[HN Gopher] D&D is Anti-Medieval
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D&D is Anti-Medieval
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 237 points
Date : 2024-09-15 11:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.blogofholding.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.blogofholding.com)
| brudgers wrote:
| _Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D &D books
| as "Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games" (on the cover) and
| "rules [for] designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign" (in
| the introduction)._
|
| The original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not
| describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame
| "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's
| _Outdoor Survival_ for adventuring between dungeons).
|
| Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the
| time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall.
| D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.
| brudgers wrote:
| For clarity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)
| kagakuninja wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean here. I had the original books, the
| supplements, then "Basic D&D" and "Advanced D&D". The rules
| were the same, just repackaged. The original rules didn't
| "recommend" using Chainmail, they assumed you had a copy and
| knew the rules, which was a source of confusion for newbies.
|
| I remember being disappointed with AD&D as it was just the same
| old shit rules, with Dave Arneson's name cynically removed from
| the copyright. The next year I discovered Runequest, and later
| in College, Champions, and never looked back.
|
| I think by the 80s D&D was well known, and not just because of
| the TV show. This was before 2nd edition, which came out in
| 1989.
|
| I vaguely remember looking over 2nd edition, they tweaked a few
| things, but the core mechanics were the same.
|
| 3rd edition did shake things up a bit, and were the first
| version I considered worth playing.
| brudgers wrote:
| I was talking about the original version of D&D that came in
| a box with three booklets and required Chainmail for combat.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(1974)
| prmoustache wrote:
| The keywords are Fantasy / Fantastic.
|
| People let grow a lot of misconceptions about history based on
| media/cinema/games representation of antiquity, medieval or even
| renaissance time. But that is normal. I guess reality can be
| boring in comparison.
| jeltz wrote:
| I would say it is often the other way round. Many fantasy
| worlds are more dull than real history due to the lack of
| imagination of the creators.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| The only rational way to interpret D&D is not as medieval, but as
| a distant far-future post-post-industrial setting.
|
| Magic spells as ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and
| difficult to invoke -- hence the "Vancian" system which comes
| from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series.
|
| Magic items as remnant tech.
|
| Different "races" as the vast gulf of time has led to speciation.
|
| Gods as posthuman or artificially intelligent entities that have
| transcended the world but still keep an eye on it from time to
| time.
|
| And so forth. There's literally nothing medieval about it, but it
| could be 1,000,000 AD. Just think of their medical technologies
| in light of our era's!
|
| (All assuming, of course, that it's "baseline reality" and not a
| sandbox, as it was in Neal Stephenson's _The Fall_.)
| mglz wrote:
| Or it might be a reconstruction of a broken world after the
| events of Ra (https://qntm.org/ra)
| tiborsaas wrote:
| If you haven't played Horizon Zero Dawn, I highly recommend it
| :)
| kombookcha wrote:
| A very fun example of this theme is in the franco-belgian
| fantasy comic series Thorgal, which is set in a Conan-esque
| fantasy world with all the expected trappings, but in which the
| gods are highly advanced alien entities and magic is often
| framed as manipulating extremely complex and powerful heirloom
| technologies that the living have no frame of reference for as
| anything other than magic.
|
| The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little
| space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy
| culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're
| into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi
| elements.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorgal
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| I read "The Archers" as a kid, and really liked it, but it
| was the only one I had access to. I recall it was a pretty
| straightforward adventure, set somewhere around northern
| Europe in the 10th century, without any sci-fi elements...
| Now I'll need to revisit it and find the others. I've got a
| young son who would also be interested, so perhaps that's
| something we can do together. Thanks, man.
| kombookcha wrote:
| I can't immediately recall any sci-fi elements from The
| Archers myself, so that checks out. Anything to do with the
| lost precursor civilization tends more towards the archaic
| future-tech. Like in City Of The Lost God there's a magical
| weapon that's basically an operational laser gun. Or The
| Island of the Frozen Seas, which has a palace that looks
| like a downed spaceship complete with sarcophagi/crypods
| with people in them.
|
| And you're welcome! I hope you and your son have fun! :)
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Honestly, "magic is ambient nanotech that's poorly understood
| and difficult to invoke" is a rather tired trope, because
| it's an instantly obvious approach one can take. Doesn't stop
| people from re-using it over and over, take e.g. "The Lord of
| the Ice Garden" by Grzedowicz: this twist is so obvious that
| all the build-up feels kinda insulting to the reader's
| intelligence.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Right, but I don't think that it necessarily needs to be a
| twist.
|
| The first two Pillars of Eternity games leaned _hard_ into
| this trope, but it was never really "revealed" as a plot
| point -- it was just background that you uncovered as you
| progressed stepwise through the game. The Gods as literal
| hiveminds, chained to or unbound from their original core
| functions to varying degrees; a fallen hyper-technological
| society; stuff like that...
| crooked-v wrote:
| I've never liked it as a narrative element because it's
| such a handwave. If you're going to have "magic is
| nanotech", or whatever other backing, at least actually
| _use_ that backing to put narrative rules on it that the
| reader can understand.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| That is similar to the concept of Numenara - which is set in
| the future 4 billion years from now. At that point in time,
| the earth no longer geographically resembles anything current
| and has been repopulated a couple of times by disparate races
| of non-human sentiences. The current population (as of the
| the beginning of Numenara) are yet another group of humans
| transplanted or created in-situ and living in a world where
| the technologies of the past resemble magic. It seemed pretty
| clear that, from the background, there clearly is not a thing
| that is magic, but its stand-in is unknown and sometimes,
| unknowable, creations from a lost past.
| wizardforhire wrote:
| Case in point, Spelljammer
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=k5ulTt5Km3Y
| twoquestions wrote:
| You just described Numenera, if you've never read/played it I'd
| highly recommend giving it a shot!
|
| It takes place billions of years in the future in what it calls
| the "9th World", when some _mysterious_ beings just went away.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Never heard of it, but will _definitely_ give it a shot. At
| this point I 'd read the books only to learn more about the
| setting. Thank you.
| crooked-v wrote:
| For an anti-recommendation, my experience with it is that
| the setting is interesting, but the system is just a
| weirdly boring-yet-fiddly derivative of D&D-alikes that
| doesn't touch on even a fraction of the narrative potential
| of the setting.
| tormeh wrote:
| The Cypher system is definitively kinda shit. It's easier
| to DM in some ways, but it's just very unrefined, and
| badly in need of a 2nd edition subject to more
| playtesting.
| eesmith wrote:
| The article concerns how to interpret OD&D.
|
| It points out "the dungeon builders were part of a coinage
| economy just like the current one. There hasn't even been
| significant inflation or deflation since the dungeons were
| built.", which doesn't seem compatible with a far-future post-
| post industrial setting interpretation.
|
| I think "fantastic American history" is a rational description.
| panzagl wrote:
| Not American history- set so far in the future that the idea
| of 'America' is as widely understood as we currently
| understand 'Sea Peoples'. Think Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New
| Sun'
| eesmith wrote:
| I understand your thesis. I highlighted how the essay
| suggests a flaw in that interpretation.
|
| How does a currency system stay so stable across thousands
| of years?
| panzagl wrote:
| There's no evidence that it does stay stable- the author
| is making a lot of assumptions about the 'implied
| setting' of OD&D that aren't really supported by the game
| materials at the time. 40 silver pieces couple be 40
| Roman denarii, 40 pre-1965 US quarters, or 40 chunks of a
| silver bracelet. They could represent the pocket change
| of a dungeon builder, but be a considerable sum to the
| barbarian that finds them. The implied uniformity is just
| because the author lacks imagination.
| eesmith wrote:
| You can't get 1 gold piece = 10 silver piece without a
| consistent monetary scheme. That was in OD&D at https://a
| rchive.org/details/monsters_and_treasures/page/39/m... .
|
| Even in the US, "free silver at a ratio of 16 to 1"
| worked - at least somewhat - by government fiat, not
| commodity value. (Great, I've now got the urge to write
| "Gresham's Law" while I flash back to high school history
| class.)
|
| https://archive.org/details/dndbook1/page/15/mode/2up?q=g
| old tell us that in D&D a copper, silver, or gold coin
| weighs 1 unit.
|
| Further, 1 silver piece = 5 copper pieces, making the D&D
| economic system not just bimetallism but trimetallism.
| panzagl wrote:
| So I was ready to type "it's just a game", but the truth
| is OD&D isn't even really that- it's a set of mechanics
| from which a games master could select in order to make
| their own game. How closely you wanted to hew to the
| socio-economic truth of the 'Medieval period' was 100% up
| to the GM. "Chivalry and Sorcery", "Empire of the Petal
| Throne", and "Runequest" were all games that tried to
| implement more 'realistic' simulations of pre-modern
| society that came out soon after to specifically address
| D&D's lack of setting detail.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Funny thing, the price of silver is pretty closely pegged to
| the amount of labor needed to dig it out of the ground and
| smelt it, and that doesn't change too much without late 20th
| century technology being involved.
| eesmith wrote:
| That's surely missing some qualifiers.
|
| Transport is a big issue. The price of silver in 1550s
| Iceland, where there are no silver mines, was certainly
| going to be far higher than Joachimsthal where silver was
| mined and Joachimsthalers mined.
|
| The Great Bullion Famine[1] and subsequent Price
| revolution[2] fueled by Spanish expropriation of New World
| gold and silver tell me that prices weren't so stable over
| the pre-20th century period.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bullion_Famine
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution
| mcphage wrote:
| A lot of Japanese video games lean into this idea pretty
| heavily, too. It's kinda funny how the Zelda series just can't
| get away from it--no matter how far into the past they go, the
| magic is always technology from a previous civilization.
| Skyward Sword was supposed to be the Zelda origin story, and
| yet the Master Sword still has an AI companion in it from who
| knows where.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| As far as I remember Fi is not an AI companion, she was put
| into the sword by Hylia. There is all the tech in the Lanayru
| desert though, that is most definitely tech from an ancient
| civilization.
| shinjitsu wrote:
| So Thundarr the Barbarian?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_4HBH6Z-Iw
| slightwinder wrote:
| Does D&D even plays on earth? I remember, there are several
| different worlds and realms and forces travelling between them,
| but nothing specifically about earth. So it can play at any
| time, it doesn't need to be a distant future.
| SSLy wrote:
| Mystara was earth-but-hollow, with the good stuff on the
| inside
| cthalupa wrote:
| This is pretty much canonical. Gygax didn't lean into it as
| heavily as Arneson did, but Blackmoor was pretty explicitly a
| post-apocalyptic setting, with remnants of advanced or alien
| technology being ubiquitous. Flying cars, laser guns,
| androids...
| js8 wrote:
| What about other fantasy works that culturally influenced
| creation of D&D, like Lord of the Rings or Conan the Barbarian?
| Are those also anti-medieval?
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think Conan the Barbarian is pre-antique. That is set in
| period somewhat before written history. So in sense it not
| anti-medieval.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I think a good argument for Conan being an American frontier
| series could be made. Especially Beyond the Black River which
| is about settlers fighting off natives.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Popular on HN: https://acoup.blog/tag/lord-of-the-rings/
| Perenti wrote:
| The original Conan story is set in the 4th century, but the
| earliest stories date from the 12th century. He settled
| Brittany/Armorica whilst fighting for the usurper Emporer
| Magnus Maximus. His name seems to relate to Conan the Barbarian
| (cutting down the men and cutting out the tongues of women) and
| Meriadoc Brandybuck the hobbit who swore to the House of Rohan.
| The House of Rohan were the Breton rulers who claimed descent
| from Conan. A coincidence?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_Meriadoc
| rsynnott wrote:
| Lord of the Rings, at least, isn't even _trying_ to be
| medieval, is it? Like, the shire seems vaguely 18th/19th
| century England, Gondor seems suspiciously Roman/Byzantine... I
| don't think Tolkien was going for "this is [whatever period],
| only with dragons", and even if he was, that period certainly
| wasn't medieval.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Middle-earth arose from Tolkien's early attempts to
| reconstruct English / Anglo-Saxon mythology. Apart from the
| anachronistic Shire, the world largely feels early medieval.
| pjc50 wrote:
| D&D is what happens when you put pulp novels in an idea collider.
| The really big influences are Conan
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian and Tolkein,
| which are themselves very different styles, but there's also a
| magpie effect where anything that Gygax read and thought was cool
| got added in.
|
| Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys
| the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a
| popular activity for fans.
| User23 wrote:
| > Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world
| destroys the fantasy.
|
| That certainly isn't the case for The Lord of the Rings and the
| rest of Tolkien's development of his world.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Depends on what type of realism you are talking about. The
| details are very scant on for example how Shire is
| politically set up and how the farming in general work and
| supply lines and all such things.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I wouldn't count sparse details as lacking realism. (I'm
| not defending the premise of LOTR being realistic.)
| lupire wrote:
| Since the planet is covered with independently evolved
| farming communities, I think it's plenty realistic to allow
| one in a book.
| Ekaros wrote:
| So why are Bilbo and Frodo not spending all of their time
| on fields? Why are they not starving when coming back?
| What do the other hobbits trade food for, is there some
| trade for metal implements or something?
| User23 wrote:
| Because they are landed gentry. The Gamgees and other
| working class hobbits do the field work. Bilbo was
| wealthy even before his adventure. Pippin and Merry are
| also members of the aristocracy. Farmer Maggot was
| something more or less like a yeoman farmer.
|
| The Shire is, in basically every respect, including its
| economics, an idealized version of the English
| countryside.
| fhars wrote:
| Apart from Sam, who is a peasant, Gandalf, who is a
| demigod, and Frodo, who is landed gentry with close
| familial ties to the local aristocracy, everyone in the
| company is an aristrocat: Legolas is the son of a king,
| Pippin and Boromir are heirs apparent to the local
| representative of the absent king, Aragorn is pretender
| to the throne of said king, Merry is heir apparent to the
| second most important local ruler after Pippin's father,
| and Gimli is a member of Durins house.
| digging wrote:
| There's actually a staggering amount of thought and detail
| in the logistics of Middle Earth, but you have to dig into
| a wide variety of sources to access it. These details
| informed his story but didn't make it into the plot of
| LOTR, for obvious reasons. "In Deep Geek" is one youtube
| channel I enjoy for learning about things like Aragorn's
| tax policy or the economics of the Shire, if you have a an
| interest but lack the time/obsession to piece it together
| yourself.
| labster wrote:
| The details may be scant but you can see the outlines of
| history there. Tolkien doesn't invent social structures, he
| adapts European history and only uses the elements he
| needs.
|
| https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/the-moral-
| eco...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| It's a popular activity because you aren't being graded or
| financially incentivized to make it all work seamlessly. You're
| playing make-believe with your friends, so if you want to
| project some realism into your game because that just sounds
| like a fun idea, well then you can!
|
| As long as everyone is on board you can kind of do whatever the
| hell you want, like playing with legos and toy cars and
| whatever else is on the ground as a kid. I'd venture to say
| it's also why "rule of cool" is so popular. Sometimes you just
| want to do cool/funny/etc. stuff and D&D told a lot of people
| "hell yeah get after it."
| jeltz wrote:
| There are a lot of authors and RPG creators who create coherent
| fantasy worlds. I feel it is mostly just a matter of preference
| and I can enjoy both. Worlds without internal consistency like
| Discworld and worlds with internal consistency like Amber or
| any of the many worlds created by Sanderson. Excepting realism
| does in no way destroy the fantasy, in a world which was
| created with a focus on consistency it only makes it easier to
| play RPGs since you can use the already existing rules to
| easily make up new things.
|
| But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to
| being with you will likely be disappointed.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It's fun to see Amber described as internally consistent, but
| it seemed to me obviously built as an onion of lies and most
| of that onion was built a layer at a time seemingly by the
| seat of the pants for what would be most jarring/weird/fun at
| the given part of the book where Zelazny thought he needed a
| big twist and/or gut punch to the current protagonist (and by
| proxy, the reader).
