Technology in D&D

It's been a while since I last rambled on about something on my mind... well, here we go. - Stephen

Technology is weird and I am often surprised when things are invented in our history and how they develop. An example of that would be the airplane, in 1903 the Wright brothers 'flew' for 12 seconds and by the end of the day were flying for 59 seconds. In 1915, the earliest known aerial victory with a machine gun was documented. In just 12 years the airplane could fly hours and perform complex maneuvers against each other. It's pretty crazy how technology like that jumped forward.

I should mention that while there was some development before the Wright brothers on aircraft, no one else was able to actually fly for any length of time. Saying that aircraft were developed in 12 years is ignoring years of trying to get into the air successfully, I'm just comparing when we began effectively flying to how quickly it developed. 

Now, it's amazing how fast we developed flight, but that has nothing to do with D&D as not every world has zeppelins to carry their party from one land to the next, instead let's look at a piece of technology our groups do have access too. 

Plate armor, compared to something like the spear or sword, is a new piece of technology that seems to have permeated all of our notions of what life was like in the medieval ages. The plate armor didn't get fully developed until about 1420 and was only worn by the wealthiest due to cost. As most people considered the end of the middle ages to be the fall of  Constantinople (1453), plate armor was barely in the middle ages and yet whenever you think of knights or armies marching in the middle ages, everyone gets a set of plate armor and a shield. If you wanted plate armor to permeate your military, you had a brief period of time between the 15th & 16th century until firearms started becoming too widely spread (and cheap) and they tore cheaper plate armor to shreds. You can take a look over at Lord of the Rings and marvel at every soldier's amazing armor and how all the elves have such form-fitting, light armor and marvel at their amazing production abilities compared to what it would actually be like. 

Now, plate armor has a much longer development cycle. It wasn't like flying, it took us a long time to get full body armor though there were parts in early history where we had something that was like plate, though not as effective. 

The earliest examples of heavy armor could be the muscle cuirass which were produced by the Greeks and were a piece of worked bronze, though sometimes boiled leather would be used, and would include two pieces of armor, one for the front of the torso and one for the back of the torso. 

The above image is of a muscle cuirass found in Southern Italy around 340–330 BCE, this example includes a helmet, and if you had greaves (pieces of armor for the forearm), a heavy shield, a sword, and a spear - you'd have a full suit of armor. This armor was typical for the hoplites and was worn by the free citizens of Greece as they were the only ones who could afford the expensive bronze armor... Yea, the citizens had to buy their own armor and weapons to be used in an army, it sucked to be a soldier back then. 

If you were a poor farmer forced to join the army, hopefully, you could afford armor that was made by linen being glued together in what is known as a linothorax, though most would be forced to go into war with no armor except a shield and spear.

After that muscle cuirass, we have different advancements where armor for the legs became available, bronze was left for iron and the armor grew heavier as it began getting harder and harder to cut through. This age of development took from about 500 BCE to the 15th century as the wealthy soldiers looked at ways of keeping alive from battle to battle and attempting to finance better and better armor. 

Now, all this stuff is interesting if you are anything like me. I can get lost going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole or spend hours and hours watching people like Lindybeige talking about ancient warfare. But what am I going on here about? Well, I suppose I am here to complain about technology in D&D and how it actually all works together, and this carries over to other sword & sorcery games. We pull inspiration from pop culture to produce those games and it ends up with some weird technology stutters. We have the rapier, which wasn't developed until around 1500 CE as a counter to the plate armor, but no mention of firearms even though they have been around since the 1250s CE for the Chinese and the Europeans had them sometime in the 1300s - which is still the medieval ages and the rapier is developed in the Renaissance age. 

Of course, I've heard the argument that muskets were just too slow to load and wouldn't make sense in combat. I completely agree. Though that doesn't stop the crossbow from being included and it has an even worst rate of fire and often required complicated straps and hooks to be placed on it to reload and you were forced to crank it for 10 to 20 seconds for each shot. Obviously we don't have a problem ignoring that part of crossbow design, no reason we can't shove that on to muskets as well. 

But this isn't only restricted to weapons and armor, but even to our methods of transportation. Think of a medieval age ship, do you see the huge sails catching every tiny part of the wind? Do you see the 6 or 7 or 10 or more sails? Well, that style of ship is known as a galleon and wasn't developed fully until the 1500's and further refined during the Age of Sail when pirates are given their glory days out in the Caribbean.  Typically ships of the middle ages would rely greatly on rowing, and while they did sports two or three sails, the power of the oar is what gave them their full speed and abilities. There are sailing ships that solely relied on the sail but those were much smaller until you get into the late middle ages and sail technology was increasing. 

At this point, you probably get it. Technology doesn't make sense in the context of a game, so what am I going on about? Not really going on anything. With these posts, I just ramble about things going through my head and right now I am working on a mass combat system and trying to figure out war in the medieval ages. It is incredibly fascinating seeing how pop culture has tied the technology of the Renaissance and brought it into our ancient past. What things in a movie are we willing to believe happened way back then, and what things even the most ignorant of history would gawk at soldiers carrying.

I'm not trying to be a party pooper. When I hear that a character with 8 Strength is firing his heavy crossbow 4 times every 6 seconds, I won't foam at the mouth and scream about the inadequacies of the game - though, secretly I really want to rant about that - no, I'm just admiring how the growth of technology can be deceiving. It took us 12 years to figure out how to kill each other with airplanes, but almost 2,000 years to figure out how to make plate armor. 

I suppose what comes down to it all is money. In your world, do kingdoms finance the development of weapons and armor? Or is it forced on the citizens? If individual people must cough up money to produce their weapons and armor, your technology is going to increase slowly. Once you have a central force with mountains of gold pieces, you can truly start making leaps and bounds in technology.