Why don't PCs ever invent things or create infrastructure?

In the case of why the players don't, it's because they're usually around to kill stuff and save the world, and the loot is just a means to becoming better at those. That said, some players occasionally do, largely because either they can or they want much better loot than they'd normally have.

As to why the characters don't, it's because you can't just invent something cool and kick back to watch the cash flow in. Look at all the IRL inventors who haven't been able to come up with one thing that's worth decent cash.

As for creating infrastructure, that's because the PCs tend not to be in positions to care. Infrastructure is built by kings and captains of industry, not mercenaries or treasure seekers.

It's entirely up to you and your DM.
Why do you assume all games are dungeon crawls; if we didn't like to get off the beaten path we'd simply play video rpgs.

Besides, I'm surprised by the list of reasons you've provided as incentives to further technical progress:
>money
>money and political power
You must have a lot of fun with character creation.

Because RPG's aren't about using real life knowledge to make your imaginary character gain imaginary money. If you are playing them for that reason, you are a shit player.

If they go the route of becoming a lord or noble they'd have the time and money to build infrastructure, like upgrading the roads, working on irrigation, things like that, but that turns into more of a town management game which not everybody might not be into, and might get away from the spirit and intent of the game.

As for inventions, that's metagaming, which is generally disliked and annoying, and might not actually reflect what your character is actually capable of knowing.

>Because RPG's aren't about using real life knowledge to make your imaginary character gain imaginary money. If you are playing them for that reason, you are a shit player.
>Because that's the pinacle of metagaming
>what you're suggesting isn't invention, it's taking real life knowledge in game

All of this.

Hey, you can also invent bombs and then use them to destroy any possible challenge that gets thrown at you

>hey, you can also try to bypass generations of innovation with metagaming
>but you also have to grossly exaggerate the effectiveness of primitive incendiaries
>but after that you can just destroy everything with your perfectly-machined 20th century hand grenades!

I bet half of you people couldn't even cook dinner if you were dropped into a comparable time period with no references, much less pull off the kind of shit you're talking about here.

That's not even touching the fact that your characters aren't you.

That's exactly what I was implying you fucking imbecile

Wait, you've really never had a player try to invent gunpowder on you before? In my experience that's the very first thing anyone tries to invent. I've seen characters whose backstory and motivation all boiled down to "he wants to invent guns." He didn't know what guns were, he just had a theory about tubes and explosions.

I cannot be the only person to experience this.

depends on the game
warbirds uses this as an actual mechanic for 'mad scientist' characters, who can invent all sorts of shit like personal computers, advanced body armour, and later jet engines, with the caveat that their particular brand of science isn't entirely compatible with the 'real' science that goes on out in the world, and so they have an insanely hard time making money off of or spreading their inventions
it's rather interesting

gurps also allows you to play a 'gadgeteer' with two levels - normal and fast
normal gadgeteering lets you invent stuff over the course of days, months or even years, inventing shit ahead of your TL and potentially even making massive changes to your setting if played right
fast gadgeteering is more or less the same, but the timescales are reduced down to minutes to hours to days, and is something you won't be able to buy in 'realistic' campaigns.

if, in those games, you aren't playing either of those types of characters then you're unlikely to invent anything startlingly new neither through mechanics nor fluff
don't get me started on people metagaming that shit
not to mention there's generally not much reason for a player or their character to pursue that shit anyway - the timescales involved are usually way too long to provide any benefit during most campaigns and the resource investment can be huge if you're working on anything large (or setting-breaking), and normally characters have actual shit to do that matters like the usual 'saving the world' or 'getting revenge' business
you can do your science experiments at home after we've fought the fucking lich, unless you seriously can't wait to take a leak on your alchemical mixtures or whatever it is you're trying to do to make this sht

You forgot to mention that gadgeteer costs a lot of point, and that inventing shit takes a lot of money. Most of it's the work of a whole campaign.
Also isn't there something with fast gadgeteering about how it breaks down after one use or that nobody but you can use it?