|
| Perhaps that's partly why the attempt by a different author
| to build prequels failed so spectacularly, too, because it
| assumed too much the world was internally consistent and so
| was boring and didn't reveal anything truly new because it
| wasn't really trying, it was just playing out the obvious
| consequences for if you believed in some of the consistency
| of the previous books. I suppose that it didn't really
| understand the onion it was trying to emulate and that there
| should have been a lot more lies and a lot less consistency.
|
| (ETA: It's also why sadly it felt like the last five books
| were all gearing up [often literally, new equipment every
| stage like levels in a videogame] for a war that will now
| never happen, because we don't know with who and for what
| reason or why because the lying protagonist wouldn't tell us,
| probably because Zelazny hadn't yet figured it out either and
| was waiting for the right moment to strike in the books that
| would have followed in some other timeline freer from cancer.
| I do still wonder where those books would have been leading.
| I don't know the author that could answer that definitively
| for us other than Zelazny.)
| the_af wrote:
| > _Worlds without internal consistency like Discworld_
|
| What don't you find internally consistent about Discworld?
|
| Yes, it's full of gags and references to the modern world,
| but is that inconsistency? Or do you mean something else?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Discworld runs on Rule Of Funny just as much as Roger
| Rabbit does, but the author was very good about continuity
| so there were rarely noticeable direct conflicts.
| the_af wrote:
| Agreed, that's what I mean! For a series that runs on
| "Rule of Funny" (or as Granny Weatherwax would put it,
| the "story") it's all surprisingly consistent. I'm not
| saying there aren't inconsistencies, but far fewer than
| one would expect from comedy literature.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world
| destroys the fantasy.
|
| I don't know about realism, but coherency is absolutely
| required for any fantasy world(imho).
| dmonitor wrote:
| D&D's main setting is built as a kitchen sink with tons of
| weird conflicting ideas happening at once so that people can
| exclude whatever parts they want to create their coherent
| setting. You want to do a vampire story? A tolkien-esque
| quest? Steampunk? Wizards of the Coast is happy to sell you
| rules for all of that.
| tormeh wrote:
| This is the core weakness and strength of the Forgotten
| Realms. It has everything but if you think about it nothing
| makes sense. Paizo did the same with Golarion, probably
| because they saw that the versatility of settings like FR
| more than make up for the lack in coherency.
| panzagl wrote:
| By the time the original D&D books came out, the Blackmoor
| campaign (that inspired the original game) already had crashed
| spaceships and trans-dimensional travel.
| somat wrote:
| Reminds me of the first ultima game, it starts out as a
| fairly bog standard medevil fantasy setting, and turns into
| star-wars towards the end.
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2012/02/ultima-part-3/
| simplicio wrote:
| I just got around to reading Howard's Conan stories a year or
| so ago and was surprised how much it felt like just reading a
| novelization of a D&D adventure. It feels like a much bigger
| influence then Tolkien, where the influence seems limited to
| borrowing some races and creatures.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I remember when our group in the 80s tried to play Chivalry. 5
| of us peasants got slaughtered by an armed guard. Sounds about
| right for accuracy, but it was not much fun at all.
| master_crab wrote:
| I can't wait for this buzzkill to state that Warhammer 40K is
| "anti-future."
| lou1306 wrote:
| There is an entire ACOUP post [1] on what feudalism actually
| means, and it is a _lot_ more complex than "land in exchange of
| military glory for your overlord". Actually the "overlord" is
| surprisingly weak wrt. our current assumptions about the powers a
| "monarch" should have.
|
| [1]: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/
| sklargh wrote:
| Violence and the State in Languedoc, 1250-1400 by Justine
| Firnhaber-Baker is an interesting and in-depth investigation of
| this power-without-power dynamic.
| sevensor wrote:
| This was the first thing I thought of when I saw "dark age" in
| the post. If you want to get a historian spun up, start talking
| about dark ages and prepare to be educated.
| bnralt wrote:
| Depends on the historian. The overly theatrical way some
| historians react to the term "dark age" is a bit
| revisionistic (and perpetual revisionism seems extremely
| popular among academic historians).
|
| And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as
| well.
| secstate wrote:
| What is academic history other than repeated attempts at
| revision?
|
| History is literally the stories we tell ourselves about
| the past. There are facts there, but the arrangement of
| such facts will (and should) always be open to revision.
| Anyone claiming to have figured out the One True history of
| humanity should be viewed with extreme suspicion.
| bnralt wrote:
| True, but there's a difference between being open to
| revisionism and actively trying to spin things in a
| revisionistic manner because novelty brings more clout.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| >What is academic history other than repeated attempts at
| revision?
|
| I remember a historian answering a similar question once
| when an ancient list civilization nut accused historians
| of rejecting information that runs contrary to their
| narrative. History and archaeology, like the rest of
| science, builds upon the body of work. Every historian
| would love to make a discovery that overturns previous
| knowledge because its career defining. But almost all new
| work doesn't do that. What it does do is improve and
| refine our current understanding. It's rare that all new
| understandings developed.
|
| Revisionist history does not have the connotation of
| improving and refining. If it did then it wouldn't need
| its own name because that's the normal state of things.
| Revisionist history is revising the record to a different
| understanding or narrative. And that is generally
| problematic because the burden of proof is very very
| high. Most of it doesn't live up to that standard.
| secstate wrote:
| Yeah, I get that people in established positions feel
| attacked from many angles these days, so defining things
| like intention become very important to justifying the
| belief in why they've chosen their perspective. Also,
| it's easier than ever for truly bat-shit crazy ideas to
| catch people's imaginations. But how, then, are we to
| recognize paradigm shifts?
|
| Herodotus was accused of just making shit up and
| accepting legend as fact by his near-contemporaries. Now
| a lot of what he wrote is accepted as being closer to the
| truth than what almost anyone else wrote down then.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Probably a difference in epistemology. A historian should
| try to start with facts and primary sources and draw a
| conclusion from them. A revisionist starts from a
| (perhaps politically motivated) conclusion and looks for
| facts to support that conclusion.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Many of the folks who get worked up about issues in history
| like this are likely themselves wrong, but in a different
| way, about what it "really was" back then.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We tend to have an overly romantic point of view of
| history. But to correct it, I think we should not add
| Game of Thrones type stuff (ultra violence and other grim
| stuff), but Monty Python's Holy Grail: rub a little poop,
| stupidity, and selfishness on everything.
| PeterCorless wrote:
| Most British historians. They would prefer "Early Medieval
| Period" (c. 410 - 1066), spanning from the Rescript of
| Honorius to the Battles of Stamford Bridge (ending the
| Viking era) and Hastings (beginning the Norman period).
|
| Within "Early Medieval England," they will eschew the term
| "Dark Ages" and instead you will talk about specific eras
| such as "Sub-Roman Britain" (c. 410 - 597), "Anglo-Saxon
| England" (c. 449 - 1066), "Viking-era Britain" (c. 793 -
| 1066), or even "Anglo-Danish England" (c. 991-1016).
| bee_rider wrote:
| Which historians? I haven't listened to a ton of them...
|
| The ACOUP guy seems to be pretty even-handed, some of his
| best stuff is pushing back on
| silly/impractical/stereotypical elements of Game of Thrones
| (itself an over-the-top response to Lord of the Rings).
|
| I think in historians we tend to see a lot of excitement
| for their special thing (like all academics), but the stuff
| they get excited about looks like details to us.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| When reading a specialist critique of a popular notion
| it's important not to conflate the strength of the
| argument _against_ the popular notion with the strength
| of the argument _for_ what the author proposes as true
| instead.
|
| Almost any specialist can muster a well-supported
| argument to a layperson that "X is wrong."
|
| Unfortunately, it's a substantial turn from "X is
| wrong..." to "...Y is true."
|
| And a well-supported refuting of X shouldn't be
| transfered into credibility towards Y.
|
| The acoup guy is a decent author, but sometimes he makes
| that pivot a bit too glibly and leverages the ignorance
| of his readers.
| jcranmer wrote:
| I've long contended that most uses of the "-ism" terms in
| popular discourse mostly serve an emotional purpose and
| otherwise do more to obfuscate than they do to illuminate
| understanding, especially because most people have very little
| idea of what the -isms actually entail.
|
| As a case in point, there was a recent conversation I was
| having with someone kvetching about modern-day feudalism, and
| when I asked them what they thought feudalism was, they were
| modelling it after Louis XIV's absolute monarchy. Louis XIV was
| the king who abolished the last vestiges of feudalism in
| France. (To their credit, after I explained the history of
| feudalism and absolute monarchy, and why absolute monarchy is
| almost the complete opposite of feudalism, they did understand
| the mistake they were making.)
|
| As Bret Devereaux points out, I think a large part of the
| problem is the sheer compression of history. We take about 1000
| years of history and compress it into just a few events: the
| Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire, Charlemagne crowned Holy
| Roman Emperor, the Viking Age, the First Crusade, (maybe) the
| Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, and two of those are
| bookends for the period.
| stolenmerch wrote:
| It's just campaign rules for Chainmail, their medieval weapon
| combat rules invented for the already existing Elastolin and
| Starlux figures. It was a system for wargamers much more
| interested in the weapon speed of pole arms rather than accurate
| political and social structure. They needed a world of treasure
| and magic to fuel the adventures, so a setting of accumulated
| Appendix N source material was pieced together into an entirely
| new setting.
| boccaff wrote:
| Disclaimer: My view is based on D&D 3Ed.
|
| I think that the the game culture have changed into something
| where the DM (dungeon master) is just a enforcer of rules/npc
| builder. Most of the arguments in the text should be
| discretionary to the DM. If a DM chooses to enforce a "medieval"
| setting, the campaign will be medieval. "Knights mentioned", "any
| time select a land", well, I guess the DM can mention knights and
| not treat land as something that can be bought as long as you
| have money. It was very different playing a campaign in Forgotten
| Realms, Dragonlance or Greyhawk, or having a custom world built
| by a DM.
| davedx wrote:
| I remember we once used ad&d rules to replay the Aeniad. That
| was awesome. Just use your imagination folks, it's actually
| that simple!
|
| (Alcohol may have helped. And hindered.)
| ileonichwiesz wrote:
| I can't agree - if anything the role of DM has been expanding
| since Gygax's day. The DM was explicitly an ,,arbiter" in
| classic D&D, a person whose role was mostly
| explaining/enforcing the rules and lightly tying the story
| together. The actual adventure was mostly determined by the
| setting (often premade) and by random tables (roll to see
| what's in the room). In modern D&D, by contrast, the DM is
| often expected to do worldbuilding, write adventures, and do
| NPC voices.
| jghn wrote:
| > and do NPC voices
|
| The steady increase of the performative acting style of play
| has been a key part of why I never picked the game back up.
| Reading that "do[ing] NPC voices" is a key part of the DMs
| job description doesn't help that stance of mine :)
| nox101 wrote:
| I played D&D with Lawrence Schick
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Schick) in the 80s.
| He very much did NPC voices back then. It's what made
| playing with him as the DM amazing. I have always assumed
| since then, the best DMs can do NPC voices.
| jghn wrote:
| I'm not saying it didn't exist back then. My experience
| was that the performative acting style existed but was
| less common. But I definitely encountered it.
|
| However I get the impression that this is the standard
| play style today.
| TheCleric wrote:
| Not really. It's the most VISIBLE playing style, because
| it make for an entertaining live play, so naturally
| that's what the videos on YouTube lean towards.
|
| But at an everyday table, it's generally not expected.
| Some players will prefer that type of DM (just as some
| players prefer combat heavy or dungeon delve heavy
| campaigns), but I've never had anyone say to me "Why
| aren't you doing voices? DMs are supposed to do voices!"
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Indeed - one of my big complaints about 5e is that the rules
| leave way too much up to the discretion of the DM. And I say
| this as a DM! I'm not an expert in game design, so having a
| framework given by the rules is extremely important to me.
| But all too often 5e's designers didn't do that, just leaving
| it up to DMs to invent something from whole cloth.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > The actual adventure was mostly determined by the setting
| (often premade)
|
| Hmm. I disagree. Greyhawk and Blackmoor were published fairly
| early in D&D's history, but the majority of games falling
| into premade settings didn't really take off until
| Dragonlance and then the Forgotten Realms in the mid to late
| 80s.
|
| It's true that DM responsibilities have changed over time -
| in a way that I am not particularly a fan of - but I think
| it's the farthest thing from the truth to suggest that DMs
| weren't supposed to do worldbuilding in the days of OD&D and
| AD&D 1E/BECMI. If anything, they had to do more - the DM's
| job was to create a believable living world for the players
| to exist in. There were very few published "campaigns" back
| in those days - Dragonlance is really what changed all of
| this - so most modules were locales you could more or less
| plop down wherever. Keep on the Borderlands just needed to be
| in a borderland, the Caverns of Thracia could be anywhere,
| etc.
|
| Players being fully in control of what their goals were and
| where the narrative was to head meant that the GM _had_ to
| build a convincing and interesting world for the players to
| adventure around. It was quite rare for there to be something
| akin to a "big bad evil guy" in the early days of D&D, or
| even for there to be some overarching plot to drive the whole
| campaign.
|
| > In modern D&D, by contrast, the DM is often expected to do
| worldbuilding, write adventures, and do NPC voices.
|
| I'm fairly certain the overwhelming majority of D&D played
| these days happens with the published modules. There's a lot
| more people playing so I'm sure the absolute number of people
| writing their own adventures is higher than ever, but I would
| be willing to wager that the ratio of people running almost
| exclusively published modules and campaigns vs. their self-
| written adventures has shifted in the opposite direction.
| ultimafan wrote:
| I think both can be true and that seems to track with what
| you are saying- modern DMs being expected to do much more and
| overperform in some areas (theatrics, atmosphere, narrative,
| game/combat balance, make sure players are having "fun" and
| are being challenged but not too much so) and at the same
| time are expected to do much less in others (like
| knowing/refereeing the rules like the back of their hand,
| being the final arbitrator and having the final and often
| only say in a ruling). I've definitely noticed the same. And
| noticed how in some cases the modern approach has "bled back"
| so to speak and a group I played 1E both before and after
| 3E/4E/5E, had a completely different expectation of the older
| game when we returned to it out of nostalgia.
|
| This next part is also purely anecdotal, but something I've
| observed in several groups so I think it's interesting to
| note- playing in groups of mostly pre-3E players, I hardly
| ever see arguments with the DM break out over rules/rulings,
| both then and now. But playing 3E/5E, or playing other games
| with people who primarily play 3E/5E, there are many
| occasions where the flow of the game is interrupted for quite
| long arguments between player and DM because a player is not
| satisfied with some resolution or not being allowed to
| do/play as something in particular and thinks the DM should
| do it a different way. It feels like there's a much bigger
| cultural expectation that the DM is there to entertain and
| enable the players fantasy and not to be an impartial judge
| for a world the players are exploring. But like all things
| I'm sure people can chime in with completely different
| experiences for all the editions
| curtisblaine wrote:
| D&D is as medieval as Hollywood movies set in the middle ages are
| "medieval": the environment vaguely resonates with a middle-ages
| setting, but then you have high fantasy, epic kind of stuff (like
| kings fighting each other directly or pep-talking their soldiers
| to victory, football-locker style) that wasn't really a thing in
| the middle ages. That you don't have vassals and king is an
| implementation detail: you can totally play a game of D&D with
| vassals and kings, if you want. The real difference is overall
| "epicness", which is obtained at the rules level: if you are
| level 10, there's no way one (or ten) level 1 opponents can even
| touch you. This allows a storyline in which a small party of
| heroes can overthrow tyrants and slay dragons; in real life
| (especially in the middle ages) no matter how trained you are, a
| makeshift mace made of wood and nails swung by angry peasants can
| still end you quickly, especially if you wander alone, which
| means you can't get away from needing an army, a society,
| strategy, politics, etc.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| When nobles did go into combat they were better equipped and
| protected.
