Worldbuilding, nonhumans, and the inaccurarcy of Earth parallels

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

That was part of my point earlier about magic and how one defines it. Magic, as it is usually used in RPGs, and *definitely* the case more and more in D&D, is nothing more than a kind of technology. Really its pretty boring. Like making love to a slot machine, or a cigarette pack dispenser. There's very little magic in the magic, and, I would say, not as much fantasy.

So what you are saying is that technology doesn't impress you at all?

I can never figure out why people say "magic shouldn't be explainable". So what's left after you've seen magic?

"Oh, look, I can create a ball of light by snapping my fingers!"
"Cool!……………………So now what?"
"Uh………I'll do it again!"
"Sorry, I've already seen it. You got anything else?"
"Uh…no."
"Well then can you tell me how you do that trick or how it works?"
"No, because then you wouldn't appreciate the mystery."
"I already did."
"Well aren't you impressed with how much skill it takes?"
"I have no idea how much skill it takes because I know nothing about what magic is like and thus how hard it is to deal with. For all I know you have no skill whatsoever."

The last line typifies my opinion on "magic shouldn't be explainable".

 

[taliesin15]

silvercatmoonpaw wrote:

So what you are saying is that technology doesn't impress you at all?
I can never figure out why people say "magic shouldn't be explainable". So what's left after you've seen magic?

I'm not saying anything about whether technology is impressive; like "magic" it is a rather broad category.

As to "magic shouldn't be explainable"--again, many things have been called "magic" such as "stage magic" i.e. pulling rabbits out of hats and so on. Examples such as this kind of magic is explainable because like most things called technology it is based on empiricism. Many things called "magic," whether in the real world or fantasy worlds, simply don't follow set rules whatsoever, it is an apples and oranges question. In a gaming setting it is kind of difficult to use something unempirical or unmeasurable because most games (D&D in particular) use quantifiers such as adjustments to a d20 roll and the like.

What's left after you've seen more magic? Why, the Universe real and imagined is limitless.

 

[Celebrim]

In real life, man's knowledge of science, and much of his philosophy, has changed and evolved over the centuries, to the point where our real-world society is unimaginable to someone from the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance. And yet, your standard D&D fantasy setting continues for centuries, even millennia, without appreciable progress in science, and retaining many of the same cultural and philosophical traits it did three thousand years ago.

I'm not sure that this is true. The general trope of fantasy fiction is that past civilizations were much more advanced than the current one. This fits in with the Medieval/Renaisance European setting. This is true of my own setting, where the greatest technological progress was during the Second Imperial Age when the Art Mages (Artificers) had elevated ordinary crafts to the point that everything that was made was magical.

Since that time, technology and magic have been static or mostly in decline by mandate of the Gods, who feared the power weilded by the Art Mages both to themselves and to the world (they nearly destroyed it in an Apocalytic war, can you say, 'Power Word: Thermo-nuclear Explosion'). Anyone who gets too close to being like an Art Mage gets splatted by the gods.

One of the never fully explored plotlines I've wanted to develop concerns the fact that several of the main nations are rabidly approaching a golden age where significant technological expansion is possible. At what point do the gods step in and start wrecking things to prevent the widespread reintroduction of magic and/or technology?

If dwarves and gnomes are spread all over the world, is it not conceivable that through cultural interchange, human cultures based on real-world societies that historically didn't have access to finished metal goods for a long time, like North American Aboriginals or Africans, might in fact have access to metalsmithing and metal instruments?

It is certainly conceivable. It is not however a necessity. Dwarves are a secretive people, and little inclined to share thier secrets. In my campaign, Dwarves basically have a survivalist mentality, and are more or less continually digging in for the next Armeggedon. It's certainly possible that there are surface dwelling stone age peoples who are functional serfs of dwarven communities with a higher technology level.

In real life, while some cultural interchange allowed non-European civilizations to get their hands on such things as metal cooking pots or firearms, they were never able to acquire or develop them on the scale of Europe, which led to the conquest of much of the rest of the world by the beginning of the 20th century. Any colonizing civilization might find its job much more difficult if it has to compete with foreign cultures who match it in technology, instead of having to pit spears and primitive muskets against the latest, up-to-date weapons.

Without firearms the technology gap between stone age and latter technology levels is much more managable. This is especially true if the stone age peoples have effective native magic users - druids, shamans, sorcerers, whatever - to counteract whatever magical/technical prowess the would be conquerers have. Unless the gods step in, no one really has the capacity to conquer really wide stretches of anything over a short period.

But what happens if a lot of that oil and coal is controlled by hill giants or orcs?

More importantly, what happens if there are no fossils? Most fantasy worlds are only a few thousand years old (again, a Medieval view). As such, there is no particular reason why coal or oil or would exist in any great quantities.

You want to develop gunpowder?