Are you unironically suggesting that players actively engaging in literally worst, shittiest and most juvenile kind of metagaming is good?

I've had this, and yeah it gets thrown around a lot as typical "that guy"ism.
For good reason too.

Because who gives a fuck?

I play RPGs to go adventuring and kill things for money. I don't play them to do boring, practical things.

The only game where this could work is Exalted, and you know when you do this? On your off time. It's "In the first hundred years of his rule, the God-Emperor invented blah blah blah, for which his people were grateful."

Metagaming complaints aside, from a historical perpective, the industrialization of society had more to do with the emergence of strong rule of law, stable nation-states, banks lending to the public at interest, and the concept of the corporation than it did the discovery of a particular set of technologies.

Landed nobles have little incentive to develop technologies because their power base and wealth is already secure, so you need a society where an educated commoner can borrow money from a bank or shareholders to build a factory, and be relatively confident that it won't just be seized by the local authorities the moment it turns a profit. If you designed a steam engine in the usual anarchic Medieval-to-30-Years-War fantasy setting, you'd end up with a peculiar technological curiosity that changed nothing much about the world.

My maximum was showing up to the door of an alchemist and asking him if he could make me some little spherical vial, not with glass but with somethng that will break easily, that I could launch to make smoke (or poisoning smoke, but I didn't say that) letting the DM handle my OOC/IC request how he wanted.
And that's only because I knew alchemists were a thing in his setting and you can buy alchemist's fire flask which is a bit of the same thing, but you know, with alchemical fire.

there's gadget bugs, which include the possibility of it breaking each use, consuming resources worth $250 or $25, failing on certain rolls, or doing other funky shit, but i didn't notice anything limiting the use of quick gadgets specifically
but yeah, the gadgeteer advantage is pretty hefty in points, but that isn't going to be an issue if you're building around it as a concept
the money requirements for inventing shit more or less came with my time and resources spiel later on, that kind of thing seems to be the norm for any kind of crafting in most systems anyway

Because my players aren't meta gaming scum like you OP.

Spend all day locked up in the cubical farm as a electrical engineer. Ahh the weekend is here time to drink a brew or two with the lads, roll some dice, kill some monsters, get fat loot!

NOPE!

DM Arsehole the OP wants to play Designers & Draftingtables.

>nevermind that you couldn't do half this shit IRL with your understanding of these things

FUCKING THIS

Genius the Transgression does this as well

Because it's boring as batshit
Because it's abusing metagame knowledge
Because it involves a whole lot of assumptions about the economy and trade in a made up world
Besides, they do. All the time. And decent GMs shut them right down.

They would probably need a very high intelligence stat or it could be perceived as metagaming.
Also this. now go out there and be a good little murderhobo

>ITT; Fuck building shit that's so HARD! I prefer breaking everything cause I'm a beta in real life who skins squirrels in my garage.
If you're not using your vast wealth and pseudo magical powers to help the common man you are a shit tier hero.

Because a level 7+ wizard can do that and even BETTER. Like, the moment you get FABRICATE, you instantly become a 3d printer that can construct entire castles within the matter of a week, or vast underground fortresses, or siege weapons, or pretty much anything made of stone. At level 16 you can now build shit out of iron, for fucking free. And thus instantly crash any economy on a whim in the span of a day if you so desire.

Add in Necromancy and using things like attunement-books that Magic Mouths read combined with programmed skeletons, you can literally create dirt-cheap robots that can automatically perform simple tasks, or make logic gates, and by extension entire computers. A set of 12 skeletons can manage a farm permanently for only 25 gp a skeleton, plus the cost of a book, and a magic mouth.. PERMANENTLY. You will never need to ever manage that farm ever again, except to go collect the food and deliver it to the city to sell to whatever your contacts are.