|
| In warring states Japan, common foot soldiers would be armed
| with pikes (wood shafts with a sharp metal point) but nobles
| might ride a horse wearing mail armor and armed with an huge
| and asymmetrical simple bow and be further protected by their
| position in the military structure.
|
| This is more like _Monster Hunter_ as you do not scale your
| 'hit points' by an order of magnitude but you do get gear and
| actual skills.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| Right, but D&D exaggerates this mechanism to unrealistic
| lengths, in order to maintain the epicness of high fantasy.
| If you accumulate enough levels in D&D, you can destroy
| entire armies and tackle literal gods. Most of all, there's a
| limit (based on your AC and the enemies modifiers) under
| which lower challenge-rate enemies _can 't literally touch
| you_ (save maybe for critical hits), which is obviously not
| how it works in real combat.
|
| I remember there were "realistic" alternatives to D&D in the
| 90s, with thousands of detailed tables and the concept of hit
| zones, where any enemy could potentially even kill you with
| enough luck (say lucky hit to the back of your armored head
| from peasant with a spiked club), and you could always get
| maimed or crippled in some ways (because you wouldn't only
| lose HP when you get hit, you can break your foot or arm
| etc).
|
| Clearly, you had to have a much more cautious style of
| playing and you didn't have as much fun as in D&D, where the
| master would tailor a series of increasingly challenging but
| killable encounters until you got to destroy an epic,
| ridiculously powered villain at the end of the campaign.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > If you accumulate enough levels in D&D, you can destroy
| entire armies and tackle literal gods.
|
| This is largely an invention of modern D&D, though. This
| was 100% not the case in OD&D, or stock AD&D 1E. Splatbooks
| in 1E added significant power level to characters,
| particularly after the success of the Dragonlance modules,
| including some truly ridiculous stuff like the power
| progression in the H1-H4 books. But before that point you
| were playing adventurers, not heroes.
|
| Even in 2E you could still play more like adventurers,
| though it was clear the preference for heroic gameplay was
| the new norm. It wasn't until 3E that the adventuring
| playstyle was really made impossible.
|
| > where the master would tailor a series of increasingly
| challenging but killable encounters until you got to
| destroy an epic, ridiculously powered villain at the end of
| the campaign.
|
| The original decade or so of D&D really didn't even have
| the idea of campaigns ending or building up to an epic
| showdown with the big bad evil guy. Gygax wrote extensively
| of campaigns as settings, and the sort of campaigns he (and
| Arneson) ran wouldn't even allow for this sort of showdown,
| because they were more like gaming clubs. They had dozens
| of people playing in the campaign regularly at any given
| time, often across multiple characters, split into multiple
| groups, etc. They were big persistent worlds. There would
| be no way to make a specific showdown or progression like
| this enjoyable for that sort of group - you could never get
| all 30-50 people together at once, and even if you could,
| there's no way to make that manageable for actual play, and
| you wouldn't want all of the players not involved in the
| final showdown to feel like their years of play had
| ultimately missed out on the climax.
| acomjean wrote:
| I played a little informally in the 80s. Even young me knew it
| never seemed to be a realistic portrait of the past world, or
| claimed to be. Way too many dragons compared to the historical
| record.
|
| the monster manual seemed to be a mash up of monster from all
| over the place, including Greek myths.
|
| Some of the weaponry was midevil but it didn't seem like it was
| at all realistic. Like many fantasy books. Not like some of the
| war games of the time that where more historical (axis and allies
| and diplomacy)
|
| Honestly if it was midevil, would it be fun? Who wants to play a
| game where you're just farming. That would be such a grind and
| never be popular.
| ajuc wrote:
| D&D is theme park based mostly on modern-day USA with some Wild
| West influences. It's very obvious for people from Europe playing
| it :)
|
| The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in
| towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages. I'm not
| sure Americans even understand the difference between a village
| and countryside.
|
| When D&D has people living in the countryside it's often
| American-style single-family farms in the middle of nowhere. That
| wasn't a thing.
|
| For actual medieval theme every small town should be surrounded
| by dozens of small villages with lots of people living in close
| proximity farming lots of small fields, and where one village
| ends - another starts.
|
| Most places shouldn't have enough people to sustain full-time
| inns and shops. Weekly or monthly markets were done instead so
| that the same traders could be reused between many places.
|
| The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if
| everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> The biggest thing is that in D &D most of population lives
| in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages._
|
| In my experience most D&D settlements have to fit onto a two-
| page spread in a letter/legal sized book. So they've got space
| for an inn, a store, and maybe one or two places with things to
| advance the plot.
|
| A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn, but there
| just ain't the space on the page.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Yeah, there's a lot of spatial and social compression.
| Bethesda RPGs are the same way, again for technical reasons.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Without some of that the game would be unplayable or at
| least highly constrained.
|
| A 2 week ride on horseback would be a reasonable trip in
| that milieu but has to be compressed somehow; at best the
| group could meet and game out some encounters during that
| time period but that takes dedication, and if that was the
| way you rolled you'd also put them in a conference room for
| a long weekend to play the dungeon.
| Ekaros wrote:
| And largely due to game play. Lot could be scaled down to
| present enough generic npcs and buildings, but having to
| spend time traveling through same town for 5, 10, 30
| minutes or more each time is not exactly fun. Or takes
| special kind of player. I am not saying there is not fans
| of that level of realism, but it is not big niche.
| ajuc wrote:
| Villages are smaller so they are easier to generate and fit
| on a page than towns. But people design based on what they
| experience (in games and in real-life). So most adventures
| take place in towns or in the wilderness. Americans probably
| never seen a village.
|
| > A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn
|
| 300 houses in one place is already a big city in dark ages.
| Let's say 2 stories with 2 families on each level, with 5
| people in each family - that's 20*300 = 6000 people.
|
| 6000 people would probably be top 10 city in a kingdom in
| 1300. Rome was 25 000 people back then.
|
| And inns were mostly for travellers, so the number of houses
| weren't that important - it mattered if you are integer
| number of days of travel from the last trade center.
| michaelt wrote:
| Honestly I just took the present day number of houses in
| the UK (30 million or so) and divided by the number of pubs
| in the UK (46,800 or so) which gave 641 houses per pub,
| then I knocked that down to 300 lest people think I was
| over-estimating the number of houses.
|
| Of course, that present day number is 30 million houses for
| 67 million population, i.e. 2.2 people per house - not the
| 20 people per house from your assumptions.
| derstander wrote:
| > The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if
| everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
|
| To be fair, that's kind of the case. Sure, not everyone is an
| adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't
| particularly rare in the world. A level 1 spellcaster may be
| able to do two of the following things a day using their two
| spell slots (depending on what kind of spellcaster they are):
|
| - feed up to 10 people for a day (and heal them, to boot) with
| goodberry
|
| - create 10 gallons of potable water with create or destroy
| water
|
| - double walking speed for 10 minutes without exhaustion
| (expeditious retreat)
|
| - move a third again as fast as normal for an hour without
| exhaustion (long strider)
|
| - load up and move 500 pounds at those speeds without having to
| carry anything themselves for an hour (Tenser's floating disk)
|
| That's just food and transportation. A level 1 cleric totally
| trounces period-accurate medical care and compares pretty
| favorably to a whole modern hospital filled with specialists
| and equipment (and with a few more levels under their belt they
| do much better than modern medicine as they can bring the
| recently deceased back to life).
|
| But that's starting to miss the forest for the trees. I
| definitely respect people, like the author of the article, that
| focus this deeply on hobbies -- I can barely do that for paying
| work. But it misses the point of D&D for me.
|
| Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a
| collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate
| model of a particular time and place in history.
|
| I, for one, would _expect_ social and political structures to
| deviate from history once you 've added magic in the mix.
|
| In my eyes, the article's argument is akin to people a thousand
| years from now role-playing in 2020s America but adding in Star
| Trek-style replicators and wondering why the rules don't model
| Homeowners Associations (HOAs). Sure, lots of current Americans
| are subject to them but what percentage of players would find
| that enjoyable? And are you sure they'd still exist in such a
| world?
| ajuc wrote:
| > Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1
| adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world.
|
| How often do you meet other adventuring groups when you play
| D&D?
|
| Post-scarcity magic utopia is one solution, but it's
| certainly not the setting of most D&D campaigns.
|
| > Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's
| just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an
| accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
|
| Sure, but more realistic medieval fantasy can be just as fun
| and more interesting (cause your players' unconscious
| assumptions about how any world has to work are broken).
| mybrid wrote:
| I grew up reading Tolkein and then playing D&D. It seemed to me
| along with everyone in our playing sphere that D&D was set in
| Middle Earth, not Medival Times. It wasn't long after the
| original release when the Gods & Demigods manual was released to
| help clerics have someone specifically to worship. I never ever
| thought this game was in any way trying to model reality. Then,
| of course, you have the various astral and god planes of
| existence. The only "setting" that makes sense to me for D&D is
| bringing Middle Earth and myths into a game setting.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I'm amused that people use the actual canon and not just
| asserting a god into existence
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| A lot of that is because the gods are usually part of some
| sort of pantheon or otherwise juxtaposed with other deities
| in some fashion. They have followers and creeds and lore and
| all these other elements that slot into the larger world. If
| you scoop them out, aside from just changing their name/look,
| you have to replace all of that in theory.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I find this surprising. I can barely get my players to
| learn the rules properly. I struggle to imagine people
| making lore accurate characters. One, because it's a lot to
| learn. Two, because it's specific and kind of dumb. We just
| use dnd canon at will to supplement but otherwise make
| everything up as desired.
| pdpi wrote:
| Different strokes for different folks. Many people
| actively enjoy having a mass of written lore to consume,
| and prefer having a well-defined setting to act as a
| foundation to their stories. It's a safety net of sorts.
| kergonath wrote:
| Back in the day we'd play the same characters for a year
| or so. Some background lore is nice to have in this case.
| It makes everything more interesting.
| ecshafer wrote:
| My primary gaming group everyone goes out of their way to
| learn the rules and make lore accurate characters, or
| build onto the lore. Regardless of which system, setting
| or game we are playing. We do a lot of homebrew though.
| scruple wrote:
| In a current PF2E game, my Cleric has a deity and I do RP
| him to stay in Ragathiel's favor. It's explicitly called
| out and I don't think it's dumb at all...
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Sure. But is Ragathiel any better than Bjorn'er, the god
| of rapturous dance that I just made up? Imo, no. If
| someone wants to choose a predefined god, sure. If
| someone wants to make one up? Also sure.
|
| The only thing I'd be fairly vocal about is that until
| some lore has reason to enter the narrative, it isn't
| canon. E.g. the space faring races that appear in both
| dnd and pathfinder
| hinkley wrote:
| You made up god may turn out to be an arch-fey who got a
| little in over his head.
| scruple wrote:
| I mean, objectively yes I do think Ragathiel is better
| than Bjorn'er because there is actual lore, thought, and
| consistency there. [0]
|
| Look by all means, if you want to bring your own deity or
| $WHATEVER to a table I don't think most reasonable DMs
| and players would even bat an eye but you'll _absolutely_
| be expected to put some degree of effort into this beyond
| just showing up unprepared and cooking shit up on the
| fly.
|
| [0]: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Ragathiel
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I would argue it's even better role play if players don't
| know things though. If you meet some followers of Bane, a
| player who knows the lore will probably deem them to be a
| bad guy. If they have no idea, they will roll knowledge
| to see if their character would know. The DM providing
| information based on character knowledge checks is
| generally a great source of fun.
|
| The DM saying "yeah I know you know Bane is a bad guy but
| I made your roll for it and you failed so you need to
| pretend you don't know that" is never very good even if
| the players try to obey the spirit of things.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Indeed, some folks do re-role until fate favors their
| egos... lol =3
|
| In a way, the more modern video game mechanics based on
| traditional starter-map games must also choose between a
| chaotic open-world, or a structured linear mission story
| (often degrading into a rail-game like snakes/chutes-and-
| ladders.)
|
| Certainly, many of the iconic characters were a mix of
| several genres:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Dealer_(painting)
|
| It was initially about people having fun, and a shared
| experience with friends on a rainy day. The golden age
| before the rise of the Internet. =3
| saghm wrote:
| In higher level campaigns, you can literally go to other
| planes and interact with the beings there. The deities in
| D&D are literal physical beings that you could just go
| and interact with (although depending on the deity and
| the context they might not take kindly to being
| bothered). A lot of prewritten modules specifically are
| about stuff with various deities; even Baldur's Gate 3,
| arguably the most played prewritten module in some time
| (it was popular enough to go mainstream and win GotY)
| heavily features lore from deities and in a few places in
| the story you (or another character) can directly have
| short conversations with some of the deities.
|
| I don't see why it's "kind of dumb" if people enjoy
| playing that way. Tabletop RPGs have always had a wide
| spectrum of playstyles where some people follow the rules
| rigorously and some people ignore them entirely, and
| being consistent with lore is just another dimension on
| that. Every successful group will settle into a pattern
| that's comfortable for them.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| The lore itself is kind of dumb. That's ok. Most TTRPG
| stories will be pretty dumb. They can still be awesome.
| Imo plying your own dumb story is a lot better than
| someone else's dumb story.
|
| I would say it's not ideal for different players to have
| different levels of knowledge about the world for non
| game reasons though. It's better when most of it is
| freshly discovered.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I used to play with a guy whose character was a Paladin of
| the God of hardtack, and before he used his Paladin skills he
| would in real life take out a plain white cracker and eat it.
| rcfox wrote:
| There's actually a race in D&D, the Kuo-toa, that did exactly
| that.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Yeah, the way I played, I read the parts of the books about
| magic, combat, monsters and chatacter development, and ignored
| anything about society, filling it in with my own teenage
| ideas.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| D&D was definitely, uh, borrowed quite heavily from Tolkein.
| Even using creatures that Tolkein invented.
|
| Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Pretty much, except World War 1.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| I must have missed the part where Gondorians and Orcs where
| sitting for months in trenches opposite to each other
| fighting for the same few kilometers of ground?
|
| The entire war of the ring lasts less than a year, and most
| battles are won after at most a few days of fighting by
| glorious charges on horseback with the leader in front of
| his men. Making them far more similar to the battles of
| Arthurian legend rather than anything contemporary to
| Tolkien.
| ekianjo wrote:
| from ww1 we know that Tolkien took a strong dislike in
| industrialisation which made war and killing much more
| effective than before. Hence the "good" hobbits as
| traditional farmer-like society, and evil portayed as
| destroying the natural realm.
| openasocket wrote:
| Tolkien has specifically stated that the Dead Marshes
| were inspired by the appearance of Northern France after
| the battle of the Somme. And that Sam is a reflection of
| the privates and batman he served with. That said, he
| explicitly denies that WW1 or WW2 had any influence on
| the actual plot.
|
| I don't know how much you want to take the Tolkien's word
| for it (death of the author and all that) but there it
| is.
| clarionbell wrote:
| That's the "hot" period of the war. Before that there
| were several centuries long war of attrition between
| Dunedain, their allies and proxies of Sauron.
|
| The capital city of Gondor, Osgiliath, was turned into
| ruins, front going straight through. And before that, the
| same thing happened to Minas Ithil. Those big towers next
| to Black Gate? Those were fortifications built by Gondor.
| But after Great Plague, which was probably a biological
| weapon of sorts, there weren't enough people to man them.
|
| What we see in lotr, is essentially last days of war.
| When one side is barely clinging on, and can muster only
| localized offensives.
| boccaff wrote:
| This impression looks more like the main events of the
| movie.
|
| You have the several turns on the Battle of Osgiliath,
| and Boromir alluding to Gondor paying the cost for
| holding the frotiers with Mordor.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| I think the Osgiliath battle lasted for many years? Not
| exactly trenches, but it was the only suitable river
| crossing in that area
| bee_rider wrote:
| Trench warfare thing is a thing, a big thing, about WW1.
