At what point is a piece of technology too advanced for medieval fantasy rpgs?
Do you care if it was around in roughly the real medieval times or would the optical telegraph fit right in despite being late 18th century tech?
>>47631362
basically if it COULD be made...
>>47631362
I don't care. Medieval fantasy is dumb. Medieval period as envisioned by fantasy RPGs is dumb. Give me late 18th, 19th or even 20th century instead, i'll play that in a heartbeat.
>>47631401
not the OP, but the issue with that is that when you put in even minor amounts of magic, suddenly a lot of stuff could be made.
>>47631362
That said, I'm fairly fine with "if it could be made" mentioned there, plus the bullshit magic might provide.
Lately, what I've been doing to sidestep things a bit in a campaign setting is that magic's been out of the game for the setting for centuries and has only recently comeback.
So wizards are trying to get back into the swing of things and only just now experimenting with what they can do with the new tech around.
>>47631411
I'd love to play an 18th century rpg as well. I was always interested in pic related but never got around to playing it. No one I gamed with was interested.
>>47631362
>At what point is a piece of technology too advanced for medieval fantasy rpgs?
Never
Magic can provide an alternative to any tech.
Cristal balls can be used as cellphones or TVs, and so on. A telepathic bond or an extraplanar familiar would make optical telegraph obsolete.
If anything, your players are gonna be looking for alternatives to real life commodities.
The only limitations are the amount of magic in the setting, the legal restrictions, the magic complications preventing mundane tech, and the stuff people simply didn't think about.
But considering a GM is only a human, there is already enough applications he won't think about without restricting himself.
As a rule, I'd say add everything needed to tell the story and make a coherent setting, and nothing else.
>>47631736
>Magic can provide an alternative to any tech.
You know, I've been thinking on this little thing myself, and thus far in my head, I've come to an analogy about this I sum as "The Wizard, The Engineer, and the Wagon Problem".
Basically the idea is that, no matter how much magic there is in a setting, eventually, certain real life issues may still call for an engineer or an engineer's mindset before you go into some ridiculously high magic stuff.
It basically goes:
>A merchant with a cart takes his wagon into a wizard one day to have it enchanted to solve a problem with it's wheels breaking on rough roads
>So the wizard makes the wheel unbreakable.
>But with the wheel problem solved, now the axle has issues and too needs to be enchanted to be unbreakable
>And there's also the matter of the cart suffering from terrible rattling, perhaps worse than before
>So the wizard either needs to throw up his hands and make the cart levitate (which then adds its own problems) or its contents exist in some suspended pocket dimension (which wouldn't solve the problem for the cart driver)
>Or the merchant could just take their cart to an engineer and add in a proper suspension system. (Or the wizard could learn to think like an engineer and magic a solution)
It's honestly pretty unrelated I guess, and there's probably more than a few flaws in this, still, I like to share it when I can (mostly to see if someone can point out flaws in it) to get a bit of chat on the subject going and if any author has brought a similar point.
>>47631961
Depends how your magic works.
It's like superheroes. A ship held in the hiar by one person should collapse, civilisation shouldn't stay the same when every major city gets wrecked at least once a week, exposure to alien tech would boost every day appliances, and so on...
IMO, fictional settings are here to support the narrative; as soon as it detracts from the story being told, any element, no matter how essential, is a bad thing. You could make a game about wizards and engineers troubleshooters and it would probably be a ton of fun, but then the game would need to be focused on it, instead of being an adventure like most campaigns.
food for thought:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsimovsThreeKindsOfScienceFiction
(most rpgs are type 2, and your analogy is type 3, I think)
>>47632707
>http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsimovsThreeKindsOfScienceFiction
Ah, thank you.
I suppose I do overthink these things because of some form of autism combined with minor fa/tg/uy mentality. Plus, I do think it's expressly fun to imagine how a society could be shaped by small things.
For example, in a superhero setting I was working out, through a mix of science and magic, a floating material has learned to be fairly cheaply produced called 'cavorite'. It can't really move without a lot of force being applied to it, but it does stay perfectly still.
So what it ends up being used for, along with super strong and light materials, is the creation of massive skyscrapers. If someone went Allah Akbar on these, they wouldn't collapse disastrously and take out whole neighborhoods around them. In fact, at worst, they'd end up floating at a fairly controlled speed towards the ground and cause traffic congestion, if not remain floating where they are while people use ropes and ladders to get back to ground.
>>47631362
If it works to enable fun for the campaign setting, there is nothing stopping you from having fun
>>47633864
Can't fault you for having imagination and questioning everything.
>cavorite
First Men on the Moon reference?
That's a pretty cool picture. I've know some settings with floating islands, but none with floating ruins.
>>47634091
yep.
As far as floating ruins, not quite. Cavorite in the setting was first invented in the 1890s and could be practically large-scale produced around the time World War II ended.
There were earlier systems of making large bodies levitate. But they required active power sources of some form. Which led to the earliest examples of international treaties about not using the things because having a city floating and suddenly not was an absolute disaster. For awhile it then got restricted to military fortresses, but, another issue about floating cities in pre-industrial worlds is high upkeep costs. Fortresses aren't much different. And so, floating cities were just recognized as more problems than they're worth and a fast way to alienate oneself from allies.
One 'floatingh city' still exists, but it's more like a floating ruined village square with a bunch of dilapidated houses from the 1700's thought to be only kept aloft by the spirits of the dead haunting it.