By extension on logic gates, you can use Peasant Railgun.. Only with Skeletons. In order to create an email service that delivers messages ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, in only 12 seconds. But why stop at putting the goddamn mailman out of business? Skellymail can be used to send freight too! You can have an entire industry constructed like this:
> Magic mouth manages skeleton miners, who deposit resources onto a pallet
> Pallet is moved by SKELLYMAIL to a factory managed by more skeletons, who use a bound fire elemental to smelt metals.
> SKELLYMAIL the raw materials to your choice of seller contacts, city watch, a distribution center, or even a personal lab so you can use FABRICATE to make anything you goddamn please.

And now you've become the aurora project, using fucking skeletons to create a perfect society where nobody ever needs to work.. Because there's skeletons doing all of the work for everyone, FOREVER.

Which brings me to a fun point. I've actually once ran a campaign as the DM, where the BBEG was a Gnome Lich trying to do everything that I exactly described. Except that the party was given the legal right from some city to steal all of the lich's shit, and fuck up his day.

Whole campaign had fun adventures across a whole world, where the party had free choice to explore dungeons, find quests in their given region.. Or go after the region's Lich Tower. The lich towers were always huge WTF moments at every corner, because they were always holding these vast incomprehensible machines made entirely out of skeletons. At one point they even found his distribution center, and I had a terribly fun time placing over 150 skeletons on a battlemap, and describing in detail to the party how they would raise their hands in strange sequences at seemingly impossible speeds.

I do this kind of shit all the time. It is a matter of having the right cross section of Craft skills.

You really have to corner the market on
-Locksmithing
-Clockmaking
-Lens grinding
-Bell casting

Once you have these skills you are on the way to basic Steampunk design.

Throwing in some glass blowing and alchemy helps also. A lot of other crafts like Blacksmithing, Carpentry, Gem cutting, Tinsmithing, and Goldsmithing you can contract gnomes or Dwarves out for.

>make looking for dungeons not only unsafe but a complete waste of bloody time.
This seems like exactly the reason. People are here FOR the dungeons.

>By extension on logic gates, you can use Peasant Railgun.. Only with Skeletons. In order to create an email service that delivers messages ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, in only 12 seconds.
Except if you apply the slightest bit of common sense to a clear abstraction in the rules, of course.

>Alright, and after a total of 15 rolls for knowledge, craft, and bartering, we can safely say that the party spends the rest of their lives riding a wave of profit as corn growth and processing is revolutionized. Good campaign.
>Now make some actual adventurers shitheads, you're starting 20 years later and the only difference is a 10% drop in the price of rations anywhere it spread, and a disgusting amount of corn products in those.

I remember there was a thread some years back where a guy wanted his gnome tinkerer character to produce a whole and complete Ford F-150 pickup truck (or some equally specific make and model) in his medieval workshop during a siege, and was angry when his DM said no.

MFW he insisted that this was achievable because (his truck of choice) was the PERFECT vehicle and anyone who refined their design enough would therefore inevitably arrive at it.

>Millennial grasp of economics.
Wew lad

This seems to be the real problem in this thread. A lot of you people seem to be vehemently against creativity to begin with.

I wonder how many of the posters so far are GMs, because you mostly sound like poor roleplayers.

>Why do people not metagame with inventions
>Because it's inefficient! You can implement modern computing with miniaturized skeletons and skip all the previous steps in the tech tree!

Lul

My players once actually started a mining operation, utilizing necromancy as helpers and some people instructing the creations. They overpaid their workers, so most of them only worked part-time and spent all their money on partying. The area became known as the "Tavern Strip" pretty quickly, and the profits from the taverns actually began to outstrip the mining operation as tourists started to flock in.

Not to be undeterred by their economic downfall, the players decided to open their own taverns. Not only with blackjack and hookers, but portals to the elemental plane of alcohol. In a true dwarf fashion, they did this in one of the mined-out caverns. Yes, they opened a portal to a plane entirely made out of liquid in an underground area, and then filled the entire place with drunked hooligans lured by cheap booze.

