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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 4351679" data-attributes="member: 9225">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.</blockquote>

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