D&D is Anti-Medieval
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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.
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.
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.
‘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…
I would have said the dragons were a much more obviously non-existent part, but sure.
The clerics in Constantinople no doubt prayed very hard during the Fourth Crusade but it didn't work.
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.
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.
Ben Milton of Questing Beast has a great video on the concept - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slBsxmHs070
There were ways people could advance in medieval society: https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/people-social-m...
No doubt more in some places and times than others: there is a lot of variation over a thousand years and an entire continent or more.
On top of that the player in D & D are not playing very low ranked characters (they have weapons and money, are free to adventure, etc.) and are adventurers of some sort so are exceptional to start with. Clerics even belong to a group that could rise a great deal through ability (albeit by showing administrative or leadership ability within the organisation rather than by going off on adventures).
> sarting by burning all of the witches
Witch burning was more of an ancient and early modern phenomenon than medieval.
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:
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.
Dragon Magazine #22 (February 1979) eventually came out with a sneak peek at some of the tables needed to resolve combat.
Otherwise, yes, during that gap time there was a lot of homebrew solutions. Cobbling together elements from OD&D, Basic Edition (July 1977), 3rd party supplements (Arduin Grimoire, Jan 1977), etc. You did what you could with content gaps and often-conflicting sources.
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.
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.
That's the important part for me, too. The general idea I always ran with was that "medieval" in the context of D&D (and most role playing games with that setting) referred to the environment (castles, villages, etc) and technology level (swords, bows, etc; sometimes early firearms).
As a general rule of thumb, it didn't go into government at all, because that's a aspect of the campaign setting. The actual campaign settings (Greyhawk, etc) defined various governments, everything from kings/emperors, to mage groups, to dragon kings.
D&D has the swords and castles which makes it look somewhat medieval on the surface, but the culture of the world does not resemble medieval times at all.
(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!
Rather than "destroy sauron's ring", it's more like "you dislodge a mysterious gold coin that was stuck to the bottom of the table".
For example, if the player is attempting something totally stupid the 20 result might even be "and nothing bad happened", as nothing better was possible (for instance it is impossible to break the one ring with a hammer, so even not totally wrecking your powerful hammer could be a great outcome of such a foolish action).
Or a 20 for asking the eagles for help might be that they bring you half-way, as the eagles wouldn't want to get too close to Mt. Doom anyway.
I'd also add that ideally (if the DM is fully in the spirit of how this can be played for maximum creative storytelling potential), asking/negotiating for the assistance of the Eagles wouldn't be a single quick dice roll, but rather a complex, possibly hour-long session of courtly intrigue, diplomacy, and politicking, featuring many dice rolls, a lot of carefully chosen words, and a lot of favor-trading and maybe even intimidation. Ideally, getting straight to Mt. Doom via the Eagles should really be achievable, but not with just a single roll of a 20 - rather I imagine it would perhaps involve a concerted and creative effort by the whole party during at least an hour of playing time.
And then, there will be numerous dice checks to survive Mordor's anti-air assets (including probably cool eye beam lasers from the Eye of Sauron tower) and to accurately land the ring in the volcano despite buffeting wind. If any of those checks fail and the ring falls into inert dirt, the party would probably have to quickly send a commando team into Mordor to rapidly finish delivering the payload to target before Sauron's mages arrive in overwhelming force. Would honestly be more fun to play through one of these semi-failure disaster scenarios than an easy win!
Even if / when the party defeats Sauron, they don't have to stop there. For example, they could set their sights on investigating and stopping the reason for the waning of magic from the world, or any (ideally noble, or at least villainously entertaining) goal of their choosing. They could even e.g. research and create dimensional travel magic and hop to a totally different setting such as that of Star Wars.
“Success” on a roll to hit with a weapon is just that: hitting, not destroying. And, well, hitting the One Ring with a weapon doesn't short-circuit the adventure (see Gimli at Rivendell.)
If they complained that they didn't get a chance to roll the dice, I'd explain to them that they're misunderstanding the purpose of dice in the game - it's to provide randomness to situations where outcomes are uncertain.
In the inverse case, I wouldn't make someone roll the dice for mounting their horse when breaking camp if their character is someone who is familiar with riding horses, or to not spill their flagon of water when taking a rest in the dungeon.
Particularly for older versions of D&D, players went out of their way to avoid rolling dice whenever possible - dice are dangerous! Roll poorly, and you don't succeed. You might even die! And the ability to resurrect the dead is far more limited for older editions - player characters being effectively immortal outside of TPKs is a much more modern change.
[1]: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/
And many get similarly spun up about the term "feudalism" as well.
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.
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.
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.
The strength of the argument and supporting evidence. Big claims need big evidence. Simple as. One problem specifically in history today is many historians can get by their whole career by being an X historian where X is some political ideology or social science construct. They can write endless papers analyzing existing work through that lense whether or not it makes sense to do so or really adds anything to the body of work. This is where a lot of revisionist history comes from. They aren't performing original research and finding new evidence and sources. They are merely critiquing the work of others through their chosen lense.
