Power sources as bases of societies?

[Lmns Crn]

AND ON THE OTHER HAND: I'm the guy who has the teensy blue text in his signature saying "It's fantasy, it can do whatever the hell it wants." So... am I reinforcing my point or pissing all over it...?

I don't think that limits are counterproductive just because they're limits; on the contrary, limits are often a great big help to the creative process.

If you throw somebody into a room and say "make art," they'll freeze, they'll get crushed under the impossible weight of Limitless Possibility. If you throw somebody into a room and say "make art, using this camera, these lights, this model..." they have a direction along which to proceed creatively (and despite your predetermined constraints, a quite large amount of creative latitude with which to come up with something original and interesting.)

This is also the same difference as the difference between "you're in a 10x10ft room; what do you do?" and "you're in a 10x10ft room. It is the antechamber to the throne room, and inside, the mad prince who murdered your brother slouches arrogantly across his ill-gotten throne. What do you do?" The first option is a lot more limitless, a lot less constrained, but it's also a lot more likely to get you an "uhh... I dunno" in response.

[sparkletwist]

The whole notion of oWoD's Paradox runs into some problems when you consider that most of the rest of the creatures in the WoD are things that most people don't believe in. Why doesn't Paradox make all the vampires disappear?

This contradiction is probably why nWoD's Mage changed the definition of Paradox significantly. :P

[Lmns Crn]

To actually address the topic in the OP, though, I'm not sure there's a direct correlation between the "power source" of an individual and much at all about the society of which that individual is a leader or a typical member. This is because D&D is, at its heart and soul and core, a game about fighting, and fighting is by far what it does the best job of representing with its gameplay.

Your character's "power source" in D&D is where they get their power for fighting. Not necessarily for nationbuilding or governance or innovation or any of that other stuff.

A rogue is a martial character with potentially a lot of cool social proficiencies and various abilities to read people, manipulate them, get what he or she wants through charm/trickery/etc. There might be a few poisoned knives on the way up the ladder of privilege, but once we're talking about a society ruled by this character (and similar others), we are potentially not talking about a "martial society" at all, but a society about alliances and betrayals and politicking and guile, where cunning (rather than might) makes right.

Similarly, we can think about sorcerers and warlocks and other classes whose "power source" is arcane but whose abilities are laser-focused along destructive lines. I'd venture to say that in a society ruled by these, you'd be much more likely to see rivals assassinating each other with magical firebolts than esoteric scholars dissecting arcane phenomena and building societal and philosophical advancement out of the leftover pieces-- I could easily see is looking like your "might makes right" martial society, just with arcane destruction instead of swords an' axes an' stuff.

I don't want to ramble on, but I think there's got to be more to the construction of a society than "what do people use to fight with", and that equating the two is a pretty big simplification which loses a lot of interesting bits in the process.

Y/N/Abort/Retry/Fail?

[Kalontas]

I simply do not understand why it is apparently so hard to consider magic/psionics/steampunk/cyberpunk as all being the same thing: Technology.

Particularly due to this:

tech·nol·o·gy
noun

1.
the branch of knowledge that deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science, and pure science.

3.
a technological  process, invention, method, or the like.

Now that's a bit of semantics nitpicking. Would you prefer term "conventional science" then?

Would really society be nearly identical if magic existed? I don't think so. Arcane, as presented in classic fantasy settings, is a wild, untamed, chaotic force, very much unlike laws of physics we live by. A strong mind can literally bend the universe to his will, and that's a change unprecedented in human societies.

Besides, the whole sociological make up of humanity changing is not my only point here: it's thinking how would "magocracies" or "psiono-cracies" (word I just made up) work, given the fundamental difference in the nature of thing they worship and draw their power and inspiration from.

Now that's the main point: our society is nowadays rational and pragmatic, because our "power source", science, encourages rational and pragmatic thinking. Middle Ages Europe was zealous, self-contradictory and emotional, because that's what religion, its basis, is like. Now, take a force which is wild, untamed, chaotic and universe-bending.