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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1709843" data-attributes="member: 3146">That may be your argument but when I reach your conclusions, they go a lot further than that: specifically, that it is not credible that a world with a DMG magic-level could look like a pseudo-medieval traditional fantasy world. I don't buy that--well, I certainly don't buy it on the basis of magic. I might buy it on the basis that the technologies and social structures that developed from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment were a product of assumptions and worldviews that were only possible because of the legacy of widespread Christian belief and that a society based on a semi-polytheistic D&D-style pantheon would not be likely to follow the same trajectory. I might also believe that the pseudo-medieval traditional fantasy world is non-credible because its many concessions to modern idealism--particularly feminism--create social structures that are only plausible in an era when technology puts less of a premium on physical strength and size and medical technology makes childbirth easy and reduces infant and child mortality rates, and contraceptive and prophylactic technology has somewhat separated sex from reproduction. (And even with all that, the modern social assumptions that govern pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds may not be able to produce a stable modern society--the jury is still out on that).So, if you want to say that it's unlikely that a world in which magic is all-pervasive would produce a psuedo-medieval society, I can buy it. If you want to say it renders a pseudo-medieval society more implausible than the pseudo elements of pseudo-medieval society make it, I don't.Actually, I would figure that non-humanoid and not necessarily intelligent creatures like wyverns, griffons, and undead would have a bigger impact. The difference between a neighboring tribe of orcs and a neighboring tribe of scythians or other barbarians may not be as great as is commonly supposed. After all, their raiding would hardly be anything our ancestors didn't experience and the significance of their non-humanity is belied by:A. the fact that our ancestors weren't really so sure all humans were equal anyway. Greeks/Barbarians, House of Islam/House of War, and all that. Would anti-orc prejudice be stronger than anti-semitism? It's somewhat difficult to tell. (Especially since ancient caricatures of other races often made them sound like orcs anyway).B. the fact that given the Star-Trek style sexual compatibility of standard D&D, there's not necessarily a biological distinction between races like orcs and humans anyway. If you can have a fertile half-orc, one of the arguments for humans and orcs being the same species is satisfied.So, since our ancestors treated their enemies like monsters anyway and the racial distinction between humans and other humanoids isn't as great as is commonly supposed, I don't think the existence of rampaging humanoids is necessarily a greater challenge to the pseudo-medieval order than the existence of rampaging huns was to the real medieval order.On the other hand, wyverns, dragons, dire bears, behirs, ankheg, etc all challenge the status of humanity (and demi-humanity) at the top of the food-chain in a way that RL animals never did. I don't think they have any analogue and that would certainly require an accounting.And it might have been inappropriate of me to do so if you had actually been extemporising from historical accidents and saying that "this might happen which could lead to this" instead of saying that infant mortality rates would go down and therefore technology would develop and that therefore in a space of a couple hundred years, we would have a modern magitech world. However, since your post was not exploring the possibilities left by historical accidents but rather asserting that the pseudo-medieval world was non-credible because such things would inevitably happen, such a response is entirely appropriate.Perhaps not if you stop there. However, if you go on to realize that it's perfectly plausible that Progress could have halted at any time or even have returned to barbarism, one would reach an insight that seems to have eluded you: that, it's not particularly more credible for the magic-saturated world to advance than to stagnate. A magic-saturated, decadent, stagnant, pseudo-medieval world in decline is just as credible as a magic-saturated world brimming with possibilities that is an unstoppable engine of Progress. That point vitiates the central tenet of your argument.I don't see why. IRL, society didn't remain in anything like the romanticised quasi-medieval state of development for that long either. 1300 AD was dramatically different from 900 AD and 1500 AD was dramatically different from 1300 AD. "Society" doesn't need to remain in the same state of development for a millenium in order for one to run a campaign in it.Your "very short" time frame is possible though certainly much faster than anything that happened IRL. Given the improbability of RL developments over a much longer time frame--and, more importantly, the dependence of RL technological developments on RL cultural, religious, and social developments (I can imagine a Magitech Max Weber writing "Capitalism and the work ethic of St. Cuthbert" but I doubt that a single member of a pantheon would have such a dramatic impact upon cultures)--I don't think your "magic as technology" example is credible enough to render the D&D "model" less sustainable than it needs to be.And, of course, anything that happens significantly slower than your very short time-frame need not create any reservations about the sustainability of the D&D "model." It simply points to the need to describe D&D societies as societies in the midst of a slow transition to something else (what is uncertain--it could be anything) rather than as static societies. If ancient armor tops out at chain mail (or splint mail) and there are no ancient magical heavy crossbows and plate armor is a new development then the world is just less pseudo, not less medieval.And, while you apparently think that's a pointless question because the answer is "it ought to look completely different, this is totally incredible," I think that's a question that can be answered and that the answers--incomplete and perhaps inconclusive as they may be since it's always possible that things could have been different--can be very helpful to creating a believable and entertaining campaign.  If one answers, "my world is pseudo-medieval because, like Russia under the Tsars, it's a corrupt and unjust society where a peasant with no goat who is given a wish wishes that his neighbor's goat will die rather than wishing that he is given a goat himself," that can create a believable world that has an entirely different feel than a world where the answer is "my world is pseudo-medieval because King Edmund recently unified the territory of St. Cuthbertsburg and the Westmark and has abolished the blood feud and appointed Justicars to administer the King's Justice--a more or less uniform code of laws that replaces the patchwork of traditions and arbitrary pronouncements of the barons; if things go the way King Edmund wishes, the world will probably be pseudo-Renaissance in 200 years; if his reforms generate too much resistance, the necromancer king of Stromgald will capitalize on the the weakness of the king's lands and I can use Midnight for my next campaign." Both campaigns would use the DMG assumptions but there would be a dramatic difference to the feel of each campaign. That feel comes from asking the question: "Why does it look like this and not something completely different?"</blockquote>

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