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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 7785161" data-attributes="member: 6688937">Personally, I don't think there is a singular answer here, especially to the tech part because I think it can depend a lot on the particulars of things (many of which have already been mentioned) like: How does magic work? or Vice Versa: If magic works, what of our physics/chemistry/science doesn't? (Player: "So I've put the Charcoal, Sulfur, and Saltpeter mixture in the tube. I light it with a twig..." DM: "Nothing happens."  Forget all that nonsense about Carbon, lad! You get better steel when you sing the right Dwarven Forge Hymns. Personally, I get the best results from Her Beard Was Rusty.) Which creatures in the MM can be tamed or are domesticable? (The Firebeetle Lighting Company worked well until we discovered they can only lay their eggs in dead Carrion Crawlers.) How do magic and magical secrecy affect the way educated people interact with each other? (Wait? You think I'm going to just let you print copies of my Principia?... No thank you, I'm much more comfortable being the only one who knows how Prismatic Storm works.)Simlarly, will science or the scientific method ever occur to people in a world where magic works? Curing a plague isn't a matter of inventing sanitation or antibiotics or vaccines...its a matter of having enough clerics around. Will academic types spend time on it when they will gain more personally from learning magic? ( Why waste time inventing Calculus when Fireball is so much more entertaining?)How do living/real/active gods/celestials respond to technology? What happens when they disagree? If progress is often randomly set back by a godswar, that could explain a lot of stagnation. (Things were going great until the High Priest of the Temple of Kuff the Plague-Bringer ran across that new toilet thing.) Similarly, politics and history would be greatly impacted if tribal inhabitants greet explorers with summoned giant sharks or allosaur calvary. (...after Captain Columbus stabbed the fellow, a few of the old ones shouted something in their gibberish and we saw the ship just...get...devoured! It had huge tentacles like an octopus and a shell like a giant turtle with massive flippers. They started to scatter into the trees and our Father Tomas started to say a prayer, but this huge.....thing...swooped down out of the sky and carried him off....) If Druids and highly active nature gods/spirits are around, will an advanced civilization be allowed to thrive?The more I think about it, the more that the presence of magic and MM creatures can really profoundly change how the world works. All that being said, I still think this is a question that more affects authors, rather than DMs and games.</blockquote>

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