Obviously, it ended up with all the customers eventually drowning in primal booze, due to an escalated inter-planetary barfight that involved at least two demigods, a hulking clockwork automaton (that somehow managed to get drunk) and a cat named Steve.

In the end, I had to take their character sheet and rewrite all their alignments as [SHENANIGANS].

Your players did good.

No meta bullshit, no rule exploits, just fucking with the world and seeing how it reacts.

Reminds me of 1d4chan.org/wiki/Tale_of_an_Industrious_Rogue,_Part_I

> Implying it's anything more than modern.
The lich "AWESOME" required 1 skeleton per every 5 feet of distance to transmit a message. In order to set a destination, he had to have RS-LATCH skeletons set to use a 4-digit routing code sent by the first 4 fingers on the left hand, which allowed up to 16 destinations. To send a package to a destination, you would hold up 4 fingers to signal the binary code for your chosen destination, and then hand the object to the first skeleton in a line.

A single AND gate requires 3 skeletons. An RS-LATCH requires 9. To make a Binary Reader that can manage the routing information would require 4 AND gates and an RS-LATCH for each combination. So a simple 4 digit routing system requires 336 skeletons to create a router. Said router can only handle 16 destinations. Each additional destination(Only measurable in powers of 2), requires an additional 21 skeletons.

It's doable by an enterprising lich, just fairly expensive. At 25gp per skeleton, a Skellycomputer ROUTER would cost 8400 gold. While a Skeleton AUTOFARM would cost 1325 gold, of which 1000 is required to make the Magic Mouth permanent. It's not like a lich is going to crash any economies anytime soon, but the best part about skelyman autofarming is that it requires zero maintenance. Up until some asshole adventurer kills your skeletons at least.

Obviously the first thing you would ever need to make is a Fully-automated mine in the side of a volcano to produce the obsidian used in creating skeletons. That would negate the cost of producing more, and mean you only need to obtain the bodies.

>Playing D&D 5e, DM is running the Adventurer's League modules
>Keep meeting NPC fuckers who disappear in clouds of smoke when we try to question/arrest/kill them
>Ask DM if I can buy some smoke bombs
>"Is it in the PHB?"
>It isn't.
>"Then no, you can't buy them."

>mine in the side of a volcano to produce the obsidian

Necromancy uses black onyx, not obsidian. Still doable, but not quite as easy or plentiful as camping outside a volcano.

Well there's also feats that allow you to exchange the material costs of spells for other gemstones of "equivalent value", which is ostensibly for necromancers that don't want to be caught going on a buying spree for black onyx. So you could indeed make skeletons out of obsidian, or really any other gemstone mine. Shit, you could just have skeletons panning for gold and other shiny rocks and that would be sufficient to construct more skeletons if you had that feat.

I think the issue we're all running into with a skeleton computer is why does the lich need one in the first place when a more compact programmable form of media in the form of golems already exists?

As to answer the OP, things like cannons and gunpowder and even automobiles already technically exist in one form or another in a D&D setting such as Forgotten Realms, it's just that none of them are really relevant or capable of being adopted by your average feudal fiefdom of a hundred square miles.

Even the cheapest golems are fuckoff expensive compared to making undead.

Actually working on doing something like this with our Dwarf Fortress Gurps system. Check out the thread here:

>Even creating basic things like a steel plow or synthetic fertiliser could earn the PCs more money than they could spend during several lifetimes
How would a PC invent the steel plow? Are they expert in farming and blacksmithing? Even then, how exactly do they come up with the idea?

Even harder, how do threy make lots of money from it? Do they campaign to have intellectual property rights laws established throughout the setting and a huge network of agents checking for unlicensed plows?

Your idea is bad and you should feel bad.

Could easily set them to mining something rather common like quartz. Might need a bigger volume to match the effective price but if you're mining it for free there's little worry.