| But it isn't the only thing that happened in WW1. It
| looms large in our imaginations, probably because it
| impacted the geopolitical situation, and that's what we
| see through the zoomed out lens of history.
|
| But Tolkien experienced WW1 in first person. When people
| say his books were influenced by WW1, I think they mean
| the experience of soldiering.
|
| Somebody already mentioned the marshes. The Nazgul are
| also described as spreading a sort of deep, supernatural
| sort of dread; not normal fear, but something that
| shatters the will of hardened soldiers, just by looming
| over the siege of Gondor. That could be influenced by the
| experience of artillery bombardments, without explicitly
| referencing it.
|
| It is also a story in which the good guys are agrarian,
| and the bad guys are industrial; this was possibly
| influenced by the experience of being on the receiving
| end of industrial warfare. I hear it is unpleasant.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Wasn't "one ring to rule them all" a metaphor for nukes?
| jawilson2 wrote:
| Not really, though I suppose you can interpret art how
| you like:
|
| The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate
| thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree,
| before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not
| think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb)
| had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of
| its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and
| the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern
| France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to
| William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House
| of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.
|
| Letters, no. 226
| bee_rider wrote:
| Probably not, it doesn't seem to have any direct power to
| just, like, blast stuff, as far as we see on the page. I
| think it is more like a wide-ranging enhancement to all
| the forces of evil if they get it. The power of every orc
| waking up on the right side of the bed to go do the day-
| to-day work of evil every morning.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| There's no doubt a lot of WWI in there. I would guess that
| part of his goal was to talk about the universality of much
| of what was going on. For that he'd need to draw from a lot
| of history, and he had first-hand experience with WWI.
|
| But the major plot element of having a weapon too powerful
| for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which must be
| destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction to the
| atomic bomb. The ring gets a pretty big promotion from an
| Gyges-style invisibility ring in the original edition of
| the Hobbit, to a civilization-destroying force in LOTR.
|
| There's also arguably a Japanese influence on the Orcs, as
| an army of people who don't look quite like the English and
| are fighting hard for a way of life the English don't
| understand. Japan was England's ally in WWI but an enemy in
| WWII.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > But the major plot element of having a weapon too
| powerful for humans (and humanoids) to wield (and which
| must be destroyed) is clearly influenced by his reaction
| to the atomic bomb.
|
| Sorry but no. The ring had been written into existence
| before 1937 (in the Hobbit) and it's darker nature in
| TLOTR was defined sometime in 1938, long before anyone
| knew about the bomb [0]. Much later, Tolkien specifically
| addressed the relationship with WW2 by saying IIRC that
| if the ring war had reflected the real war, the allies
| would have used the ring against Sauron and Saruman
| probably would have made his own in the chaos that
| followed.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructing_The_Lord_o
| f_the_R...
| bee_rider wrote:
| The Ring also has some very nebulous power up effect that
| it would give to the forces of evil. It isn't at all
| clear what it does, just that it would be real bad for
| the bad guys to get it.
|
| If it was a nuke, presumably Elrond would have mentioned
| that, haha.
|
| I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical power
| or something like that. If it fell into the hands of
| evil, it would mean the arc of history was going their
| way, all the little dice rolls would bend imperceptibly
| their way, they'd wake up just a little more energized
| than the forces of good every day, etc etc. It is better
| that way, because it becomes a battle for the soul of
| Middle Earth.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > I think it has more of a wide ranging philosophical
| power or something like that
|
| The Ring was a force multiplier for Sauron (who had in
| effect transferred some of his power into it, for
| whatever reason). He could already wield extreme control
| over his underlings (and we see what happens when he gets
| distracted at the very end) and strike fear into the
| hearts of his enemies. All of these capabilities would
| have been enhanced if he got it back. He would also have
| been able to perceive the actions (and thoughts?) of the
| other ring bearers (i.e. the elves). And perhaps a load
| of other things that Gandalf and the other experts didn't
| know about (they didn't appear in middle earth until long
| after the ring was forged).
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Tolkien continually revised his writings and published in
| 1954. I'm sure there are some hints looking back in
| retrospect at his earlier drafts.
|
| And we know he changed the Hobbit to give the ring more
| power in later editions, for example making it
| irresistible to Golem. This sort of changed was likely
| propagated throughout the LOTR drafts as he made the ring
| more powerful.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Yes, but Tolkien knew from the outset (in approx 1938)
| that the Ring absolutely could not be used. This was the
| whole point of Frodo's mission, that the Ring must be
| destroyed, even though the details of the tale changed
| substantially as Tolkien wrote and rewrote.
|
| By 1944, Tolkien was already writing about Frodo trudging
| through the dead marshes on the way to Mordor, bearing
| the hideous burden of the Ring. The bomb was still a year
| away.
| arp242 wrote:
| Tolkien has repeatedly and explicitly said that he never
| wrote allegories for anything, and that he simply wanted
| to write a good story.
|
| Of course he also readily admitted that his own
| experiences and views on life influenced his writing. He
| went off to fight in the trenches with his university
| friends and he was the only one to come back. This
| obviously leaves a mark. And if you read his writings
| aware of his views on Catholicism, then obviously quite a
| lot of that shines through as well.
|
| But all of that is fairly subtle. The notion that this or
| that is an allegory for such and such is pretty much
| always wrong. Tolkien just wanted to write an
| entertaining story - nothing more, nothing less.
|
| With a large work of fiction and a large set of real-
| world events, you can find allegories in everything.
| Doesn't mean the author intended this.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I never said it was an allegory. I think you're confusing
| two ideas. One is whether the story in as allegory, and
| the other is whether Tolkien was inspired by one of the
| most significant events in the history of humanity.
|
| He said if he had written an allegory it would have a
| different ending, as in if he wanted to preserve a one-
| to-one mapping things would have changed. But there are
| story types that are not allegories and which also are
| influenced by things.
| arp242 wrote:
| "Inspired by events, and write them into your story" is
| what an "allegory" is.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| An allegory is a moral fable. It's a similar genre to
| Aesop's fables or parables. A relatively familiar example
| is Animal Farm.
| Daneel_ wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| Sadly my English teachers in high school wouldn't accept
| this as a response to their request for an essay on
| Tolkien. It was extremely frustrating, to say the least,
| given his repeated stance on the matter.
| michaelt wrote:
| The great thing about interpreting LOTR as an allegory
| for WW1 is it nicely explains the lack of female
| characters, without us needing to say critical things
| about an author we like.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel say what?
| cthalupa wrote:
| This is largely an issue of definition. When Tolkien
| spoke of disliking allegories, he was largely referring
| to the medieval tradition -
| https://slate.com/culture/2016/05/an-allegory-is-not-the-
| sam... - where you are quite explicitly making a direct
| connection to a specific thing.
|
| He did, however, love to speak of "applicability," which
| many people would call allegory today. The One Ring, for
| example, is clearly meant to to embody power and the
| temptation of it/addiction to it. This is pretty
| unambiguously true! What Tolkien didn't want was for
| people to view The One Ring as some specific embodiment
| of power, e.g. the atomic bomb, and instead for readers
| to draw parallels to their own lives, experiences, and
| knowledge. To him, this was "applicability," but in the
| modern discussion of literature this sort of thing would
| still often be called an allegory.
| adashofpepper wrote:
| I'm sorry but the proposed metaphor is just completely
| unworkable. The ring is not "too powerful for humans"
| it's not useful at all to humans! it induces irrational
| desire for it, but actually is of minor real utility, one
| person at a time can become real stealthy, it's cool but
| it's not beating an army. oh but actually when you try
| and use it for that minor ability, it secretly calls
| goons on you. Not desirable!
|
| So it's like the atomic bomb, except there's only exactly
| one, and only the nazis can use it as a bomb, when the
| americans have it it just poisons the local groundwater a
| bit. But they have to keep it around and just let it do
| that because it's really important to guard it against
| the axis getting their hands on it.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Definitely both imho. Tolkien's own ww1 experience shines
| through. But then his sons served in ww2 and you can feel a
| lot of bilbos pain come through as Frodo has to take on the
| burden of fighting evil.
|
| You can clearly see the pain at the end of return of the
| king where Frodo and Bilbo together just leave. They had
| both been through too much and are basically shell shocked.
|
| It's really hard to not view it as an allegory of the
| journey of two generations through ww1 and ww2 imho.
| ekianjo wrote:
| thats a little reductive.
|
| Tolkien was influenced by many things, such as the rings of
| the nibelungen and other proto germanic stories, his studies
| of the english language especially in its older forms,
| christianity for core values, and indeed his experiences in
| ww1.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Yes, of course. Tolkien was massively well read and
| obsessively created whole worlds, as can be seen in things
| like The Silmarillion.
|
| > thats a little reductive.
|
| I prefer to think of it as dimensionality reduction :)
| Zardoz89 wrote:
| DnD is primarily based on Jack Vance and Michael Moorecock's
| fantasy. Moorecock's work being a direct rebuttal of the
| pastoral conservatism Tolkien was peddling.
|
| Gygax was adamantly not a fan of LoTR. The creatures of DnD
| are clearly not based on Tolkien's works, and the player
| races you believe Tolkien invented predate his work by
| centuries.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Damn peddled pastoral conservatism! I far prefer the
| pansexual libertines of Baldur's Gate 3.
| panzagl wrote:
| Howard and Burroughs rather than Vance and Moorcock, though
| Tolkien would be number three. Gygax only argued otherwise
| after he was sued by the Tolkien estate.
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| I would say that the description of dwarves as middle-sized
| strong men that live underground and are known for good
| forgery, and elves being tall, old, singing folk indeed
| comes from Tolkien. Previously Dwarves were imagined as
| magical folk with powers more close to Cinderella's God
| Mother, and if I'm not mistaken, Elves too (i.e. dwarves
| were elves really) according to Germanic mythology. For
| example, if you read Andre Norton's Witch World this world
| differs greatly from Tolkiens' - especially in this matter.
| hinkley wrote:
| Elves were more imps than tall, eternal sages. See
| Santa's elves.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| The word "Eldritch" as in "Eldritch Horror" comes from
| the same root as the word Elf.
|
| Elves were terrifying forest creatures akin to djinn.
| They were horrors that would give you amazing things at a
| terrible cost, and from the medieval period we hear only
| the stories of the rare survivors of their actions.
|
| (like Tam Lin who was given temporary immortality at the
| cost of being the slave of the elf queen and being tithed
| to hell unless some other mortal saved him)
|
| or would literally kill you and drag your soul to hell if
| they encountered you
|
| (the Wild Hunt)
|
| or tricksters who would ask you for a favor and in the
| process attempt to steal you away as a slave
|
| (there was a midwife who was summoned to help with an
| elven childbirth, after she was done the husband tried to
| get her to eat or drink of their food, but the elf-wife
| had warned her that if she did she would become his
| property)
|
| They were not cutesy Santa's helpers or Legolases
| (Legolai?) or whatever flavor anime blonde girl you're
| thinking of. They were horrors you hoped to never
| encounter, the dark things in the forest looking for
| their next plaything.
| hinkley wrote:
| Ah, I was referring to physicality not the personality.
| They hold the Trickster archetype prior to Sinter Klaus
| and Tolkien for sure. At least in Asian cultures a fox
| (trickster) sometimes has wisdom.
|
| Have you read Susanna Clarke? Her faeries are like djinn
| if djinn had hopes and plans of their own. Amoral,
| egotistical, slightly insane, and sometimes petty beings
| of immense power, born of ancient pacts with the elements
| of nature.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Chainmail drew heavily on LotR, in no small part because
| Chainmail was heavily influenced by 'Rules for Middle
| Earth,' and halflings were even explicitly called hobbits
| early on, there were explicitly balrogs, etc.
|
| Gygax himself lists Tolkien and The Lords of the Rings in
| Appendix N in the 1e DMG.
|
| After Saul Zaentz started threatening lawsuits about the
| similarities Gygax did a lot to distance D&D from LotR and
| Tolkien but in the mid 70s this was hardly the case.
|
| D&D is obviously not just a recreation of Tolkien-esque
| fantasy, particularly since the players weren't even
| anything resembling heroes in the early editions and
| instead just adventurers trying to eek out a living, but
| the idea that D&D is anti-LotR is largely revisionism from
| Gygax and TSR trying to avoid a lawsuit from the person who
| owned the merchandising rights.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Not as much as you'd think. D&D's conception of elves,
| dwarves, and halflings was straight out of Tolkien,
| and...that was very nearly it as far as really unique
| elements (barring a few monster names and specific magic
| items, out of hundreds). Those three races are highly visible
| but kinda superficial. The
| Howard/Burroughs/Vance/Moorcock/etc. style of swords-and-
| sorcery/murderhoboism is a lot more deeply baked in.
| the_af wrote:
| Hm, while D&D borrowed a lot of the trappings (and creatures)
| from Tolkien, I think Middle Earth is all about birthrights and
| kings and noble (elven or "old human") bloodlines. Tolkien is
| all about the legacy of your blood, ancient prophecies
| fulfilled that have to do with birthrights, vassals and fealty
| and whatnot... and I believe none of this plays an important
| part (or at all) in classic D&D.
| vantassell wrote:
| If you like at the skills of each class then it's pretty
| obvious that wizards, rangers, halflings, elves, dwarves, and
| orcs are modeled after Gandalf, Aragorn, the hobbits, etc.
|
| Gandalf calls Aragorn the world's best hunter, and Aragorn
| literally listens to the earth (in the pursuit of Merry and
| Pippin) like the Ranger class skill. If D&D isn't based on
| LOTR, weird that so many of the classes are 1:1.
|
| Then look at the way Dragons in D&D affect their environment
| (e.g. the weather changes as you get near a dragon's den) and
| it's even more obvious that D&D is based off LOTR. Not to
| mention the assault on Minas Tirith beginning with a change
| in weather due to the power of Sauron (or the way Saruman
| changes the weather on Caradhras). Or look at the mechanics
| of being frightened, that's pretty much the core class trait
| of the Nazgul.
|
| Reading LOTR after reading through the Player's Manual makes
| it extremely obvious where each of the class skills came from
| - the came from events in LOTR.
| the_af wrote:
| Yes, but that's it: the _trappings_ of LotR. I don 't think
| there's anybody that would deny the elf, dwarf, halfling,
| ranger, wizard [1] of D&D are based on LotR.
|
| The thing is D&D stops at the trappings of LotR, and
| completely ignores Tolkien's world is a kind of feudalism,
| with vassals, oaths, birthrights, "noble blood", etc.
| Upstarts are frowned upon in Middle Earth, and in fact,
| much shedding of tears is caused by people overstepping
| their bounds or wishing to dethrone their rightful lords.
| The very concept of "rightful lord" is so very Tolkenian.
| Denethor in his pride forgets he is a mere steward and not
| the rightful king of Gondor. Saruman in his pride forgets
| he is tasked with a "sacred" task and should seek no
| earthly glory. Wormtongue covets both Eowyn and the throne
| of Rohan.
|
| D&D has none of this, as the article explains. You can
| "earn" your way to having a fortress, lands, etc, without
| the pesky concept of vassalage. D&D is all about the
| upstarts seeking fame, coin and glory.
|
| [1] except D&D's magic is Vancian in nature, unlike LotR's.
| You cannot "learn spells" in LotR, and in fact, Elves don't
| even consider what they do magic and are suprised of it
| being called as such.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| Also for me same experience, only difference is the setting, I
| was playing Dragonlance
| tarsinge wrote:
| D&D world draw heavily from Middle Earth but also from other
| authors like Vance, Moorcock, Leiber, ... The list is
| officially documented as "Appendix N" in AD&D 1st ed manual[0]
|
| Kind of like Warcraft, I personally started playing around the
| Warcraft 2 release and it was always kind of the same world of
| everything medieval fantasy mixed in, never realistic.