The worst form of revisionist history is of course just denying the facts as they are known and inventing your own. But thats is rare within serious academia these days with a few notable exceptions.
All history books should begin with "A map is not the territory" to remind historians what's going on.
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).
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.
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.
Part of that is just that particular specialty trying to make a case for itself in contrast to the more popular classical and modern periods. Then there is the complexity added by the fact that the classical era never really ended in toto; it just stopped being as evenly distributed.
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.
Has anyone written about this?
Tormenta and Old Dragon are pretty popular as well.
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.
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.
For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.
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 ;-)
There's a huge retrojection problem going in a lot of fantasy right now.
I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society, rather than wish casting "vague liberal fantasy with different clothes"(usually liberal, but libertarian authors do it too, same problem, different lumps under the clothes).
Now, I wonder: would that sell? I dunno.
But I might scream the next time I read or see an "other" society dumping duty for individualism as per European upper crust romanticism. Again.
Art, inclucing fantasy, always has been a mirror to reality (not 100%, of course). Otherwise, nobody would understand it, it wouldn't move them, and they wouldn't care.
Also, it would be very hard to write well. People write well about what they know. Hemingway famously advised that you need to know the entire iceberg to write convincingly about the tip.
It tells a story of deeply alien societies ruled by mysterious and grand powers. Unsettling, strange, and defined by extremes. But those extremes have roots in the deepest parts of the human psyche and immediately resonate when uncovered. Ideology, faith, rebellion, hierarchy, immortality, death. All of its characters, motifs, and locations are so clearly derived from classical myth and tragedy, even carrying many of the same metaphorical lessons. But taken at its face, it bears no resemblance to anything that has ever existed in human history. It is not immediately relatable and confuses most people until things start to click into place.
I'm convinced of two things by my experience digging through Elden Ring: 1) Most people are not creative enough to imagine something uncomfortably alien but which still has something timeless to say, and 2) as you said, it's astoundingly difficult to write such a thing well. For example, I regularly read Year's Best Sci-Fi compendiums, and many of those short stories miss the mark. They reach too far and are unable to connect. But each book has at least one story nails what good sci-fi should: Saying something resonant in the context of a human or alien society with technology and practices that are uncomfortably different, but where that difference elevates the central thesis.
We agree; we are just misunderstanding each other: Deeper metaphysical truths fit in what I intended by "mirror". I wasn't restricting it to "contemporary society and its ills", though those also fit.
I meant that it's hard to write something that is not a reflection of our experiences, perceptions, emotions, etc. It's hard to write from a bat's actual perspective, for example, or from the perspetive of a fictional alien with no connection to human perception or experience.
Its my long standing observation that people with a varied and interesting life history make the best fiction authors, rather than those who loved books and went straight into writing fiction.
which probably is the problem.
How does one "authentically" describe something no human has ever encountered?
there's a whole light genre of cracked-esque material "10 things you had no idea about from back when" that exists, just dial that up to 11. Get _deep_, and you will put the player / reader into someplace most will never have dreamed of. ( https://writerthereseoneill.com/ makes a specialty of doing pop history in that genre - I recommend her books)
imo when you dig hard enough into a very different human society, you start getting into the heavy questions of "what makes us human", and that is _interesting_.
D20 rules applied, usually, to "slice of life" situations and mixing in four strong personalities, with zero production values, just talking heads around a table, rolling dice.
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
That certainly isn’t the case for The Lord of the Rings and the rest of Tolkien’s development of his world.
The Shire is, in basically every respect, including its economics, an idealized version of the English countryside.
https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/2024/05/31/the-moral-eco...
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.”
But of course if you expect consistency where there is none to being with you will likely be disappointed.
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.)
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?
I find the strongest differences are between early and later Pratchett, but there are big streaks of consistency across novels, especially within a "sub-series", e.g. all the Watch novels, all the Witches novels, all the "industry" novels, etc. Even they are often consistent across subseries.
That's why I think Discworld is surprisingly consistent, all things considered.
I don't know about realism, but coherency is absolutely required for any fantasy world(imho).
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.)
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.
And you're welcome! I hope you and your son have fun! :)
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...
It takes place billions of years in the future in what it calls the "9th World", when some mysterious beings just went away.
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.
How does a currency system stay so stable across thousands of years?
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=gold 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.
"'The Tempest' as an allegory for European colonialism? It's just a play."
My comments in this thread concern textual evidence which cast doubt onto A_D_E_P_T's proposal that "The only rational way to interpret D&D is not as medieval, but as a distant far-future post-post-industrial setting."
I found the thesis that OD&D draws from US expansionism to be interesting. The fact that later games tried to implement more realistic simulations is besides the point.
