Old Man Posted October 10, 2017 Report Share Posted October 10, 2017 Mystery of how the Great Pyramid of Giza was built solved tl;dr: Boats. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted October 10, 2017 Report Share Posted October 10, 2017 You're boats! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alibear Posted October 10, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 10, 2017 If ancient knowledge wasn't always getting lost and forgotten why do we have so many experimental archaeology projects around? There are literally hundreds in Europe where people try to work out just how we used to do things. We're learning new old stuff all the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted October 10, 2017 Report Share Posted October 10, 2017 I saw a video about Stone hedge that was plausible. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alibear Posted October 10, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 10, 2017 I saw a video about Stone hedge that was plausible. They're called garden walls, NB. We can still make those Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigdamnhero Posted October 13, 2017 Report Share Posted October 13, 2017 It's worth pointing out there's also a certain amount of antiquity bias going on in some of these, ie people believe Old X is better than New Y simply because X is older, or because they've always been told that Old X is better. These was a study a couple years ago where they had master violinists play several different violins while effectively blindfolded. Some violins were centuries-old Stradivariuses (Stradivariusi?) worth millions, others were modern makes, and one had literally been completed (IIRC) the week before the study was conducted. Without "knowing" which violins were supposed to be better, the experts overwhelmingly rated the new violins as superior in sound quality. The most expensive Stradivarius was consistently rated the worst. Then there's survivorship bias, ie - people think old houses were better built simply because the crappy ones all fell down and only the best survived for comparison. That's not to say there's no such thing as ancient secrets and so forth. But as L. Sprague de Camp put it in an old essay of his (I'm paraphrasing greatly), for every one example of "ancient wisdom" we have dozens to hundreds of examples of ancient stupidity, such as the ancient belief that digging a canal in the Suez would drain the Mediterranean because everyone "knew" the Red Sea was at a lower level than the Med. A bit OT, sorry. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted October 16, 2017 Report Share Posted October 16, 2017 BDH on the other hand, we shouldn’t have a bias because it’s old, it’s worthless. Can’t seem to remeber the C.S. Lewis quote (if it’s him) on how we assume that because we’re modern all that came before us was inferior. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigdamnhero Posted October 16, 2017 Report Share Posted October 16, 2017 BDH on the other hand, we shouldn’t have a bias because it’s old, it’s worthless. Can’t seem to remeber the C.S. Lewis quote (if it’s him) on how we assume that because we’re modern all that came before us was inferior. Fair point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted October 16, 2017 Report Share Posted October 16, 2017 BDH I meant to edit my last post and say why can’t we just be amazed that humans as a whole are ingenious? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigdamnhero Posted October 17, 2017 Report Share Posted October 17, 2017 That's how I took it, NB; no worries. And while antiquity bias annoys me in real life, this is fantasy gaming we're talking about and it's fairly standard in the genre. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted October 18, 2017 Report Share Posted October 18, 2017 As an antiquity, I am fully in support of antiquity bias. Humans are indeed ingenious, but they temper that with a good helping of laziness, shortsightedness, and sheer wtf stupidity. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted October 18, 2017 Report Share Posted October 18, 2017 But Old man, a lot of the ingenuity is because we are lazy! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doc Democracy Posted October 19, 2017 Report Share Posted October 19, 2017 I have often said that if it were men that bore children, we would, by now, have cracked the artificial womb where there would be far less of all that messy biology and pushing.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ninja-Bear Posted October 19, 2017 Report Share Posted October 19, 2017 I have often said that if it were men that bore children, we would, by now, have cracked the artificial womb where there would be far less of all that messy biology and pushing.... Doc if men bore kids, the human race would’ve died out a long time ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alibear Posted October 19, 2017 Author Report Share Posted October 19, 2017 If men bore kids then male & female roles would be reversed and women would be at work designing stuff drinking beer and scratching their arses and not giving a toss about our pain. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nolgroth Posted October 19, 2017 Report Share Posted October 19, 2017 Humans are indeed ingenious, but they temper that with a good helping of laziness, shortsightedness, and sheer wtf stupidity. Hey no need to get personal now! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Man Posted October 20, 2017 Report Share Posted October 20, 2017 Sorry, didn't know you were a human. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vondy Posted October 23, 2017 Report Share Posted October 23, 2017 If you are running a multi-generational campaign that spans a significant period of time, then advancing the technological timeline makes sense. If you are running a game that covers a specific set of characters careers, then it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to have many technological advances. You could showcase one or two important things during that period - the novel invention, as it were - and make it a plot related thing, of course. I guess you could have magic progress like high-tech and move at a breakneck pace the way our generation has seen it move. But, for most of human history, that was not the case. Our perspective of fast-paced technological change is actually highly unusual. But, overall, I prefer my fantasy games have a more discrete time scale - and approach them the way REH did the Conan. The chronicler was telling tales about the life and times of a legendary king, conan, so it didn't matter how there were - they all fall within one man's lifetime. I like to tell stories about characters and their careers, not about worlds. This may just be because I'm not a Tolkein fan. He was a far better world builder than storyteller. For me, unless the technological change is relevant to the plot I'm not going to be much inspired by it because its change for its own sake and not even about the characters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Liaden Posted October 23, 2017 Report Share Posted October 23, 2017 Haven't read the whole thread yet, so I apologize if this point has been raised; but the waxing and waning of magic could be a good rationale for why society in a world like this doesn't progress technologically over the long term. When magic is around it does many things better than any pre-industrial technology could, so there's no incentive to pursue that kind of development. With the waning of magic there are technological advances, but when magic returns they're supplanted by it and largely forgotten. Rinse and repeat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
massey Posted October 24, 2017 Report Share Posted October 24, 2017 I don't really need to justify why fantasy games don't turn into the modern world eventually. They're fantasy games. Progress towards a 21st century-style civilization isn't inevitable. In the real world, there were all sorts of boring, mundane reasons why civilization advanced the way it did. In a world with dragons and magic and stuff, I have no problem believing that the scientific method never gets properly developed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nolgroth Posted October 25, 2017 Report Share Posted October 25, 2017 Sorry, didn't know you were a human. Some days. Last week or so, I feel like the assistant to the janitor of the god of diseases. Nasty cold. Maybe flu. Definitely not human right now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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