On
page three of the Additional Craft Secret Perks? thread, Dr. Kromm had a couple of things to say that I think are relevant, here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
If you mean the slings and arrows of gamer logic, I'll note that I find it very helpful to reply to "But X would imply Y, and then everybody could figure it out!" arguments from players with something like, "People in the setting – including your PCs – think in a different paradigm and don't see these connections. Discovering the new paradigm is an Amazing invention . . . roll against the the lowest of Philosophy, Psychology, or Teaching at -22. After that, you can teach others at the usual 3d months per class." Gamers who live in today's rapidly changing near-Singularity society have a blind spot where such things are concerned. That is, they don't realize that most implications are missed by generations of thinkers who can plainly see them, until a suitable Zeitgeist emerges and removes their blindness. Great-man thinking is amusing and all, and plays well to gamers' power fantasies for their PCs, but it's probably bunk.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kromm
To be very clear: My post was not talking about specific discoveries, inventions, and secrets. I was addressing the "meta-issue" of looking at others' discoveries, inventions, and secrets in such a way that one can undertake to understand and reproduce them. Things like "reductionism," "the scientific method," and "reverse engineering" aren't timeless . . . they were invented and developed, and people without them were fundamentally ill-equipped to reproduce results from analysis, observation, etc. Those who wish to create a world of the mind in which Craft Secrets are routinely grasped and disseminated by observers have their work cut out for them. I'd say that the necessary thinking needs to be reinvented at each TL, too.
My point is really only that players who say things like "Oh, I saw gunpowder made, so now I should be able to do it!" are thinking like modern gamers with meta-game knowledge. In a TL3 world, say, "making gunpowder" may well be a Craft Secret that always flops for those who lack it, sometimes disastrously, and that can't easily be understood because the essential analytical methods and concepts of experimental controls don't exist to allow it. If they want to change that, then they should first develop TL4 scientific thinking as a philosophy (or something like that). That's because they're trying to change the setting TL from 3 (gunpowder is a rare secret) to 4 (gunpowder is well-known and mass-produced) in an important respect.
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Of course, these don't cover someone from TL(5+2)^ teaching someone from TL2-3^ how to build the tools to build the tools to build the factories to build steam-powered trains and railroad tracks (and all else that that entails), they just cover the difficulty of building a railroad from seeing a train in operation. Sure, they could sort of duplicate it with wooden or stone (concrete?) tracks and trains pulled by donkeys (such already existed, IIRC, in ancient Greece), but making the mass-production steel tracks, much less the train engine, would be way bloody hard work.
As for Craft Secrets in general, it's a perfectly valid Perk, and only if it becomes widespread does it cause that aspect of the Tech Level to change (which I think is what Kromm meant).