|
| [0]https://goodman-games.com/blog/2018/03/26/what-is-
| appendix-n...
|
| From the D&D original author:
|
| > The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp
| & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P.
| Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as
| well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of
| the game.
|
| Edit: citation
| SeanLuke wrote:
| IIRC D&D was so directly based on Tolkien that they used the
| terms "halfling", "goblin", and "magic user" to avoid a fight
| with the Tolkien Estate over the terms "hobbit", "orc", and
| "wizard". This article thus makes little sense to me: how many
| half-elf magic users do you see popping up in medieval history?
| pinebox wrote:
| I have long considered the relationship of OD&D to historical
| medievalism as equivalent to the vaporwave genre vs. music
| actually produced in the 80's.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'd say that (1) there's a lot more to the medieval period than
| just the high middle ages in England and France and (2) a world
| with orcs, owlbears, etc is going to tend to be more thinly
| populated than similar historical analogues, meaning finding
| unclaimed land becomes more plausible.
| cdrini wrote:
| I mean, this is like saying "because DND has magic, and the real
| medieval age didn't have magic, that means DND is anti-medieval".
| It can be accurately described as "medieval" without replicating
| every element of actual medieval society. And there are enough
| medieval like elements in there that it strikes as a sufficiently
| resonant descriptor for me.
| Guthur wrote:
| Sorry did you read it, the point was there is literally nothing
| medieval/feudal except the fact that there are swords and
| pointy sticks.
| Guthur wrote:
| If you want to see an actual fantasy feudal setting check out
| Burning Wheel.
| cdrini wrote:
| I did read it :) I disagree that not being feudal is enough
| to disqualify something as medieval. Loads of DND components
| are medieval, the timeframe, the architecture, the technology
| (excluding magic), the vague element of religion like
| cleric/etc. It's like a very blurry view of medieval times,
| with certain elements dropped out. But not enough elements
| removed to say that it's _not_ based on medieval times; let
| alone anti-medieval!
| xbar wrote:
| Huh?
|
| Gygax's own campaign was decidedly medieval and the rules were
| written before his milieu was published, so he left it as an
| exercise of the imagination for rule-book consumers to produce
| their own milieus until such a time as his could be published.
| The rules include descriptions of the possible selection of
| governmental structures. Technologically represented in the rules
| (aka weapon types) were decidedly medieval, as the author
| concedes.
|
| That it was left to the DM to implement bureaucracy does not mean
| that it was anti-medieval.
| helboi4 wrote:
| There is a certain propagandistic line about capitalism that
| implies that it is the natural state of affairs and everything
| leading up to it was a proto-captialist society (see the myth of
| a barter society, which never existed). I wonder how much
| revisionist media like this that makes people associate medieval
| aesthetics with an economy that works like the American frontier
| aids that propaganda. Not that I think D&D is a purposeful piece
| of propaganda. Just that it unknowingly reinforces the
| brainwashing of the public into believing capitalism is an
| immortal and immovable default state of human being.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 'Capitalism' is a term that was coined by its enemies, if it
| had its own way it would have no name but be the thing that
| "there is no alternative" to.
|
| Christopher Lasch's _Culture of Narcissism_ is about the 1970s
| (early middle Technetronic?) but also about the late 19th and
| the old pagan empires such as Rome and is popular in Japan as a
| critique of the Tokugawa era culture.
|
| I imagine urban people in cosmopolitan centers (like that
| university town Corinth that my namesake wrote a letter to) of
| an artisan or merchant or intellectual class would have very
| much liked a game like Dungeons and Dragons and would have come
| up with similar weapons tables, monster books, spell lists,
| theology, etc.
| helboi4 wrote:
| Merchants of course would have loved it since they were the
| few people living in a reality that would actually become
| capitalism.
|
| I disagree with your initial statement since there were
| obviously alternatives throughout history and countries that
| never fully bought into full trappings of capitalism. It is
| only our opinion that capitalism, heavily influenced by our
| education that lends us to believe that capitalism is the
| only way things can be.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Markets, however, have always existed as long their have
| been towns, see Braudel.
| helboi4 wrote:
| Yeah I do think some level of market is natural. But I do
| think on the whole humans would rather live in a society
| that leans socialist with market forces than a rugged
| individualist nuclear family hyper-capitalist society.
| Like, being a frontier cowboy is only fun for a short
| amount of time. After your adventure you just wanna
| return to the shire and share vegetables and chill with
| your friends.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| _But do they want to play that game?_ Dungeon and
| Dragons, plus the computer RPGs that it inspired,
| represent an idealized version of the "building up of
| the self" that one does in, say, contemporary urban
| China, U.S., etc.
|
| What would a game set in a world of positive socialism be
| like? Is it like Sim City or can we tell compelling
| stories about people who are part of the plan?
|
| Fiction needs compelling villains. _Time Bandits_ on
| Apple TV fails at this and instead is a madcap ramp
| through character and setting where good and evil seem
| equally bad. Contrast that to _Foundation_ where Tellum
| Bond was quite terrifying and set expectations for the
| Mule to be much more terrifying in the next season.
|
| Real life doesn't.
| spencerflem wrote:
| I read an interesting take that the Free Market and
| Capitalism are natural enemies- in that, the ideal
| capitalist investment, one that makes tbe best returns,
| is in the creation of a monopoly, thus subverting the
| free market.
|
| We can see that today that, given the USA has largely
| stopped externally enforcing anti-monopoly measures, that
| companies grow and grow in size in a very un-free-market
| way.
| helboi4 wrote:
| Fr. I find libertarians so laughable because I'm like...
| your ultimately free market would just lead to mega
| monopolies that would go from being warlords to emperors
| real quick. Which would immediately destroy the free
| market.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder about the real quick part. Eventually surely,
| but before that would it not be cheaper to affect
| political system so that government takes these actions
| by themselves, with tax money from everyone and with good
| loaning of money to boot. Paying for all that gear and
| people is expensive, better have someone else to boot the
| bill and then when system crashes down capture it...
| rsynnott wrote:
| This problem has been recognised more or less since
| capitalism was conceptualised; Adam Smith warned about
| it, for instance.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > education that lends us to believe that capitalism is the
| only way things can be.
|
| It seems to be the only stable system that has allowed
| relatively stable and continuous growth to occur long-term.
|
| > capitalism is the only way things can be.
|
| Of course it depends on how you personally define
| "capitalism" (because it's really not clear at all) and
| obviously humanity has attempted to implement various
| different systems, they never really worked out.
|
| Other more "natural" (i.e. not imposed by the use of
| violence) systems of course have existed (e.g. various
| hunter gather societies) but they seem to have a very low
| cap on productivity and therefore can't sustain any long-
| term economic growth and therefore were outcompeted by
| "capitalism".
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > that it is the natural state of affairs and everything
| leading up to it was a proto-captialist society (see the myth
| of a barter society, which never existed).
|
| Wasn't that one of Marx's ideas? Certainly the part about
| everything leading to capitalism (including the proto-
| capitalist part). We're stuck at this stage for longer than he
| might have expected but I don't see how that invalidates his
| core ideas...
|
| > capitalism is an immortal and immovable default state of
| human being.
|
| Depends on how you define "capitalism" but in many ways it (at
| least many aspects of/proto-capitalism as you said) just seems
| like the default equilibria state human societies converge to
| without someone using excessive force/violence to mould it into
| something else.
|
| At the end of the day humans need/want food/stuff to survive.
| Them giving it away them altruistically wouldn't be the best
| from the evolutionary perspective (i.e. their descendants if
| they kept doing the same would soon be outcompeted by more
| selfish individuals). Mutually beneficial (on the individual
| level) exchange of goods services seems seems to lead to
| extremely high productivity and no other system/approach can
| really compete with it.
| helboi4 wrote:
| Yeah it is sort of a Marxist idea, that doesn't mean its
| correct nor does it mean that it's not co-opted and warped by
| capitalists to make their own points.
|
| Some level of market seems sort of natural but I think I
| would say full blown capitalism was a temporary stepping
| stone that was necessary in order to bring us to modern
| industrial civilisation. And now there is really absolutely
| zero reason to have as high as possible productivity. Like
| most people are being forced to pretend to be super
| productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do not
| need that much labour any more to get things done. As humans
| it would feel more natural and less miserable to not live
| under this system.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > And now there is really absolutely zero reason to have as
| high as possible productivity.
|
| Why? Redistribution is a problem and of course there are
| negative externalities (environmental and other) associated
| with the high growth over the few hundred years. But it
| doesn't mean that productivity can't continue growing even
| if we find ways to handle those things.
|
| > Like most people are being forced to pretend to be super
| productive at totally bullshit jobs because we really do
| not need that much labour any more to get things done
|
| So they aren't super productive? Inefficiencies exist in
| every system. And people spending a lot of effort working
| without producing any real value is not particularly
| "capitalist" at all.
|
| But I do think that "capitalism" (again, it's very hard to
| provide any meaningful arguments when it's not at all clear
| what you mean by that specifically) enables higher
| productivity but it doesn't necessarily force you to
| maximize your productivity (due to technological and
| institutional progress we should be able to have enough
| surplus, at least for a generation or so, unless people
| start having children again..)
|
| Anyway. What alternatives would you propose?
| netbioserror wrote:
| This is to say nothing of the modern "baristacore" fantasy, which
| seems to be a projection of modern American urban life, with many
| of its social attitudes and creature comforts, into a fantastical
| set-dressing evoking a mixture of high-fantasy and medieval
| aesthetics. Like a fancier-looking version of the Columbia U bar
| scene.
|
| For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are
| pushing further and further in this direction lately.
| busterarm wrote:
| Never heard this term in the context of fantasy gaming, but I'm
| stealing it.
| baxuz wrote:
| Did you coin this term? I can't find it anywhere online but I
| _LOVE_ it.
| lacker wrote:
| I suppose this comment is inspired by the recent "Legends &
| Lattes", a fantasy novel winning various awards, starring a
| barista Orc...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Lattes-Novel-Fantasy-Stakes-e...
|
| I haven't read it myself, but apparently it is big on TikTok.
| Perhaps for some HN readers this is the sort of thing they are
| looking for ;-)
| crooked-v wrote:
| For me, that book sits in a weird crux of interesting yet
| underwhelming. I think it suffers a lot from the implied
| quasi-D&D setting intersecting with modern assumptions. It
| has a lot of absentee worldbuilding that amounts to a blank
| space implying all the stuff you're already used to from the
| real world, instead of doing anything interesting with it
| being fantasy.
| WereAllMadHere wrote:
| Can you go elaborate on this concept of baristacore? I'm
| guessing you mean something broader than Legends and Lattes?
| Pinegulf wrote:
| No, it's not "anti-medieval" it's medieval fantasy. Or in the
| words of the greats "Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games".
| pyuser583 wrote:
| D&D was highly customizable, so it was as medieval as you wanted.
|
| Some of the sourcebooks were extremely accurate in describing the
| Middle Ages. Others didn't even try.
|
| I do like the articles core criticism: the goal of D&D is social
| advancement.
|
| D&D always was a Western at heart. A group of desperadoes going
| town to town taking up jobs and fighting the baddies.
| jeltz wrote:
| When did that change? Because I have played since ADnD 2nd
| Edition and I do not think it has ever been highly
| customizable. Customizable? Yes, but not highly so.
| jghn wrote:
| 1e literally had examples on how to blend the game with other
| games such as Boot Hill, Gamma World, etc.
| jeltz wrote:
| I never played 1e, I started with ADnD 2e.
| jghn wrote:
| Yeah, things started shifting with 2e and that shift kept
| going further and further.
|
| With Forgotten Realms it shifted from more of a pulp
| swords & sorcery to a medieval-ish Tolkien-esque
| environment.
|
| Over time it shifted from low fantasy to high fantasy.
|
| And not only did the theming start to solidify, but over
| time the tropes arguably became self-reinforcing.
| ourmandave wrote:
| We played all three but never combined them.
|
| They have guns and smoke powder in 5e and it just doesn't
| feel right.
|
| _Game of Thrones_ with cowboys carrying torc grenades?
| jghn wrote:
| I feel like as the game evolved to fit more of a trope-y
| Tolkienesque quasi-medieval setting it definitely got
| more and more out of place. 1e, especially earlier on,
| and before was much more of a genre mishmash. Fantasy in
| the truest sense.
|
| We never combined them either but I did find it cool that
| the 1e DMG gave explicit advice on how to do so. Heck,
| there was even that one module where the characters can
| find laser weapons. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_to_the_Barri
| er_Peak...
| cthalupa wrote:
| > They have guns and smoke powder in 5e and it just
| doesn't feel right.
|
| One of the settings for the game that became OD&D
| included far-future alien technology (Blackmoor), so
| there's long been precedent.
| ElectricSpoon wrote:
| Having read that, I really wish to back to being GM and trolling
| players by awarding them non-fungible plots of land as rewards.
| Then players get challenged since they failed to occupy the land,
| so at a later visit, they discover their plot occupied by
| squatters.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Or coming back from year or two on adventure and wondering
| where is everyone and why there is tribes of whatever creatures
| around. Just to find that your peasants are really really angry
| for abandoning them and not doing your duty to protect them and
| moved to neighbour who is actually around to do their job.
| busterarm wrote:
| There are long term/generational campaigns that run like
| this. It's just that the majority of the playerbase is
| playing a different game, whether they're murderhoboing or
| badly copying Critical Role.
|
| And the murderhobo style is as old as D&D itself.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It can be a lot of fun if the players actually _do_ occupy the
| land and start influencing the game world at a higher level
| than just adventuring all of the time
|
| It also gives them something to invest their hard earned
| treasure into that isn't just trying to buy more and more
| powerful magic items to minmax their builds
| creer wrote:
| It's actually very practical and useful. A common problem is
| absent players (their characters are busy trying to run their
| domain). Another common problem is too much money among the
| adventurers: easily fixed with costs of construction, required
| finery, and a constantly deficit-running domain. Sometimes it
| helps if one of the player has some form of authority over the
| others - set the adventure in or near their domain.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| I think I'm missing something here - what is "OD&D" in this
| context? Is this just some back formation for the original D&D
| once AD&D existed?
|
| Looking at the "Basic" D&D rules (red books), they don't cover
| characters up to the levels where they would be landowners etc.
| They only cover up to 3rd level.
|
| The "Expert" D&D rulebook (blue books) covers characters up to
| 14th level, and includes sections on strongholds and land
| ownership. Once characters are 9th level, they can gain land but
| the narrative is definitely rooted in feudal concepts (fighters
| get land from a higher lord, and their realm is a barony etc)
| amonon wrote:
| I believe you are correct; OD&D is the holmes/moldvay/etc.
| books that existed before AD&D, but I'm not certain.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Nope, that is Basic/Expert, and eventually BECMI/Rules
| Cyclopedia. These were released in parallel with AD&D.
|
| In theory they catered to different playstyles, in practice
| it was largely to escape paying Arneson royalties.
|
| OD&D is the original 1974 release co-authored by Gygax and
| Arneson
| hackthemack wrote:
| What to call the many editions of D&D to differentiate them is
| a bit nebulous. Here is an article with an infographic at the
| end that explains what the community started calling the
| various editions.
|
| https://daddyrolleda1.blogspot.com/2024/06/editions-of-dunge...
|
| OD&D usually refers to the Original Edition that was first
| released in 1974. It consists of 3 little brown books.
|
| Direct link to infographic
|
| https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi8QrcSdtdy...
| VagabundoP wrote:
| OD&D usually refers to the 3BB (three brown books;Men & Magic,
| Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness
| Adventures.), there is a fourth called Sup1:Greyhawk that has
| additional content. Thats what is usually referred to as OD&D.