Thinks I can recreate with my knowledge right now:
>batteries (as long as I can get my hands on copper and zinc ore, I've done enough metallurgy and set up that I could manage it in my own)
>rudimentary electric lighting (I'm glad I know as much as I do on how electric lighting works from several projects I did)
>electric motors (this came from a hobbiest obsession for years)
>rudimentary radio (same obsession)

Besides this I know a enough about medicine I might get something working? At least I know I can make penicillin with either mold from wine or bread (not sure the kind of mold or which, but that's what trial and error are for). Willow bark boiled is like aspirin I think?

As for farming? I know rotating certain crops means nutrients in the soil get replenished but besides that fuck all.

Oh and I know the right ratios to get gunpowder right.

Because in my setting right now there's a lot of political instability and general xenophobia and hatred of learned men for various reasons, none of which goes to supporting the creation and spread of new inventions.

This thread:

Therefore it is obvious that Turm the barbarian or Faggotiel the mage can invent the steam engine

Necessity is the mother of invention.

First of all, pic related. Then, ask yourself those:
1) Why should they do that in the first place as players?
2) Why should they do that in the first place in-character?
3) Are they playing a game that actually focus on being an engineer or inventor or MacGuyver?
4) How did they possess that knowledge and why they are trying to change the world
5) Is it a party goal or single member only?

Besides, I really don't like your assumption about "never". It's like you never played a post-apo game, where this shit is the main focus, right after killing things for resources. Or Infinite Earth, where you can by default influence worlds you visit... if you have skills and resources for that, not to mention political power.

Given the most notorious case, the steam engine, eight-graders in my country are actually taught in detail how to build Newcomen and Watt engines. But that still doesn't resolve the issue about resources, infrastructure or skilled manpower, so yeah, knowledge for the sake of it.

Because it's not the point of the fucking game, and it's metagaming.

If people want to play a game of time travellers, they can outright say it, instead of fucking with me like I'm some sort of computer who can't tell what they're doing.

Well if inventing is so easy why didn't they have steam engines and electricity and cars in the middle ages?

>I think metagaming is good
>I also think hearing once about Object A means I will be able to replicate it
I will give you this - can you build a transmission chain? Even the most basic crankshaft?
Because I bet you have no clue what are those, but want to metag... sorry, "invent" things that require to have first shitload of resources, skilled manpower and shit like that.

Or you are unaware that up until times of Edison, there were no companies around the world doing research on purpose, where you could come in, tell them your problem, and they would try to figure it out. Instead, most of inventions were gradual evolution and/or exports from other cultures.
Like the steel plow, invented by Chinese around 4th or 5th century AD and eqially old winnowing machine. Des it mean they've spread over the world overnight? Of course fucking not. And if not Dutch traders, who realised how fucking advanced and important are those, Europe would never "invent" this shit for next two centuries, if not longer.

But hey, let's meta-game!

Same reason you should kill the lich before trying to legalize gay marriage, inventing take time particulary if you aren't a metagaming faggot and understand that your character doesn't automaticaly know what you know.

>Or you are unaware that up until times of Edison, there were no companies around the world doing research on purpose, where you could come in, tell them your problem, and they would try to figure it out.
That's not strictly true. A good blacksmith would undertake simple work like that.

The Royal Society would take commissions to answer questions / solve problems for people.

But your points are all valid.

Who said it's easy? I've specifically pointed out how even having proper knowledge, won't grant you ability to recreate things from a scratch, because you lack infrastructure, resources and manpower to do so, not to mention often requiring previous steps.

I mean, check OP. Articial fertilisers. Easy, right? Just nitrate-heavy powder... How do you get nitrates? Well, if you don't want to scoop guano, it will require Haber process. Oh, so you need now electric generator, shitload of high-grade steel (snce you are planning to produce profitable amount of amonia). So you need electricity. Now you need copper of high quality, high-grade magnets and a mill, preferably water one. Not to mention knowledge to build electric generator and the reactor for Haber process - which will require a nice forge full of people who have at least 19th century expertise in metal-casting, metal-rolling and of course all the infrastructure for that.
In the end, you need a small country full of craftsmen and highly trained work-force to even think about using amonia to produce fertilisers.