Given that the default D&D universe has only four elements - and one of them is 'heat' - even though at a superficial level the physics of the world resemble ours, the D&D world has in detail very different chemical and physical properties than our own. Lighter things might really fall slower than heavy ones. Heat might not simply be energy converted to molecular motion, but a fluid available in limited quantities. The sum of the ashes of a combusted material might have less mass rather than more, and perhaps the energy of an object is proportional to the velocity rather than the square of the velocity.

In short, why would you necessarily expect gunpowder to exist at all?

In my own campaign, firearms have never been invented (despite many attempts) because no one has ever developed a stable explosive with sufficient energy. Either the explosive doesn't produce enough energy to be terribly effective (imagine if each cartridge was the size of your fist just to get a modest muzzle velocity) or else the explosive was too unstable to be of practical use (imagine bullets with liquid nitrogylcerine as the propellent). The hurdles in getting 'gonnes' to be effective enough to challenge a good longbowmen or a wizard are just too great to justify the economic expenditure.

And, I personally doubt that D&D demihumans would be any more vicious and brutal than humanity has generally been to itself. Although it might not be readily apparant, the modern age is probably the least warlike in human history. Most of human history, everyone is fighting with everyone else pretty much all the time.

 

[CruelSummerLord]

Indeed, my biggest frustration with fantasy gaming is the amount of modernity that is already alloyed with popular settings.

Boy, you're not kidding on this one. As an aside, I deliberately go out of my way to insert political incorrectness into my version of Greyhawk-slavery is sanctioned even in some good societies, women and demihumans are denied certain rights afforded human or dwarven males, etc.-as a way both of making the world more "grey" and believable and also as, admittedly, my dislike of the increased insertion of 21st-century morals in just about every aspect of the setting.

Just so we're clear, of course, my including it in a fantasy setting doesn't mean I like it in real life. And I also make sure that there are just as many places where women and demihumans can get equal opportunities with the men.

I also hate some of the types of speech different authors use in gaming fiction, like Jeff Grubb's dialogue for Olive ("the little halfling's room?" "Boogers?" gag me) and Paul Kidd's valley-girl fairies. Blech.

But I digress.

One of the points I wanted to address here is one in general, is that the level of magic is going to affect technology in one way or another. SOme folks posit that there's no reason to develop technology if magic works just as well...but if you have a low-magic setting like mine, such magic alternatives simply don't exist.

You're going to have to look very long and very hard to find even a 6th or 7th level wizard, much less one who can manufacture a golem or skeletal triceratops. In many cases, there simply isn't a wizard powerful enough to do the job, if there is one at all. Besides, wizards are not going to waste their powers and resources crafting golems or giant skeletons for something so mundane as farming...and most farmers would either laugh out loud at you for suggesting they try that...or burn you at the stake, depending on their inclinations.

Don't get me wrong, if your setting is geared for that, then great, but mine isn't. Part of what I'm trying to do with this discussion is generate ways in which a low magic setting, that simply doesn't have the capacity to do something like that, can maintain its pseudo-medieval stasis.

As for DrunkOnDuty's questions about racial determinism, I'd reply that it's a false dichotomy to compare the racial determinism that might exist in Howard or Tolkien with that of your typical D&D fantasy campaign. Remember, many of the "good" races all look human in one way or another, and the "evil" ones don't.

My favorite orc artwork is the one that depicts the orc as a cross between a man and a warthog; this thing obviously isn't human, and its culture doesn't really mesh with any human equivalent. Trolls look like spindly green things with pure-black eyes and long carrot noses-you really have to stretch, and more than likely have some axe to grind, to connect them with some sort of culture.

This is part of the reason why, I think, it helps to expand the D&D world beyond your typical Feudal European model. We can see how the fantasy equivalents of other real-world cultures interact with the elves, orcs and dragons of the world; how do elves get along with a Somali-inspired culture? Where do halflings fit in a nation derived from the Incas? How would gnomes fare in their interactions with a society based on medieval Vietnam?

As with the European-inspired cultures, so too with others. Some of them will be in many ways benevolent and good, much like their European counterparts. Others may be in league with demons, devils or other malevolent spirits...again, much like some of the European-based societies. When it comes to humans of ALL ethnic groups, your skin color won't determine your basic tendencies towards good or evil. It doesn't work that way for the European-inspired parts of the world, and it won't work that way for the rest of the world.

By fleshing them out, and giving them each their own distinct culture and history, freely throwing in whatever original bits you can think of, and mixing and matching, you can make your world far more than a standard plain-vanilla pseudo-European setting.

In my mind, this can also act as a fairly effective way of responding to those critics who read too much into your typical fantasy setting. If they say an orcish race is equivalent to a real-world human culture, you can point to a good-aligned human society, and tell them you were inspired by that human culture when you created it.

