dragon Magazine, which I know nothing about.

Any class from The Dragon in that period would have been an 'Unofficial NOV Class,' FWIW.