The Campaign: The Demands Of Campaign Play Compel Development

As much as people like to talk of Magic vs. Technology, this is entirely wrong. Magic is Technology.

Just as real esoteric secrets of science and engineering would later be made exoteric and desacralized into today's professions that are all specializations of one or the other so would the power of the supernatural become externalized into an array of artifice to achieve those effects without tying up valuable human capital in drudgework.

It is also an error to think that this would not be used for ordinary purposes, by ordinary (more or less) people, and thus gain acceptance if the people behind the breakthroughs decide to make it available to the masses. It's not like no one ever considered that this could be a possibility.

The reality is that, as we can see from how real players act when allowed to do so, the odds of this "indusrialization" can't be avoided if there is the slightest threat of competition where failure means being conquered or destroyed- and both are always on the table in most tabletop RPGs, not just Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.

"But that wouldn't happen."

Rome standardized everything about their civil and military operations so that even the most milquetoast of Patricians could handle a local tribal revolt if they just followed procedure; this was the difference between wiping the floor with the Iceni (success) or getting butchered to a man by Armenius (failure). Chinese dynasties have not only those same standardizations, but commentaries upon them by later readers. Ramses II had a literal factory assembly line for war chariots and similar standardization for their users. It would happen if it could.

What makes the appearance to the contrary so dominant is that the setting is either in the aftermath of a collapse, or in a recovery period prior to a new cycle of exactly this phenonemon occuring.

Conflict drives innovation, and war is the supreme conflict due to its stakes; AD&D1e is a wargame, so such innovations are bound to happen--and to repeat--because the benefits outweight the costs in exactly the same way that every other major technological paradigm shift occurs. Once one side breaks through in a given manner, everyone else has to either adopt it or invent a hard counter even faster or get taken out of the game.

A Referee that stifles such things out of hand is a Referee that doesn't get that campaigns--like games--are played from the beginning to reach a definitive and final end. In other words, until either someone wins or everyone loses. Let the players win. You can always start a new campaign; you can't undo the damage of not ending one when it should. That's what it means to #winatrpgs; they win the game, and the game is over. Enjoy it and move on.

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Today is also the anniversary of the Battle of Tukayyid. In 3052, Space AT&T pulled a Stalingrad on the Clan Invasion and won.

There is also a new Geek Gab.