World-Building Turn-Offs

[PairO'Dice Lost]

13. The languages in 95% of settings, especially published ones. Common works fine as a lingua franca, sure, but in that case most people should speak it as a second language, rather than their primary. Sometimes people from different areas of the same country can barely understand one another in real life, so the idea of most of the world speaking the same language mutually intelligibly is mind boggling. Especially when most people are uneducated, and there are no global media to reinforce a language standard. And don't even get me started on the silliness that is racial languages (e.g. Dwarven) and environmental languages (e.g. Aquan).

Yeah, I know Common is supposed to be an abstraction to represent whatever the PCs and DM speak, and I know it's super nitpicky. I'm a linguistics major, though, so this completely destroys my suspension of disbelief. Similar to how a biologist must feel when he looks through the Monster Manual, I suppose.

Well, to be fair, Common is pretty much English. English is the bastard child of at least two major language families with a few bazillion loanwords, spread around the world because the countries with it as their native tongue are very influential in the world; swap Latin and Germanic for, say, Elven and Goblin and swap American and the UK for Humanity, and you get Common. I still prefer Common as a trade pidgin over an actual language, but it's not really that bad.

And the elemental languages are the languages of creatures made of the elements; things made of fire and water can't speak the same way humanoids do and wouldn't use the same means to record anything in written form, so it makes sense that they'd have their own means of communications. Now, it doesn't really make sense that humanoids could speak those languages easily since their vocal apparatus aren't built for it, and they'd have a really terrible accent if they tried. I generally play those languages as Shyriiwook from Star Wars: a water elemental walks up to a human and is all "blubblublubbwooshwooshblubwooshblub" and the human just responds with "You said it, Chewie" and doesn't bother trying to speak Aquan back.

I TOTALLY disagree with you here. Reading the books on Hell or the Abyss they specifically say they are punishments and the upper planes are rewards.

As I said, the WotC version of the planes doesn't make any sense at all, since they're just imposing monotheistic biases on a polytheistic world. Having the Fiendish Codices say that Kord is better than Tiamat or similar is like having a book on mythology saying Zeus is better than Hades: in actual mythology neither one is good or evil, they were brothers, and they got along relatively well, but the popular conception of Hades is of being a bad guy, partly because in our culture we're used to having a major divine bad guy to balance out a major divine good guy and partly because of the fact that the Disney version of Hercules cast him as a bad guy.

Furthermore the hell you describe of people going there because they enjoy torturing innocents etc is people doing for the evil nature of what they do. Not because it is easy, simpler, shapes the world into a prefered mold, and/or gives them the ability to not thing about parts of themselves they don't like...as in real normal motivations in murder etc. Once the afterlife is known to have the kind of rules that are described in DnD furthermore mortal law and judgement are pretty much rendered moot and silly anyway.

D&D settings are ones in which you have roving bands of insane murder hobos wandering the land, killing anyone they can get away with and stealing their stuff, and those are the good guys. Murder in such a setting is still a way to get what you want, it's just that there are now religions you can follow who actually reward you for it.

And as for 2e planescape. Never was I closer to leaving the game than that book. I hurts how many problems that book has and takes every minor issue that one can have with alignments and turns them into game breakers

Than "those books," technically, there were several Planescape sourcebooks. If a group already has a common understanding of alignment and fleshes them out a bit--my PS group had a common interest in philosophy, so we had lots of discussions of morals and ethics as applied to alignments anyway--then you won't really have issues with Planescape, and if alignment is a game-breaker for you then you will, lots of them. You can love or hate Planescape, but its take on alignment and the afterlife makes a hell of a lot more sense than the 3e version.

first of all the age of the planet doesn't really matter, heck the Permian explosion of multicelled life is far more important for this discussion and that was less than 1Billion years ago and much more important to homebrew is the fact human "civilization" as we know it has been around for less than 25K years....and I'm being generous there. 12K years for permanent settlements, farming, most tool making speciallists etc. As for the Elves etc I'll give you that it buys you some leeway but not the multiple shifted decimal points that we are so ubiquitous.

My point was precisely that the age of the planet is more important than the rise of humanity as far as most settings' history are concerned. You've heard the common fantasy trope of "Foolish humans, my race was building flying cities while you overgrown monkeys were still making fire!" and so on? Same here. 100,000 year histories make no sense at all if you're working on human timescales, but if you're talking about magical creatures who were ruling the world while humanoids were still crawling out of the seas, you can have an Age of Demons that makes perfect sense.

No I'm not making the assumption of west europe based tech. What I am assuming is that if you have enough people to have specialist in crafting various things and semi regular communications via travel to distribute new knowledge is that technology grows. I don't care if it is mills, swords, clothing or even(in fact especially) magic as field there will be growth. If a culture doesn't grow it will loose out to those that do.
I really don't care how development goes but as long as the impuse to do so is present. If it is not working there needs to a retardent force present. A government or church that presents an idealised lifestyle and sees new tech (which a spell would be an example of) as a potential threat. A cycle of a rising deamon horde that wipes out almost everyone and sets humanity back to the stone age. Whatever force is holding things back is irrelevant and setting based. However if you don't have one then technology (which includes magic-spells are basically inventions) should be advancing. And if the world looks like midevil europe then I would expect the tech to match.

Well, first off, magic is a technology that's advancing. Spells aren't named after wizards for no reason. If you look at Eberron you can see that settings with logically-used magic have basically reached the modern world technology wise (1950s-era tech, if not Information Age tech). Secondly, D&D and other fantasy systems that assume ancient ruins with forgotten artifacts do assume catastrophes that set everyone back decades or centuries. Looking at Eberron again, the Last War left society looking pretty much the same instead of sending everything back to the Stone Age; however, the Mournland wiped out Cyre, destroying an entire nation's infrastructure and breaking up a major lightning rail hub; the Treaty of Thronehold (mostly) destroyed the means to create warforged and other large-scale magical items; most of the more powerful spellcasters died in the war; and so forth. If the equivalent of losing the last decade's computer advancements and bombing half of Europe off the map isn't a setback, I don't know what is.

And as for magic driving material technological growth you missed my point though I don't think I explained my reasoning there. Magic allows a civilization to discover things faster. How stone works or how stone it is by magical testing and vision etc allows one to select stone for properties that would otherwise need chemical testing. Magic makes purification of things used in lamp, weapon or whatever else manufacturing. It can make higher tempreture forges to work metals that before couldn't me made or used. It provides guidence, ideas, and solutions to problems during technological development.

With your above clarification, this part makes more sense. And magic is doing that. You need magic to perform alchemy, forge mithral, and similar.