User blog comment:Kalitu/Racial abilities-perks?/@comment-4547854-20130719043530/@comment-4536066-20130719054153

I agree with Peth here. Just seeing something from a distance and knowing that it works doesn't mean you can create it. Gnomes and dwarves are, in-lore, technologically more advanced because all the 4,000 years everyone else spent beating each other up during the third age was spent being scientific and learning.

Imagine taking a modern day electric toaster and showing it to someone from 2,000 BCE. (For those who aren't sure, that's about the time people were inventing glass and the Bronze age was starting in China.) You don't hand the toaster to him, you don't let him take it apart and fiddle with it, you only show him what happens if you plug it into a funny hole (electric socket), put bread in, turn a knob, push a button down, and wait a few minutes the bread comes out perfectly toasted with no extra effort on your part. Then you take the toaster away and tell this person, "Now make an electric toaster that does that." What's he going to do? Humanity didn't really even figure electricity out until about 1600 CE, over 3000 years after his time.

Even if we presume that, in the 4th and 5th ages, humankind in RuneScape made a ton of progress catching up to gnomes and dwarves, and cut their industrial lag-behind in half, they're still 2,000 years behind, technologically. That would be like giving that same toaster to someone from year 0001 CE - back when Europe was mostly controlled by the Roman empire and people were just inventing the codex (a contemporary book) to use instead of scrolls.

Humans are smart, but come on now.