But hey, that's gonna be easy, right guys? Right?

Personally I blame all the time-travelling flicks, starting with the Connecticut Yankee, where knowing about shit X means you are perfectly capable to replicate it within few days. Cross-time Engineer, even if extremely bad and based on obnoxious Marty Stu, at least take into account the resources and workforce problem, so the main character spends first few years on organising chain of brothels with quality booze to get his funding first and to gain support, expands local cloth mill with at least passable inventions. Sure, then the book runs away and within 15 years he's building a small flottila of steamers, but at least early on it was somewhat bearable what a single guy with limited knowledge and almost no powerbase can achieve.

Because we don't meta-game. Nor invite meta-gamers to our group

>science
>metagaming

UGH, EDISON WAS SUCH A METAGAMER

Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a Dataprobe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.

alternatively:

I have often been asked: if we have traveled between the stars, why can we not launch the simplest of orbital probes? These fools fail to understand the difficulty of finding the appropriate materials on this Planet, of developing adequate power supplies, and creating the infrastructure necessary to support such an effort. In short, we have struggled under the limitations of a colonial society on a virgin planet. Until now.

>as long as I can get my hands on
Then you can't do shit, mister.

Seriously, the best thing you can do after finishing obligatory education around the world, is making a crankshaft... which humanity had since late Antiquity.
So at best, you could work as travelling mill builder.

Willow bark IS aspirin, point taken.
Most of the crops required for rotation were either effect of centuries of slective breeding to get them and/or outright imported from other parts of the world.

Gunpowder requires nitrates. How are you gonna get those? And I'm serious, this shit was problem big enough to even have a fucking WAR for guano.

Edison hired fuckload of actual engineers and craftsmen, while using entire knowledge of the world around him to solve problems. And shitload of funding on that from all the investors interested in the solutions to mass-produce his devices

If you seriously don't understand how this differs from a local blacksmith building one-off lathe machine, then you are fucking retarded.

Does the science of the setting support your inventions?
If not, then it's meta-gaming.

Try GURPS, it had rules for preventing this shit. If you are a member of society on specific technology level, going above that level gives you a penalty and a really high one, -4. And that's for skipping single technology level. So if you are a quasi-medieval TL3 "inventor", and want to build railway, from TL6, you've got now -12 penalty. On 1-20 range of skills, that means you can spend your lifetime on this to get SOME results. And that will still require absurd funding to happen in the first place.

But hey, inventions!

No, but he had at his disposal well-staffed lab and workshop, with almost unlimited funding. And he was using already existing science to deliver inventions based on it.

Because obnoxious meta-gaming is a big no-no? If you are playing the game just to break it completely via gaining huge-ass funding, what's the point to continue the game? Average TTRPG revolves around bottom-tier people trying to gain fame, wealth or just get by. Sometimes you are some mid-tier person, like low-ranking noble or middle management of a corporation, but that's rare and usually either the entire point of game revolves on operating on higher tier or you've earned that with hard work and countless campaigns.

In short - you propose to jump to high-tier role in the setting in a game about bottom-tier people.
What for?

Character knowledge versus player knowledge.

Does your character have ranks in Knowledge: Metallurgy, Knowledge: Machinery, Knowledge: Farming Equipment, Profession: Blacksmith, and Knowledge: Fluid Dynamics?
If not, they don't know how to make an improved steel plough. Do you know how complex 'improved' ploughs are? It's not just a blade you stick into the soil and pull along.

Most PCs don't because their players want to smash and grab rather than build and create.