|
| However everything is a little fuzzy in that sphere, sometimes
| anything before 1e is called Classic D&D.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Basic/Expert (and the BECMI -> Rule Cyclopedia) line were
| parallel to AD&D. TSR claimed these were the rules meant for
| "Home" play and AD&D was meant for "Tournament" play. More
| plausibly, this was an attempt to escape from having to pay
| Arneson any royalties for continued editions of D&D.
|
| OD&D predates both and was the original release.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| I have seen the ruleset for Pathfinder where you can purchase
| land and titles, etc. and it is pitifully boring. I would be
| surprised if someone seriously into crunching the numbers behind
| real estate would be interested in a game based centrally on die
| rolling. I have also seen rulesets that tried to be more medieval
| and they were near unplayable. Someone who was serious about
| playing that sort of game is generally not the same kind of
| person who would play the more popular forms of TRPGs. I think
| there's not much about medieval life that is exciting enough to
| be able to make a sustainable ruleset for TRPGs.
|
| There's very little in modern society that is pro-medieval. Even
| the Ren fairs that so many people are into have almost nothing to
| do with recreating actual medieval life.
|
| Being pro-something does not always mean being anti-something
| else. Sometimes it means that a certain group just isn't
| interested.
|
| And in the context of modern TRPGs, medieval is a marketing term,
| not an actual descriptive term.
| busterarm wrote:
| There are plenty of campaigns out there that are politically
| oriented and traveling hobos aren't likely to get positive
| attention from the local lord or lady.
|
| Turns out that having a stake in local society is one of the
| best ways to get that positive attention, just following
| logically.
|
| Rules like these are for people playing the setting
| appropriately. But these days I think it's appropriate to
| assume that large numbers of roleplayers are doing so to play
| out chiefly their own fantasies and all of the modern
| sensibilities that comes with.
| jeltz wrote:
| In my country, Sweden, one of the most popular RPGs used to be
| Eon and that game i s much more medieval than DnD and it is
| very playable. I would argue more so than DnD, that that is
| subjective. And it was a very popular game so your guesses are
| wrong. There are also a whole bunch of the games which are semi
| successful which are more or less about medieval life, e.g.
| Pendragon. And then we have Warhammer Fantasy which is
| renaissance.
|
| DnD is mostly just big in the US due to historical reasons.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| OK so where is my high fantasy 4X feudal city state tabletop sim?
| Maybe HRE Tabletop lol. I'd play that if I could find a group of
| people insane enough to do it with me
| jowea wrote:
| As someone who could find such a thing interesting, I googled a
| bit and there seems to be some RPGs with more of that focus,
| although I think people mostly play video games for that:
|
| https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/city-building-manage...
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/ll6z4d/games_that_have...
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/2zazc9/rpg_systems_whe...
|
| And if you want people slightly less insane (lol), maybe a
| mixed game with management elements would be easier to swallow?
| The ASOIAF RPG, Pendragon and the Border Princes region for
| Warhammer Fantasy all have some type of feudal lordship
| elements in addition to the usual RPG fare for example.
| jerf wrote:
| If you get to a sufficiently-high level of "realism", D&D game
| mechanics and fuedalism can't coexist anyhow. All of human
| history prior to around the 17th century is based on the fact
| that a "military man" is within a certain range of power. You can
| have better or worse, like how the Roman empire had a more
| reliable way of getting more-per-soldier than the competition of
| the time, but in general throughout history, there's definitely a
| range on human power. Everything is so deeply based on that model
| that we can't even see it. Even as I describe this you may be
| going "yeah, but what about...", but bear with me for a second.
|
| In these style of games, though, there's generally exponential
| power growth. One level 20 warrior can take on an absurd number
| of level 1 warriors. With modern games being so much larger and
| more complicated it's not impossible to find builds where a level
| 20 (or 40, or 60, or 100...) warrior can defeat _arbitrary_
| numbers of level 1 warriors. Moreover, the leveling mechanics are
| such that the things you do to attain levels are only loosely
| correlated to the skills you obtain from those levels, e.g., why
| would killing a bunch of kobolds suddenly allow you to cast two
| fireballs instead of one?
|
| This breaks fuedalism in ways both subtle and gross. If the King
| is level 20 (or whatever), he has little to no utility for your
| Level 3 warrior's oath of fealty and the several dozen Level 1
| warriors following him. In the real world every oath of fealty is
| some incremental boost in power and you may need everything you
| can get, but this oath of fealty is just a waste of your
| military's food.
|
| So what would it look like? Well, you may note I time-bound my
| claim above that soldiers were somewhat range-bound in
| capability. Clearly modern militaries are wildly disproportional
| in effectiveness per soldier. It's been that way ever since the
| gun became a practical military weapon and has generally gotten
| worse over time. And what do we see today? Broadly speaking, the
| people with militaries have power and offer nothing like
| feudalistic loyalty in return. Loyalty is a one-way street where
| the plebs are beholden to the militaries, but the only loyalty
| the militaries have back to them is mostly based around the fact
| the plebs are still the supply line, so you can't actually kill
| them all, but you sure can kill a lot of them if you need to in
| order to maintain power. If you feel this is an inaccurate
| summary of the modern West, look beyond the modern West; there's
| a lot more to history than just the modern West in the past
| ~300-400 years. And it is, of course, a single paragraph merely
| sketching a hint of a broad shape, not a PhD thesis; I'm well
| aware that this is a very fuzzy picture. But the point I'm trying
| to make is not a positive one about the details of the sketch I'm
| making here; it suffices simply to point out that A: we actually
| have much less balanced "power per person" in the real world
| (though not driven by "leveling mechanics") right now and B: the
| resulting social structures that have been semi-stable now for
| centuries look nothing like feudalism at _all_.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See also the common sci-fi story such as _Skylark of Space_ or
| _Microcosmic God_ or _The Stars my Destination_. Those are
| oldies but goodies, in all of them the hero experiences major
| leveling in capability by pulling up on their bootstraps.
|
| Newer literature is more sophisticated as the hero becomes more
| socially involved. It definitely happens in Pohl's _Heechee_
| series and also Vinge's _The Peace War_ but you don't see it in
| _The Terraformers_ by Newitz as the characters are born into
| the post-human.
|
| Commercially there is a lot to gain from 'future histories' but
| they have a way of blowing up: exponential leveling can be
| sometimes contained, as in Niven's _Known Space_ but such a
| system can be killed by any bad idea, and that one got two.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Counterpoint: Why in god's name would I want to play a fantasy
| adventure in a "realistic" medieval setting?
| TillE wrote:
| Because Ars Magica is a really good game.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Thank-you - I was searching for "Ars Magica" here in the
| comments - as it is the only fantasy RPG that I have ever
| seen come close to having the "feel" of actual "medieval"
| times, except - of course ... for the magic... (It is also
| the absolute best magic system out there!)
| thfuran wrote:
| Why should you hate the idea?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Realism is a sliding scale. Some people prefer to count their
| arrows after every combat, some people prefer to go into a
| dungeon without even checking whether they have a backpack,
| much less whether it has any rations in it.
| jeltz wrote:
| Having tried it myself: because it can be really fun! More
| magic, more dragons, more princesses does not inherently make a
| story better.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Not a tabletop but the Kingdom Come Deliverance video game has
| completely changed my previous very similar opinion. It's one
| of the best action RPGs of all time and it's historically
| accurate and realistic:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/379430/Kingdom_Come_Deliv...
| jowea wrote:
| Fair enough but that's not fantasy.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, I don't think the author is claiming that you should;
| they're just saying that it's not medieval.
| dash2 wrote:
| My favourite world was Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay of the 80s. It
| was explicitly early Renaissance, with analogues to France and
| the Empire, but also with the underlying darkness of the
| narrative that Chaos was sure to win in the end.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| British fantasy RPGs in general have far more Jabberwocky
| (1977) in them than the American ones.
|
| Basically everything is covered in shit.
| kergonath wrote:
| That's fine. I prefer grimdark to cartoonish settings, even
| if both tend to be a bit camp. Warhammer is better than
| Warcraft as a setting.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| They have a good amount of "not taking themselves too
| seriously" as well.
|
| The Enemy Within is a great read and I'm planning on
| running it one day, this has some spoilers about it, but is
| funny:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/warhammerfantasyrpg/comments/7hzz1
| l...
|
| The original blog post is gone I think,
| kergonath wrote:
| Brilliant! Thanks for the link. I did not play WRPG
| (though I know more than a bit of the lore from WFB and
| things like Mordheim) much but this resonates with some
| memories :)
|
| Some of the pages are on archive.org apparently.
| dadrian wrote:
| Of course D&D is not an accurate picture of the medieval era.
| There's magic in D&D! There was not magic in the medieval era.
| What are we even doing here?
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I don't think they rolled dice to decide who won in combat
| either. I agree, what are we doing here??
| Hugsun wrote:
| D&D claims to occur in the european medieval era where magic
| and fantastic beasts exist.
|
| The author's point is that it's not like that. It's a
| persistent capitalistic medieval themed wild west with no real
| power structures. The feudal power structures were a defining
| feature of the european medieval era.
|
| Of course it's fantasy and can be anything. The author is
| simply explaining that it says that it's theme is the european
| medieval era, while it has almost none of it's defining
| features.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| D&D is based on the _popular conception_ of the medieval era.
| This has very little to do with the actual history that
| happened during the medieval era, despite sharing the same
| name. But D &D didn't invent the ideas it's building on.
| the_af wrote:
| > _Of course D &D is not an accurate picture of the medieval
| era_
|
| I don't think that's what being stated in TFA. The argument is
| that there's _nothing_ medieval about it (except maybe some of
| the weapons), contradicting Gygax 's own assertions:
|
| > _You can be forgiven for thinking that OD &D is a medieval
| European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so.
| He describes the original D&D books as "Rules for Fantastic
| Medieval War Games" (on the cover) and "rules [for] designing
| your own fantastic-medieval campaign" (in the introduction)._
|
| As for this:
|
| > _There 's magic in D&D!_
|
| You could devise a medieval society where magic exists. This is
| not what D&D does. That's the point.
| VagabundoP wrote:
| Birthright[1] was a 2e setting all about managing your domain in
| a fantasy feudal setting.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(campaign_setting)
| mlinhares wrote:
| I was about to say that, how come no one mentions Birthright
| here?
|
| The usual D&D scenario might not focus too much on this but as
| you level you you can have something like that. Almost all high
| level campaigns I DMed would eventually see the characters form
| a retinue, groups, organizations (like the harpers). A lot of
| the novels also have this context for the powerful characters,
| so there's plenty of content out there where for you to be
| inspired.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Was looking for this!
| waffletower wrote:
| This article reads like: "D&D is not like this other game I
| imagined! Why?" It is a pedantic, tunnel-vision diatribe that
| focusses upon Gygax's casual use of the word "medievel". While
| not explicitly built into the D&D system, the author completely
| misses the point that D&D has considerable flexibility to allow
| for many of the "glaring" medievel flavor lacks they didacticly
| emphasize.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I think of creative work, and most human endeavors, as frames
| within frames. The inconsistency of something like D&D is easily
| avoided by stepping out of the frame, and thinking of it as a sui
| generis creation of Gygax, or stepping further in and thinking of
| it as a game mechanic that leads to an experience of fun.
|
| But the geek habit is to stay inside the frame and obsess over
| how the premise should have been more explicit, the details more
| accurate, the rules more consistent. How does the tricorder work?
| What's inside a Dalek?? Can you really clone a dinosaur using a
| chicken egg??? Let's write a wiki page about our theories and
| then argue about it!
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I think in the context of a role playing game like D&D, you
| _do_ want to stay within the frame because a unique & defining
| part of an RPG is the _role playing_. This is different from
| content you purely consume, like a TV series.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I'm not an RPG person - but when I've done it, every player
| is in fact both acting their character's role AND acting as
| player in the game. The elven mage character does not know
| that a DM exists, or that dice are being rolled; but the
| player does, and complains when the DM applies a rule
| inconsistently.
| swayvil wrote:
| That's how concentrating your attention goes.
|
| You pick a thing within your field of attention, center your
| attention upon it and narrow your attention until the thing
| fills your entire field of attention.
|
| Which gives you a new field of attention. Then you repeat the
| process. And so on.
|
| A kind of infinite shrinking of perspective.
|
| This is what artists, scientists and engineers do. It's a bit
| insane. It's the cornerstone of our civilization.
| creer wrote:
| > sui generis creation of Gygax
|
| Isn't it the opposite? Gygax lived in a world of sword and
| sorcery books, short stories and pulp comics. If you want his
| model of "medieval world", it's more like that: you have
| independent characters galore, few concerns about overall world
| economics or power structure (aside from the immediate
| interference with the heros).
| agentultra wrote:
| There were other RPGs and settings with more historical
| influences than D&D. The "fantastic" was always a part of the D&D
| setting. The cultures that influenced D&D came more from 20th
| century Minnesota than any 13th century society.
| dagw wrote:
| If you want to role play in Medieval Europe, but with a
| smattering of magic and fantastical elements, then Ars Magica
| is the game you're looking for.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| It's "romanticized middle ages", epic high fantasy, it's not
| supposed to be realistic or allegorical, it just provides a
| neutral canvas, on top of which the actually interesting bits are
| painted. The most interesting themes to me in D&D's forgotten
| realms were always mythological, immortality, the pantheon (the
| time of troubles etc.), divine and arcane magic, good vs. evil,
| destiny & prophecies etc. it has nothing to do with the middle
| ages. Kings are often literally background characters while the
| heroes fight against the world ending threats (like dark lords
| similar to Sauron, liches or ascended (demi)gods).
|
| But of course everyone's perspective on this is very different,
| which is a good thing imho. It only has very deep lore if it
| matters to you.
| jghn wrote:
| > epic high fantasy
|
| In the early days it was much more of a low fantasy
| environment. The epic high fantasy angle grew over time.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| I'm a much younger D&D enjoyer so that makes sense then,
| everyone seems to have a different perspective on what D&D
| even is.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > everyone seems to have a different perspective on what
| D&D even is.
|
| There's a variety of axis you could split it on, but if you
| wanted to look at the departure from low-fantasy
| adventurer's just trying to eek out an existence to the
| players becoming heroes going on epic quests, there's a
| pretty universally agreed upon point that really kicked
| this shift into overdrive, and it's the original
| Dragonlance modules. They weren't the first to position the
| game this way, but they were the first to really stick with
| the population. We started seeing more AD&D splatbooks that
| raised the power level of characters, the Companion rules
| came out for the Basic/Expert line that raised the power
| levels there, etc. AD&D 2E further embraced this, though
| you could still play the more traditional sword and sorcery
| style, but 3E largely cut off the original style of play
| completely.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Generally fantasy role-playing relies on some historical input,
| which fills out the world. A game could be set in a place like
| 13th century Spain with a mix of influences from North African to
| Western European. Or it could be set in something like the Aztec
| Empire of around the same time period. The whole game is setup to
| be pretty flexible - you can project onto it whatever you want,
| within the basic ruleset.
| davidashe wrote:
| Hacker News, where a fun fantasy game with zero world-modeling
| ambitions is criticized as a failed medieval simulation by
| software engineers who know little about
| anthropology/sociology/history.
| leoc wrote:
| Sure: D&D is the American Dream. (Lizzie Stark said it in 2012
| https://nordiclarp.org/w/images/a/a0/2012-States.of.play.pdf and
| I'd been saying it for the best part of a decade already at that
| point.) That's why _Paranoia_ , a middle finger to the mores and
| expectations of late-'70s, rules-lawyer-era D&D, is a role-
| playing game about being, basically, a work gang of gulag
| prisoners in a totalitarian state; while _Call of Cthulhu_ ,
| another RPG from people who were sick of D&D, experiments a bit
| half-heartedly with ideas of cosmic despair and creeping personal
| ruin, and bigs up Cthulhu himself as an unbeatable grudge
| monster.
| teachrdan wrote:
| _Call of Cthulhu_ was notable for the fact that players '
| combat skills were inevitably their weakest.
