Technology levels

[Utgardloki]

I have ideas for developing a system to rate a culture's technology from 0.1 (for the most primitive era of the Stone Age) to 5.9 (for technology so advanced as to be godlike).

The question is, would anybody besides myself find it useful? GURPS has a Tech Level system, but mine is better. 8)

Would anybody besides myself be interested in these ideas?

 

[Adept]

Tech levels have been around since Traveller, so it's not just a GURPS thing.

As a rule, useful tech-level definitions are simple, easy to remember and sweeping.

Going into decimals and painful precision isn't going to help. At that stage it's easier to just write a description. One usually needs the description anyway, so (TL -1, iron age) is precise enough as shorthand.

 

[Utgardloki]

The advantage of the decimals is that it allows different degrees of precision, depending on what is needed. So anything from ancient Sumer to the Reformation is Level 1, but I can also say that the Renaissance is level 1.8.

Another advantage is that if you see a tech level at 0.9, 1.9, or 2.9, you know that it is a society about ready to move into the next stage, and likely to be more in flux than a society at 1.5, 2.5, or 3.5. This is because the levels have been chosen to map to broad paradigms (agricultural vs industrial vs cybernetic). The stages, besides indicating what kind of technology to expect, also indicate how far into the broad paradigm society has evolved, so at 2.0 or 2.1, people are just getting used to "industrial" ideas such as urban living and factory work, while by 2.6 or 2.7, people are taking these ideas for granted.

By 2.8 or 2.9, people are beginning to see the need for a new paradigm. (That would correspond to the period about 1960-1995.)

But the most useful aspect might be the ability to talk about the future. The GURPS tech levels for the future seemed kind of vague, while my system divides the future into three major eras: the cybernetic era, where technologies that we can see as engineering problems are developed, such as artificial intelligence and interplanetary space travel; the interstellar era, where "magic" technologies, i.e., those like FTL travel and force shields which have no solid basis in 20th century science, are developed; and the advanced era, where technology is so advanced that we at the beginning of the 21st century can hardly imagine what these would be like.

The hard part, though, is that we can't really predict in what order things will be invented. Maybe somebody will invent a workable interstellar drive in 2009. Or maybe it won't happen for a thousand years, or even never. It is very speculative.

 

[Michael Hopcroft]

Tech Levels are a matter of context as much as anything else. In most fantasy campaigns they are not all that useful a design construct, because most advances have little game impact. For example, most power in a world like Glorantha is provided by muscle, whether of man or of animal.

In a more technological setting, one other thing to remember is that real-world tech development is not a uniform or predictable process. It is quite reasonable for a society that is very, very good at one particular piece of technology (such as information systems) to be reluctant to make any real advances in others (like propulsion systems). Also remember that even if the knowledge and capacity needed to develop a technology exists, a society could very easily choose not to, sometimes without even realizing they have made a choice. For example, manned space exploration has actually regressed as a practical technology over the last thirty years, simply because most of the people in a position to pursue it have chosen not to, or to put their effort into other priorities.

One other thing: tech levels work in reverse too. Performing many low-tech tasks in a practical fashion will be quite beyond most people from modern or more advanced tehcnology levels. These can include tasks such as using a crossbow to good effect in battle, managing a team of horses, or even something as simple as washing your clothes in a stream as opposed to a washing machine.

 

[frobisher]

The advantage of the decimals is that it allows different degrees of precision, depending on what is needed. So anything from ancient Sumer to the Reformation is Level 1, but I can also say that the Renaissance is level 1.8.

You could just say it's 18 though

Seriously - are these calculated values, or are these assigned?

How do the bandings work? Is it just one sweeping value, or do different fields of science/technology fall into different levels (Social/Phyics/Medical/Agricultural/etc) because not all technology increases at the same rate - not even in our world. Soviet electronics certainly lagged significantly behind US/Western Europe but their Astonautics was on a par if not better.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

Dear All,

Wow, are you are going to run into a whole heap of problems!

A case in point - Europe entered the Renaissance in the 15th century, while China entered a similar stage of technological advancement in the 11th-12th. Which is going to trigger the onset of a TL?

Sadly, trying to pin down highly flexible and fluid social developmental states into fixed (or even sem-fixed) bands is just a statistical slippery slope - best not go there.

Perhaps, a more interesting avenue however, would be the effects of technology on societies, rather than simple categorisation. It's a slight change of focus, but actually more interesting in the long run.

I hope you don't take exception to this suggestion, it's just more likely to be useful in describing societies.

Best regards

 

[frobisher]

Perhaps, a more interesting avenue however, would be the effects of technology on societies, rather than simple categorisation. It's a slight change of focus, but actually more interesting in the long run.

That's pretty much what all tech level systems I've seen do.

But as you pointed out, it's very hard to pin even a single planet down to one tech level at the same time.