>tfw entire party built a country that was successful just to undermine trade, agriculture, and religious influence of neighboring country.
>Force them to surrender or tell them they'll starve
>They refuse, inspire revolution and convince their citizens through propaganda that our county and our religion are better
>They overthrow their leaders, public executions ensue
>Hand us the country
>We make it awesome as fuck through trade agreements, infrastructure, religious devotion, and general good management
>Used combined forces to launch crusade against BBEG who threatened the world just so we could take it over
>Lawful Evil is fun

Since it's bragging time:
>Horse collars (you would be amazed how important this shit is)
>Basic transmission chains for low-power machines, thus:
>Wind and water mills
>Trip hammers
>Puddling furnace, as long as I've got proper bricks
>The most basic blast furnace (so no Bessamer "pear", just a huge-ass building)
>Winnowing machines
>Horse-powered mowers, as long as you will provide me with enough metal
>Spinning Jenny
>Hand-cranked threshing machines, but I need gears for that
And I know how to add flying shuttle to basic loom, but can't build the loom itself.
Working in local open-air museum has its perks

>>The most basic blast furnace (so no Bessamer "pear", just a huge-ass building)

Blast furnace: lets turn ore into metal!

Bessemer: lets turn pig iron into steel!

Completely different things really.

>I will give you this - can you build a transmission chain? Even the most basic crankshaft?
Yes and yes.

If my player comes in and has intricate knowledge of every step of creating a device then I could let their PC attempt something

>which is ostensibly for necromancers that don't want to be caught going on a buying spree for black onyx
Why aren't there government bureaus who go after you if you're stocking up on onyx because they suspect you're building a skeleton army?

In the real world you can't buy loads of bleach or fertilizer because the government will investigate you to see if you're making a bomb.

>I cannot be the only person to experience this.

You aren't.

>the main character spends first few years on organising chain of brothels with quality booze to get his funding first and to gain support, expands local cloth mill with at least passable inventions
What? What skills does he have that allow him to be a big success in the entertainment business?

If engineering is his forte, why doesn't he begin by designing a handy prototype that fixes the biggest problem of the day, then build from that? Why the fuck is he selling whores rather than writing letters to the 'better mousetrap competition'?

Gadgeteers in the Star Munchkin RPG can do the same, although they mostly just build slaughterbots. They have an ability that allows them to build in rounds what other people can in turns, so they can actually create a robot army in the middle of a firefight.

I'd be more impressed with your DM if your rival country had a communist revolution that killed off their aristocrats then spread into your country, fucking everything up.

That would have been just as fun to play, honestly.

>hatred of learned men for various reasons
A lot of people in the modern world fail to understand how this was a thing in ages past. To be a man was important in many cultures for many reasons, and being someone who paid attention to details, who rationalized, who was patient and deferred to those who knew... were not well respected. (Think of Game of Thrones and how respected the knights were).

New poster here. I wanted to throw in the fact that what many ambitious inventor gamers are missing is the idea of necessity being the mother of invention. Take for example the first thing on your list - batteries. Sure, a modern person with some knowledge of chemistry could make one, but why would an ancient need one? We have evidence the Egyptians had them, and they were probably used for electroplating jewelry. How and why would your character create one, that is, know to create one?

I'm not saying your 18 intelligence character couldn't make the leap, but why would they want to? Would they think of details like machine screws or that a steam engine needs a secondary condenser to work? Would your character reason he's creating novelty, or a device to get water out of the local copper mines so miners don't drown?

I can't think of any other spells that use black onyx, so I imagine any kingdom aware of the connection wouldn't just monitor it, they'd outright ban its sale, declare every bit of it property of the crown, grind every piece they find into powder, and scatter it in the ocean. Necromancers would have to use the black market, raid mines, or secretly operate them.

Bleach and fertilizer have legitimate civilian applications, onyx is only good for jewelry and necromancing.

Copper and zinc were both commonly traded.

You underestimate my culinary talents.

But you'd need billions of skeletons.

>peasant railgun

Debunked. Kill yourself.

None of this is true.