Again, it's no accident that the "evil" races don't look human at all. The "good" ones do. It becomes harder, in my view, to equate a nonhuman race with a given real-world culture if the creature looks like a cross between a man and a wild boar, or is otherwise fifteen feet tall and wears iron-plate armor in a volcanic region.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

And, I personally doubt that D&D demihumans would be any more vicious and brutal than humanity has generally been to itself. Although it might not be readily apparant, the modern age is probably the least warlike in human history. Most of human history, everyone is fighting with everyone else pretty much all the time.

I was with you up until this point. The Modern era is plenty warlike, we just have new categories for how that warfare works. The semantics, tactics, and propaganda have changed but the violence is still there.

At the same time, human societies are at least as much about alliances as conflict. There's plenty of peace and war in every era, and you are absolutely right that there's no reason to suspect that demihumans would be any less or more horrible, just potentially distinct in how they approached it.

 

[Doomhawk]

Sort of a tangent, but it's also a worthwhile point that real-world technology was often fueled by geniuses who made huge leaps forward. In D&D, a genius with the predilection to learn more about the universe becomes a wizard, and then he's too busy making things fly and looking at other planes to bother inventing something so pedestrian as a telescope.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

That was part of my point earlier about magic and how one defines it. Magic, as it is usually used in RPGs, and *definitely* the case more and more in D&D, is nothing more than a kind of technology. Really its pretty boring. Like making love to a slot machine, or a cigarette pack dispenser. There's very little magic in the magic, and, I would say, not as much fantasy.

I'd say it's all in the presentation. "Magic as technology" can be boring - but only if it's done wrong.

The same is true for technology. Advanced technology can either mean just "better weapons and armor", or something that utterly transforms society. I mean, take a look at Transhuman Space - apart from the terraforming, most of the technology is entirely plausible within the next century. And yet all that technology is able to create a setting that's strange, alien, and more fantastic than any generic fantasy setting you'd care to name.

And the same can be done for actual fantasy settings. Even if they treat magic as a kind of technology. Especially if they treat magic as a kind of technology. At least, that's my plan for Urbis, and I'm sticking to it.

 

[eyebeams]

Diamond's reasoning is deeply flawed.

He argues for over-arching rules based on single unique cases.

No, that's not how he does it at all. Exploring every case cited in equal detail would make Guns, Germs and Steel the size of a three foot high filing cabinet, which is not marketable for a popular audience.

There have been many excellent discussions about how the book glosses over contrasting cultural values and the role of individual moral agency, however.

 

[eyebeams]

I'd say it's all in the presentation. "Magic as technology" can be boring - but only if it's done wrong.

D&D magic doesn't really evolve like real technology. If the real world was like D&D, the history of PCs would involve digging them up, fully formed from the ground after getting really good at dowsing for them. Now, there are many inventive things that can be done with these dowsed PCs, but nobody can make better ones. They just get better at dowsing so they can dig up a 9th level PC instead of a 1st level one.

The question is more whether these items (spells) can be used to drive actual technology, which might be possible, Unfortunately, this tends to butt up against the rules, since they are generally phobic of PCs building certain things, so you end up with goofy things like Eberron's Warforged, where to keep PCs from building them, they are adjusted to be totally impractical technologies from an economic standpoint.

Fortunately, warforged do have a good conceptual example that might fix this, even if it doesn't work for warforged themselves, which is to make the minimum resources necessary out of PCs garage-building hands by requiring a big industrial infrastructure -- but unlike the warforged, it can be used to produce a lot of things cheaply. The bad effect is that it centralizes power, leaving you with fantasy megacorps -- but that might be interesting, especially if there are a few bottlenecks in the system.

I think Dune might actually serve as a decent model, because it's about competing monopolies, has a big bottleneck (the spice must flow!) and relies on a great deal of heroic-level personal competence to keep society running. D&D heroes are the Mentats, Swordmasters and Bene Gesserit of this kind of setting, and their heroic abilities are necessary technologies.

 

[Celebrim]

I was with you up until this point. The Modern era is plenty warlike, we just have new categories for how that warfare works. The semantics, tactics, and propaganda have changed but the violence is still there.

No, the violence hasn't gone away. That's obvious. But in terms of the percentage of economic expenditure that goes to violence and the tools of violence, this is the least warlike time in world history. Likewise, in terms of the percentage of the world's population affected by warfare and the percentage of the world's population which suffers a violent death, this is the least warlike time in world history.

If you run the numbers, the most warlike societies are the stone age ones. In terms of the percentage of population which dies a violent death, nothing else comes close.

If you compare the percentage of economic activity going to the world's militaries, only a few totalitarian states match what every European society was doing from the middle ages right up to WWII.

That isn't to say that we couldn't have another spasm of violence akin to WWII which would wash all of that away - there are alot of potential trigger points out there, including the fact that all of this peace, prosperity and technological advancement is running up population densities the like of which the world has never seen.