| hibikir wrote:
| It's interesting to look outside the US, in countries where the
| D&D translations didn't come in a decade early: When facing
| Cthulhu, Paranoia, Rolemaster, Vampire and the like on an even
| playing field, D&D didn't really win.
| bovermyer wrote:
| I know how the RPG hobby played out in Japan, but I'm
| unfamiliar with other countries' experience.
|
| Has anyone written about this?
| SSLy wrote:
| I don't know of any broader essay about it. You you'll get
| per-country folklore if you ask specific communities.
| Probably some will chime in here.
| geon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakar_och_Demoner was pretty
| big in sweden.
| rmsaksida wrote:
| I think at a time _Vampire: The Masquerade_ was the most
| popular title in Brazil, but D &D eventually won.
|
| _Tormenta_ and _Old Dragon_ are pretty popular as well.
| tormeh wrote:
| The American market rules supreme. Any setting and/or
| ruleset popular with Americans will be able to afford much
| higher production values than its competitors. Those
| production values in turn attract non-American players.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Don't forget _Toon_ as the radical alternative for somebody who
| wants to run an easy and fast game that is not set in such an
| unforgiving setting as _CoC_ or _Paranoia_.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > But it's worth taking a step back from the medieval-fantasy
| cliches that overran later D&D publications, and playing the
| original, more coherent setting: A swords-and-sorcery world,
| empty of government, where anyone can pick up a sword, become a
| hero, and live the American dream.
|
| "... empty of government ... live the American dream"
|
| _That_ is the real fantasy: to believe that the USA is "empty
| of government".
|
| Or maybe the author considers the american dream is dead, because
| of too much government?
| golergka wrote:
| > No one knows what "plate mail" is supposed to be.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_plate_armour
|
| It's literally the first search result.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Later edition:
| https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Armor#content
|
| There is Scale mail, Splint, Half-Plate and Plate...
|
| Which is quite range of different things that are mostly same
| concept, but to different degrees so it does get rather
| confusing when looking for real world examples.
| baxuz wrote:
| Reading this article, it seems to me that what the author thinks
| of when they say "D&D" is actually Forgotten Realms.
|
| Which is why I massively prefer Eberron, as the original setting
| makes no sense at all.
|
| Not that Eberron is without its faults but at least it's coherent
| and embraces what it is.
|
| https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/279-welcome-to-eberron-an-in...
| coolsunglasses wrote:
| I just finished posting a comment disagreeing with the author
| and I think you've nailed the problem with their argument more
| succinctly than I did. They're assuming "Forgotten Realms" and
| AD&D, not OD&D.
| kagakuninja wrote:
| The author was specifically referring to the original 3 book
| rules, which pre-dated Forgotten Realms by 13 years.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the original setting_
|
| Forgotten Realms was not the original setting of D&D. To the
| extent there was one, it was Gygax's Greyhawk campaign.
| baxuz wrote:
| TIL. I thought that Greyhawk and Dragonlance came after
| Forgotten Realms!
| coolsunglasses wrote:
| This post takes the way D&D is played today to be how Gary and
| his contemporaries played D&D and it leads them to the conclusion
| that D&D is the opposite of medieval.
|
| As near as I can tell, patrons, village leaders, barons, and
| kings were very intentionally a part of the schema of a typical
| original D&D campaign. They used 1:1 time, players had multiple
| PCs, and you often led mercenaries into battle (cf. Chainmail
| rules being incorporated for this purpose)
|
| What's weird is the author appears to be au fait with some of
| original D&D (they mention Chainmail), but then they make claims
| like:
|
| >While you can create a barony, there is no way to level up and
| become a duke or King
|
| I mean, you definitely could, but it's a question of what the
| scope of the campaign is meant to be. That's between the DM and
| the players. Just because Gary Gygax didn't address every
| possibility explicitly doesn't mean it was considered and assumed
| to happen in some campaigns.
|
| >There's no evidence for (or against) the idea that OD&D takes
| place in a dark age after a fallen Roman Empire analogue or
| during the death throes of a feudal kingdom.
|
| The magic system of D&D is largely based on Jack Vance's Dying
| Earth series which is a post-apocalyptic and exhausted Earth set
| in the far future. Between that and the _sheer number of ruins
| littered all over the landscape_, I would tend to think that
| there's plenty of room for a DM to weave a background history of
| a fallen empire into their setting.
|
| The author seems to expect Gary Gygax to have played the role of
| someone like Tolkien rather than what Gary Gygax actually was: a
| systems builder who was interested in designing systems for
| interactive games humans play together.
|
| >The monster descriptions of "men", "elves", and "dwarves" don't
| suggest that the game is set in a European culture.
|
| What? Just because there are corsairs doesn't mean there isn't a
| strong Old World flavor to the elements of D&D's cast of
| cultures. Barbary pirates were a relevant force in European
| history.
|
| >OD&D is meant to be setting-free. The game's referee is to
| create his or her own campaign, ranging in milieu from the
| "prehistoric to the imagined future" (with emphasis on the
| medieval, especially for beginners).
|
| This is an accurate statement.
|
| What the author's saying here fits better for AD&D than it does
| OD&D. There's some insight and reasonable points about D&D not
| being Feudalism Simulator 2024 (play Dark Albion if you want
| that) but they take the idea further than the facts on the ground
| can bear.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| D&D was inspired by Sword & Sorcery novels, not history. And I
| wouldn't call it the "American Dream" - maybe the Wild West,
| which was a very short period in the history of the USA.
| gavmor wrote:
| This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points.
| Largely, I agree, but the author makes a mistake that's extremely
| common in the hobby: they presume that the author of the book is
| the authority of the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax
| et al. was that the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas,
| and needed only some reference points to pin them down.
|
| One might as well refer to my garage toolbox as "anti-Cabinets"
| for containing no hinges.
|
| And these anti-Medieval fixtures from the text aren't even
| necessarily _central_ to the experience. Hiring retainers is a
| hand-wave, a way to get back to the meat of the game: prying gems
| from the eyes of enchanted statues.
|
| I guess my point is that the most accurate possible exegesis of
| the Gygaxian canon misses, almost entirely, the heart of the
| game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table, and not in the
| book.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table. It's
| at the table where the game is being played, by the rules that
| the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever really played
| before, and a way everyone ended up playing since.
|
| You can barely call D&D anti-medieval; it isn't from a world of
| obsessing about Tolkien-style fantasy. It's Gygax coming up
| with rules for miniatures wargaming where players are
| _individuals_ within a group rather than being entire sides of
| a war and moving armies, or being squad-level and choosing how
| to move squad members. That was the important part that
| influenced the entire world. All of the players were part of a
| single squad, and working (and cooperating) as individuals for
| their own benefit.
|
| These rules were then applied to Gygax's (and everybody else's)
| favorite fantasy novels. The thing that varied most about those
| novels was the idea of magic, so the only influence on his
| system from fiction that I recall is the stat-friendly Jack
| Vance magic, which would end up imposed onto other settings.
|
| But it's still fair to call the system anti-medieval as the
| article does because it was made for a competitive multiplayer
| tabletop game which was meant to progress over sessions, and
| the main aspect of its progression are stats. So it has to be
| as fair as possible, and you have to be able to accumulate
| indefinitely rather than die in the same place you were born
| with no more than your parents had. That's American myth, not
| medieval reality. There can't be a medieval system, because
| that would crush all of the characters, starting by burning all
| of the witches. If every character were a fighter trying to get
| ahead by fighting in an army, there's no D&D, because D&D is
| individual, not squad or army.
| creer wrote:
| The original books missed the idea of initial motivation on
| the "adventurer" career path. Why and how did even these
| first level characters end up this way. That makes the rules
| and settings awkward and necessitates the world to contain
| bait for first level characters. Like posters seeking guards
| for (incompetent) caravan escort duty or that kind of thing.
| Some people noticed that and tried to formulate 1st level
| adventures or entire world settings which did not start with
| a fully formed 1st level fighter or mage. Perhaps you start
| as a bored teen farm hand, or something extraordinary happens
| in your life but it helps if there is something that kicks
| you outside of "normal" medieval life and into something far
| more individualistic.
| jfengel wrote:
| In my experience, there are an awful lot of people waiting
| around in taverns for somebody to show up with some sort of
| quest. Fame and fortune in return for killing the bad guy
| and returning the crucial artifact he stole.
| crooked-v wrote:
| > So it has to be as fair as possible, and you have to be
| able to accumulate indefinitely rather than die in the same
| place you were born with no more than your parents had.
| That's American myth, not medieval reality.
|
| The medieval era actually had a pretty decent number of
| wandering mercenaries and adventurers, many of whom were
| displaced people from the neverending ongoing local wars
| across the centuries. (Of course, these groups were also
| basically interchangeable with bandits if they were broke.)
| Just look at the Varangian Guard, which recruited itinerant
| soldiers from all over Northern Europe from the 900s pretty
| much right up until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans.
|
| This all kicked into even higher gear in the Renaissance and
| later. As central monarchical control grew, so did army sizes
| and the impacts of those armies, leading to entire villages
| being wiped out or displaced entirely as a side effect of
| being in the way of an army passing through. Conflicts like
| the Thirty Years' War led to immense numbers of deaths and
| famine (current estimates say 4-8 million deaths just from
| the Thirty Years' War, for example), and consequently to
| immense numbers of migrants looking for work anywhere they
| could.
|
| The part that didn't exist was, of course, the dungeons.
| There was no nominally ethical-concern-free money sitting
| around underground; the source was other people, willing or
| not. But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale
| alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting
| each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I can
| give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually
| figured out any coherent setting explanations for it.
| whythre wrote:
| "But the whole point of D&D was to have a small-scale
| alternative to the "armies or mercenary companies fighting
| each other" gameplay that it originally sprang from, so I
| can give a pass on that, even if the writers never actually
| figured out any coherent setting explanations for it."
|
| 'A wizard did it' is almost always the in-universe reason.
| Whether it is Halaster Blackcloak or a Red Thayan or
| Acererak, it is usually a magic user doing it to mess with
| people. Which, as I type that out, kinda just seems to be a
| barely disguised expy of the role of the GM...
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I don 't buy that the "heart of the game" is at the table.
| It's at the table where the game is being played, by the
| rules that the game sets up. In a way that no one had ever
| really played before, and a way everyone ended up playing
| since._
|
| To an extent, yes, but while, as I responded to the GP just
| upthread, I think Gygax's view, at least with AD&D, was that
| every game should be played a certain way, I don't think
| that's what actually happened. Every D&D campaign I have been
| in has had plenty of house rules, ignored some of the
| standard rules, and in the end, if what the rules said didn't
| make sense at the table, the rules got thrown out and
| everyone just roleplayed what made sense at the table. So in
| the end, I think the heart of the game _is_ at the table;
| that 's where the actual stories are made. The rules are a
| helpful framework for cooperative storytelling, but they
| don't and shouldn't be the final determiner of what happens
| in your world.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > All of the players were part of a single squad, and working
| (and cooperating) as individuals for their own benefit.
|
| Sorry, I'm not sure if this is specifically referring to
| Chainmail or early D&D. If the latter, this is explicitly not
| how Gygax (and Arneson) ran their campaigns back in those
| days, though. They had groups of people playing that
| fluctuated in the 30-50 player range, and people often had
| multiple characters specifically because they frequently did
| not have the same people at the table each session. They were
| in the same shard, persistent world, but there were many
| different parties, and they all decided on their own goals.
| These often conflicted - adversarial interactions between
| groups were things that happened! B2 - Keep on the
| Borderlands - even includes a lot of details around how the
| DM should handle such situations, how the players can protect
| their treasure from other players, etc.
| upwardbound wrote:
| That sounds amazing!!! I would love to be part of a gaming
| community like that (in-person I mean) with party vs party
| interactions in a single unified & fluid unfolding plot.
| The closest thing I've read about to this (but never
| participated in) is the "Grand Quest" in Drew Hayes'
| excellent litrpg series _Spells, Swords, & Stealth_, which
| is still being written. The audiobook format version of the
| series is especially captivating.
| https://www.audible.com/series/Spells-Swords-Stealth-
| Audiobo...
| cthalupa wrote:
| It's a very different way to play than most people get to
| experience now, and one that I think is a lot more fun!
|
| Ben Milton of Questing Beast has a great video on the
| concept - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBsxmHs070
| pdonis wrote:
| _> they presume that the author of the book is the authority of
| the game, whereas the presumption made by Gygax et al. was that
| the Dungeon Master was overflowing with ideas, and needed only
| some reference points to pin them down._
|
| Original D&D may have been more or less that way, but anyone
| who read the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide will see
| the opposite: a profusion of detail laid out by Gygax himself,
| with strong implications all over the place that this was The
| Correct Way to run a D&D (or at least Advanced D&D) campaign.
|
| _> the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the
| table_
|
| I agree with this, and I think Gygax probably would have said
| the same if asked, but at least as far as AD&D is concerned, I
| think what Gygax meant by "at the table" was "at the table as
| long as things are run the way I think they should be run".
|
| And of course no discussion of D&D and Gygax would be complete
| without the classic XKCD requiem:
|
| https://xkcd.com/393/
| cthalupa wrote:
| Hmm. I still play a mix of ADD 1E and Basic/Expert twice a
| week, and regularly re-read the 1E DMG. I think Gary has a
| lot of ideas about how D&D is best played, and is happy to
| share them, but between what's written in the DMG, all of his
| posts on dragonsfoot over the years, etc., I can't agree that
| he thinks the only way to play D&D (or even AD&D
| specifically) is the way he envisions it.
|
| In fact, he's always known that the overwhelming majority of
| players have not ever played D&D the way that he did during
| the OD&D/AD&D 1e days. You have to remember that Gygax and
| Arneson's campaigns were much more like a tabletop precursor
| to MMOs than what we think of today when we talk about TTRPG
| campaigns. Both of them were running persistent worlds where
| 30-50 players were dropping in and out constantly, often with
| multiple characters involved in different things, multiple
| parties, etc. Time ingame ran linearly with time in the real
| world (thus Gygax's repeated insistence that strict time
| records must be kept), things happened in-world even when no
| one was playing, etc. But it's always been a tiny minority of
| games that were run this way, and Gygax knew it and knew that
| most people playing would have difficulty doing it the way he
| did.
|
| You also have to remember that Gygax explicitly states in the
| DMG that players should not know all the rules and that you
| should distrust any player that has a copy of the DMG, and
| has many places where he recommends the DM adjust things as
| they see fit for their situation and table. He also was in
| favor of DMs fudging rolls when they believed it to be the
| right thing to do! And there's also his quote of "The secret
| we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't
| need any rules" - to me, all evidence points towards Gygax
| believing that the heart of the game really was at the table.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > This was a good read, and the author makes convincing points.
|
| The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is
| Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world
| characteristics.
|
| When the game world clashes with what narrative is being
| presented, they retreat to minutia. When the game world makes
| no reference, a reasoning is constructed without reference.
| Topics are repeated - eg no feudalism and no vassals and no
| kings (which is incorrect and handwaved away as it serves
| them).
|
| I think it's empty prattle, reeking of being edgy, and seems
| more than a little strange to show up on HN.
| handoflixue wrote:
| Can you actually provide any citation for OD&D containing
| feudalism or monarchy? Certainly, later versions add it, but
| I found myself nodding along going "huh, he's right, the
| original version didn't have anything that really resembles a
| large-scale government at all."
|
| Every version of D&D contains the idea that a random peasant
| can go make a name for themselves as a monster-slayer and
| become a baron. Land is literally free for the taking if you
| can just clear out the beasts. That seems much more American
| Dream / Colonialism, and not at all European / Medieval
| history.
