Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8335334" data-attributes="member: 82106">Who decides what is 'primitive'? I mean, take some people who live by hunting and gathering. They have a toolkit, right? The technology which makes up that toolkit has been developed over a, literally, immeasurable length of time. Like, we cannot even say "technology started here." So is it more primitive than your average group of Americans living in Seattle? Most of our tech is maybe 100 years old, 200, 500, even the oldest of our technologies are what, 12,000 years old (going back to the first urban constructions). How can you call anything more primitive than something else? I mean, OK, maybe there are situations where you can, if some people are, say, refugees from a fallen civilization and they had to go reinvent stone axes from scratch. I don't think that's normally the case for any D&D cultures though. There are DEFINITELY better words to be used than 'primitive', it is simply inaccurate, and communicates the, probably erroneous, idea that the PCs tools and things are going to automatically be superior to those of a group of beings which has probably existed in their home environment for centuries, millennia, or possibly even much longer than that. OTOH there is no doubt that, say, 18th Century British had things like steel and guns that Native Americans lacked. However, I would note that the what those Native Americans made from that steel was versions of their own tools, which the English found to be quite handy (witness all the steel tomahawks they made)! Nor did Native Americans find firearms all that handy, except as a way to fight said English/Americans (or each other sometimes). So, it isn't clear that an objective evaluation would conclude that one group's tech was definitively superior to the others. When they came together, the result was some sort of fusion. Finally, I think it is fair to say that often one group has a superiority in terms of the operational means available to it. So Native Americans were not making steel, certainly not guns whereas in principle the British could potentially make tomahawks. However, making a stone tomahawk was still not a skill that British people had, any more than Native Americans were able to smelt iron. Either one could learn the other's skills, but Britain had operational means to do things like mass produce goods. Is this 'higher technology'? I mean, its kind of hard to say, that technology, in its most modern form, seems to be destroying the Earth. Maybe we were the ones who needed to learn something? Pity we didn't. The ultimate point is, these sorts of highly judgmental words and statements are very subjective, very context dependent, and generally close people's minds to ideas that they might actually want to let in. It seems like there might be better ways to phrase things.</blockquote>

Verification