The guy ends up in medieval Poland roughtly 12 years before Mongols raided it really hard
He's an aircraft engineer. He has no connections, no money nor anything, but his knowledge and two hands. He manages to catch attention of local merchant with proposition of making strong alcohol (since distillation won't be introduced for next 4 centuries). For a share of profit he makes a still, but they quickly realise there is hardly a way to distribute such quantity of booze. So they end up contacting local baron for a deed for inn. To help things up, the engineer propose to use barely clothed women and the thing quickly turns into a small chain of highly-renomed inns, serving high-quality service with extra-clean girls (since the engineer shows them how to mass-produce soap)
It makes much more sense in the context of the story and seriously, the first book is really good, considerably toning down how Mary Sueish the main character is

About your question - he does that eventually. After finally being someone more than a nameless drifter, he uses all his connections to meet with local duke (a historical figure of ruler well-known for his massive settler actions and setting up industries), promising him to build a cloth mill. Since he has the backing of the (now pretty rich) merchant and the baron they've originally get for their deal, the duke agrees to fund this thing. The engineer delivers in few months exactly what he promised - a 18th century mil

For this achievement he's granted a deed for settlement action (which was his "price") and help with organising settlers...
... which was his goal from the very start. With the deed and quite a big sum from the inns (he's still co-owner at this point), he starts to build up, starting from the scratch, now having manpower and resources to solve things

Still, after the first book, the series goes to shit. But it goes into deep end to explain why just having knowledge is not enough - he barely survives first 2 years

That doesn't mean they were cheap, user.

Phoenicia were - most likely - the guys who invented glass. It didn't became commonplace until what? Early modern period? Tail end of medieval? That's more or less 2000 years later

Underrated Post

In my Exalted campaign, I had two PCs going the invention/infrastructure routes in their "off" time. I warned them that outright making new stuff or drastically changing the setting this way would require lots of time and effort, but I would allow it.

One PC wanted to be Tony Stark (who was already Han Solo and Hawkeye), but started to drift from that plan when he saw that he'd have to develop each subsystem of his custom power armor, not simply whip up a 5+ dot Artifact from his imagination. He shifted focus to building diplomatic and trade pacts that would presage a League of Northern Nations.

The other PC got started on a huge infrastructural project that would potentially turn his quiet desert backwater into an agricultural and economic powerhouse, but sadly the campaign went on hiatus just as the 800-mile long canal and desalination Manse were nearing completion (took him less than a year in-game).

So in short, PCs often don't bother with inventions and infrastructure because it takes too long in most games.

It does depend a little on the time period. Early Christian mobs burned the library of Alexandria, but later John Dee was considered as much a magician as a learned man.

>SMAC
>reinstall
You mean there are people who don't have it installed all the time?

Both excellent quotes, particularly the first. The reason PCs 'inventing' pinnacle technologies is considered bullshit is that they're trying to justify an iterative designed technology that built on its predecessors, which built on their predecessors and so on, but the PCs are trying to skip the intermediate step.

They're also not trying to solve a problem with application of things they already know and jumping the last few steps, they're literally trying to skip three or four centuries of iterative development and assuming knowledge of fields of science and technology their character has no real way to understand.

That and half the stupid inventions they try and cram in have little to no reason to exist because they were invented in a world without magic. Even a world of D&D first level spell casters is a world with little to no disease, incredible cleanliness, fires/heating on demand, magical repair, easy cross-cultural communication, on-demand healing and so on. These guys can literally create water as needed, they don't need a host of agricultural developments. They barely need medicine and with that a whole host of chemistry.

I was that piece of shit. Granted I was 17, my first game, and didn't successfully invent gunpowder (at the time I thought the DM was just fucking with me, but boy was he right and good) but my character made more magical explosives, tanglefoot bags on crack and other zany mad scientist inventions.

Godda give him mad props for not letting me have that shit, it didn't mesh well with the whole high-fantasy Eberron thing well.