| upwardbound wrote:
| Fair enough. I forgot the name of this ruleset, but there's a
| very simple D20-based game ruleset which is designed for
| beginners but IMHO is more fun even for everyone, as it focuses
| on creativity and storytelling! The rules are very simple:
|
| (1) The players take turns. They describe what they want to do,
| and the DM narrates the outcome, incorporating a dice roll into
| the process if needed, because:
|
| (2) Any significant action requires a dice roll, which cannot
| be re-attempted if failed.
|
| (3) A roll of a 1 is a critical failure (a guaranteed failure
| even on an easy task such as cooking pancakes), and a critical
| failure during combat causes accidental self-injury. A roll of
| a 20 is a critical success, which always succeeds (e.g. a level
| 1 archer can destroy a level 18 Elder Dragon if they aim for
| the eye and roll a 20). Any roll between 2-19 is compared to
| the difficulty level of the attempted action. Difficult actions
| require a roll of around 16 to succeed; easier ones, perhaps
| around 12. The raw dice roll (if between 2-19) is supplemented
| by adding around +1 or +2 if the player has invested skill
| points into the relevant skill, and by also adding around +1 or
| +2 if the player is using high-quality specialized equipment
| for the task.
|
| That's it! Of course you probably also want to incorporate
| standard gaming tropes such as levels, gold, HP, MP, weapons,
| armor, and such, but all of that is not meant to be set in
| stone within this system - e.g. if you want to try using a pair
| of sapplings and some rope as a giant improved slingshot
| weapon, that's meant to be allowed to work, in this system
| (albeit maybe with a -3 adder to dice checks, since the
| weapon's quality is probably total crap). It's about being nice
| to each other and encouraging each others' creative ideas, so
| the team + DM can tell a totally new and perhaps unexpected
| story together.
|
| When I explain DND-like games to people, I usually tell them
| about this system, because it's very welcoming, and encourages
| people to try out new ideas and find creative solutions to big
| tasks. A campaign can be super open-ended; e.g. "Destroy
| Sauron's ring - by any means - open world". With these rules,
| all sorts of creative ideas (such as the classic idea of asking
| one of the giant eagles to fly over Mt. Doom and simply drop
| the ring into the open caldera of the volcano) can be
| attempted, and can succeed, if the players are plucky and
| resourceful!
| WangComputers wrote:
| ACKS fixes this
| PeterCorless wrote:
| The author might make broad sweeping generalizations but the main
| point is true. A group of PCs is basically a democracy. Such D&D
| democracy makes roleplaying in strict social hierarchies pretty
| difficult. PCs will mouth off to kings or wizards or even
| deities.
|
| I clearly remember how such "D&D PC-ism" influenced the relative
| flopping of the early Star Trek RPG [FASA, 1982
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Role_Playing_Ga...].
| The main reason? No one wanted to be ordered around by a Captain
| PC, or by other PC officers that outranked them. Players wanted
| to be "equals." (While Star Trek TTRPG did have fans and survived
| for a long while, it never really took off as many hoped it
| would.)
|
| Another reason, though, is that it did not satisfy the bloodlust
| of the typical "hack and slash" D&D fans (what are now called
| "murder hobos" -- wandering bands of characters with no
| allegiances, no lords, no loyalties). These types of players
| couldn't just use the Enterprise's phasers to hold planets
| hostage and take all their loot. They couldn't just be space
| pirates. They thought the universe of Star Trek was "boring." In
| GDW's Traveller, by contrast, you could definitely (in due time)
| get a ship capable of hurling nukes at planets. You _could_ be
| space pirates! Now that was "fun!"
|
| It is often difficult to get many D&D players outside of their
| modernisms and into a medieval mindset, or into any sort of
| realistic strictly hierarchical society (as shown, even in
| Science Fiction).
|
| I've run Pendragon for decades. It can misfire spectacularly if
| players refuse to put aside their modern mindsets and adopt the
| concepts of chivalry, feudalism, courtly love and faith
| (Christian or otherwise) that are central to its themes and
| historical source materials.
|
| I had a whole session in this past year where I went through the
| ancient Brehon marriage laws under late pagan/early Christian
| Ireland. (btw: It's a far cry from "Say Yes to the Dress.")
|
| D&D is more like a typical Renn Faire. A motley assortment of
| anything from ancient to nearly modern dress. A cross-time saloon
| of attitudes, weaponry, cultures and so on. What passes for
| society is made up from kit-bashed models. It rarely makes
| cohesive sense.
| isk517 wrote:
| The Star Trek RPG might have done better if it was released
| today than in 80's. YouTube pen and paper role playing shows
| have lead to more people being interested in the actual role
| playing aspect and not just murder hoboing.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| One factor in the emphasis on role-playing is that "kill
| monsters and watch numbers go up while navigating a mostly
| linear narrative" is quite well addressed by video games...
| We go to the table to do things we can only do at the table.
| crooked-v wrote:
| There's a decently successful Star Trek RPG right now
| (https://modiphius.net/en-us/collections/star-trek-
| adventures).
|
| I would put the gradual failure of the FASA system more on
| the same basic problem a lot of licensed RPGs have: it's an
| elaborate simulation wargame that happens to use the same
| setting, rather than a game designed to actually feel like
| the experience of the show. This is extremely common to the
| point of absurdity, to the point that even official Doctor
| Who and My Little Pony RPGs have done it.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Yeah but then you see how the historical unconscious reveals
| itself: not in the "true" history trapped in books but the
| lived memory in the world. Of course modernity has infested all
| historical understanding, but it also reveals things,
| unconsciously, about history that a rigorous analysis could
| never show: and thus to redeem true history is also the bring
| it to a point beyond historical recognition.
|
| You need both: you need to critical historical understanding,
| but you also need the real world exercise of collective memory,
| so that you can break through history to bring about something
| entirely novel.
| the_af wrote:
| Good comment!
|
| > _The author might make broad sweeping generalizations but the
| main point is true. A group of PCs is basically a democracy.
| Such D &D democracy makes roleplaying in strict social
| hierarchies pretty difficult. PCs will mouth off to kings or
| wizards or even deities._
|
| But D&D (and its descendants) make this _particularly_ likely
| to happen, right? Take Paranoia as a different extreme. You
| cannot mouth off to authority figures in Paranoia because it
| will get you killed in a second, and the rules encourage making
| you trip and get killed because you said the wrong thing to the
| wrong person (or Computer).
| keybored wrote:
| In this episode of HN we learn that people want adventure and
| excitement and not a Medieval court simulator.
| krapp wrote:
| Honestly, I would expect a fair number of people on HN to
| want a medieval court simulator.
| beloch wrote:
| If you made a completely faithful and realistic medieval role-
| playing game, only sociopaths would play it.
|
| Even if such a game started players off in positions of enviable
| social status, the things they'd be required to do to maintain
| order would be so distasteful that only seriously screwed up
| people would want to continue playing. The obstacles set up by
| society in the way of going on any sort of adventure outside of a
| few strict avenues (e.g. a pilgrimage or crusade) would be so
| infuriating that even sociopaths would be hard-pressed.
|
| Medieval society is _seriously_ alien. We can look back on their
| art, literature, architecture, etc. and see their humanity
| shining down through the ages, but we 've carefully tended and
| cared for only the portions of medieval culture that still hold
| appeal. From top to bottom and in almost all respects, medieval
| society would shock and horrify us today.
| yyyk wrote:
| What's mentioned here is trivially 'fixed', it's setting stuff
| which can filled in.
|
| The bigger issue is the magic system and description, especially
| combined with the very active divine system. D&D without it could
| be a zero-sum ignorant world like medieval times. The magic and
| divine systems transform it into an almost scientific world with
| magic replacing science. We can't easily 'fix' this like the
| setting stuff.
|
| To get a more static result, designers then need to introduce
| powerful enemies, limit magic to a few people so the results of
| research can make little social difference, and since that's not
| enough (the PCs must have access to magic and work against the
| enemies), introduce almost regular cataclysms. That's still not
| enough, since the attitude is still a modern one ('we can fix it
| with tech^W magic').
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| cf "Papers & Paychecks":
| https://www.explorersdesign.com/content/images/2024/04/7f35a...
| subjectsigma wrote:
| I mean, did anyone really think D&D was an accurate
| representation of medieval life in any sense of the word? It's
| interesting to talk about medieval life but the pretext for the
| article is flimsy. If someone really thought non-blood-relative
| peasants commonly traveled the land in autonomous groups earning
| money doing side jobs and largely ignoring the law, then I guess
| we needed this article, but...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| D&D is the fever dream of late medieval merchants, guildsman, and
| other proto-bourgeoisie.
|
| It's depopulated because of the black plague.
| DEADMEAT wrote:
| Perhaps I'm oversimplifying things, but I have personally always
| assumed that using "Medieval" to describe D&D was almost entirely
| a reflection of the (non-magical) level of technology, and not
| anything societal or cultural.
| the_af wrote:
| Interesting. The article does mention the aspect of
| tech/weapons to mention it's not particularly "medieval"
| either:
|
| > _The D &D weapon list has a medieval feel to it, but partly
| that's just because that's what we're expecting to find. In
| fact, it's a sort of survey of (mostly) pre-gunpowder weapons.
| Most of the weapons and armor appear in ancient Europe and in
| Asia as well as in medieval Europe. Partial exceptions:
| Composite bows are mostly non-European, while longbows are
| associated with Europe. The halberd is basically a Renaissance
| weapon, and the two-handed sword appears in medieval Europe,
| India, and Japan, but not the ancient world. No one knows what
| "plate mail" is supposed to be._
| notjes wrote:
| But societal, cultural and political concepts and traditions
| are technology too.
| cthalupa wrote:
| Early D&D didn't really make any sort of assumptions about
| technology level, either. Arneson's campaign was heavily
| implied to take place in a post-apocalyptic future - Blackmoor
| was full of advanced technology, including nuclear powered
| flying cards, lasers, androids, etc.
|
| Gygax himself didn't lean into it as hard, but there were
| plenty of fairly gonzo modules that did include aspects of
| future and/or alien technology.
| paperplatter wrote:
| No, D&D is definitely set in medieval Europe except with magic
| added, and the mythical creatures are based on European fairy
| tales (albeit ones before the medieval era). The weapons are also
| medieval era specifically, with types of swords and armor that
| didn't exist prior and weren't used later.
|
| Maybe it doesn't represent feudalism, but this was the
| inspiration, not the USA. And macro economy isn't a focus in the
| game. If you want to make it fit, you could say the adventurers
| are not adhering to the system, rather they're rebels, nomads, or
| pirates.
| crooked-v wrote:
| If anything it's much more Renaissance than medieval, what with
| the prominence of aesthetic-defining heavy armors.
| paperplatter wrote:
| I can see that, but plate armor was prominent in the later
| middle ages too, pre-Renaissance. And D&D has no gunpowder
| weapons, which were starting to be common in the Renaissance.
|
| Then again a lot of "medieval" movies/TV/games mix
| Renaissance stuff in.
| ender341341 wrote:
| the DMG has Pistols & Muskets, and there's also Laser
| Rifles in at least Rime of the Frostmaiden. They just tend
| to not get used cause they don't really fit in the rest of
| the setting.
| jghn wrote:
| > and the mythical creators are based on European fairy tales
|
| My copy of Deities & Demigods had gods from mythology that came
| from all over the world. Not just European derived.
| creer wrote:
| It's the whole point of the fine article - that very little of
| actual medieval Europe is in there. It's only in there as a
| faint backdrop meant to provide some kind of "comon" image in
| the mind of the players. Exactly like the early sword and
| sorcery stories, or Conan comics.
| Steko wrote:
| I think the author's issue is he conflates feudalism, which is
| generally held to begin in the 10th century, with the entire
| medieval period, which is traditionally dated as starting in
| the late 5th century. He also thinks of feudalism as this
| static culturally defining force but in reality it waxed and
| waned depending on the time and place.
|
| It also had some huge holes in who and what it covered, and
| it's not hard to imagine any of the OD&D classes (cleric,
| magic-user, fighting-man) in those gaps. The largest of these
| gaps by far was The Church, but we also have universities
| (which developed under protection of the church), guilds (which
| developed in places under protection of the universities), and
| the rising merchant class (who could form guilds to reinforce
| their power). There were also mercenaries, hermits and various
| other free people.
| sigy wrote:
| I find the overall assertion to be grasping at a counterpoint.
| Particularly, 1. The reference to "Medieval" labeling goes all
| the way back to the beginning when D&D overall was nothing but a
| seed and an experiment. Modern materials do not come with the
| same presumptive labeling. 2. There is good reason to not include
| all the trappings of life in any particular era, as the core of
| D&D is a set of rules, and all the settings are simply versions
| of content that work on top of it. There are many such settings
| and they decidedly do not come from the same time and place. 3.
| Many of the arguments take the form of "It's not ..." wherein the
| thing that is not explicitly medieval is also not explicitly not-
| medieval. For example, it's easy to consider the texture of towns
| and villages as we generally see them in D&D as operating within
| the tapestry of an explicitly medieval (as the author describes)
| environment, or within any variation thereof as desired by the
| DM. Similarly you could also say "D&D does not explain how to
| make ice cream accurately." It was never _seriously_ about being
| medieval nor seriously about making ice cream.
| karaterobot wrote:
| D&D is the rules system. You can bolt on your own setting,
| including a hyper-realistic medieval world. I GM'd that game, or
| its derivatives, for almost 26 years, and never really used their
| (frankly terrible) generic fantasy setting, since the fun part
| for me was coming up with our own world. There's nothing
| mechanically that prevents you from running a medieval game with
| D&D rules. There are better systems for it, but there's nothing
| stopping you. You just don't want to.
|
| I don't blame you for that. I don't want to run one either. Which
| may point us to why D&D is ahistorical: a realistic medieval game
| would be of limited interest to most people.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Duh. D&D has only ever had a "medieval aesthetic" going all the
| way back to "Advanced" 1st edition.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Core d&d is lord of the rings and the hobbit, with much more
| powerful magic.
|
| Really the essence of the game is right in the name: dungeon
| crawl, fantasy creatures. Everything else is a bolt on.
|
| Personally I apply a rule that there is no way to "mass produce"
| magic effects. Each spell invocation is unique based on local
| conditions/environment, and enchantment of magical items is
| unique to the item, even if quantities, materials, shapes, etc is
| precisely identical.
|
| Otherwise magic is essentially more powerful than modern
| technology and medicine: infinite power generation, cure
| anything, raise dead, invulnerability, produce almost anything
| from thin air, know anything, teleport anywhere, and it would be
| inevitable that machines would be made to do so
|
| It is kind of like the navigators in dune, although that has a
| prohibition on computers, I believe that computers pre jihad
| couldn't compete with spice enabled navigator prescience.
|
| What was always funny to me as a teenager was the price tables
| for castles like barbicans, crenellations, etc: I had no idea
| what these were before the Internet. I knew towers, walls keeps.
|
| Castles themselves seem much useless in the age of dragons,
| flying carpets, disintegrate spells, and flying mounts. There's a
| reason the US military doesn't have castles for defense.
| Jiro wrote:
| D&D isn't American history. It's fantasy fiction. The "American
| History"-like elements come from fantasy fiction, where someone
| like Conan could become a king and there are unexplored areas
| full of hostiles all over the place.
| scelerat wrote:
| "You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval
| European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. "
|
| At various points (the original Dungeon Master's Guide, for
| example, page 88), he also has said it's expressly _not_ a
| European Feudal game, and goes at length to qualify that, saying
| that it is only one of many sources of inspiration, and describes
| a number of political systems possible in a campaign and explains
| ways a variety of societies could be woven into it.
|
| So, yeah I suppose if you've only read a little about D&D you
| could be forgiven for thinking this, but there is a large body of
| in-game and supplementary official and fan-created rules and
| settings which should give no one the impression that at any
| point were game authors and players as a whole were going for
| feudal european verisimilitude (or opposing it, for that matter)
|
| Blog post is interesting but the title and initial setup is kind
| of a strawman
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