In fact, the essay author observes that by doing so it takes away from the 'American fantasy of empowerment and upward mobility' which was perhaps 'the last un-muddled example of the genre it inspired'.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
I feel like a Troubleshooter that mouthed off to Friend Computer!
A little known story: there was a player in Dan Gelber's social circle who was a total rules lawyer. He annoyed Dan & crew immensely. So Dan created a game where it was treasonous — reason for summary execution — to show any knowledge of the rules. They had a lot of fun killing that player's character over-and-over.
> 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.
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.
The argument the author is making is messy because it mashes together the dichotomy of old school D&D versions vs. the modern equivalents. Originally, D&D was a framework that you built on top of. You might adhere fairly closely to the rules as written, but they were intentionally quite basic in nature, and additional structure and systems almost always came as part of your campaign milieu and table-specific needs. Modern D&D has significantly more rules - it's a more complete game, with all the good and bad that entails. Neither have a mechanism to force you to use any specific portion of them, and many people don't.
I agree with the sentiment that D&D is not pro-medieval, though depending on which rulebooks you use it might incorporate aspects of medieval society and structure. I also don't think it's anti-medieval, because that implies structure that isn't there. Any given campaign or table might be more or less medieval than any other and still be totally authentic D&D.
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.
(Alcohol may have helped. And hindered.)
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 :)
However I get the impression that this is the standard play style today.
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!"
To be clear, I do mean more than just NPC voices and am talking about the style of play where everyone is acting a bit. And yes, not unlike those recorded shows, albeit usually less good. And not saying there's anything wrong with it, it's just not for me.
Between what I'd seen online & from friends who play these days I've had the impression that this is much more dominant over what I encountered in the 80s - where that was the less common style. Instead I saw more "my character/I do XYZ", more of a focus on the mechanics of everything vs the RP.
Perhaps I'll poke around a bit then. I'm really only interested in 1e or perhaps 2e but I know there's the whole OSR thing going on so that's easier to find these days.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII
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.
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.
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.
You have the several turns on the Battle of Osgiliath, and Boromir alluding to Gondor paying the cost for holding the frotiers with Mordor.
I don't know if it's mentioned anywhere what happened in the meantime, but Denethor says he's expecting an enemy strike against Osgiliath shortly before the second attack happens, so it can't have been an active frontline at the time.
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 Nazgûl 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.
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
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.
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_of_the_R...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't he write mostly before the public knew about the bomb?
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.
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.
> thats a little reductive.
I prefer to think of it as dimensionality reduction :)
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.
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.
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.
Post-christian elves were diminutive. But Tolkien was using pre-christian myths as a foundation for the LOTR. The elves leaving Middle Earth is a metaphor for the old legends being replaced by sanitised children’s stories.
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.
Tolkien was a/the leading scholar and Old English and the associated languages and cultures, including the myths. His knowledge was far deeper and wider than Beowulf. Much of the material in his books were from those myths.
Also, WWI was perhaps the greatest influence on Tolkien's life. Tolkien was an officer at the front; almost all his friends died in that war and his entire battalion was killed or taken prisoner (while Tokien was away recovering from illness).
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 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.
If you read the books D&D lists as influences, it's pretty obvious where most of this stuff comes from.
Vance's magicians are childish, petty, reckless, vindictive and power hungry.
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
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.
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.
They have guns and smoke powder in 5e and it just doesn't feel right.
Game of Thrones with cowboys carrying torc grenades?
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_Barrier_Peak...
One of the settings for the game that became OD&D included far-future alien technology (Blackmoor), so there's long been precedent.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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).
And the murderhobo style is as old as D&D itself.
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
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then again a lot of "medieval" movies/TV/games mix Renaissance stuff in.
My copy of Deities & Demigods had gods from mythology that came from all over the world. Not just European derived.
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.
Basically everything is covered in shit.
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/7hzz1l...
The original blog post is gone I think,
Some of the pages are on archive.org apparently.
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').
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.
In the early days it was much more of a low fantasy environment. The epic high fantasy angle grew over time.
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.
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.
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...
Forgotten Realms was not the original setting of D&D. To the extent there was one, it was Gygax's Greyhawk campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_campaign_...
Note that Blackmoor and Greyhawk, at least, were used by their respective creators/DMs (Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax) for quite a few years before being published. I suspect that's true of at least some of the other settings as well (Forgotten Realms was Ed Greenwood's campaign world before it was published--it looks like it was a D&D campaign world more or less from the release of AD&D 1st Edition in 1978).
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.
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.
DnD is mostly just big in the US due to historical reasons.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(campaign_setting)
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.
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.
Originally it was much more Conan the Barbarian & other such pulp fantasy stories than LOTR.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_plate_armour
It's literally the first search result.
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.
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)
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
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...
However everything is a little fuzzy in that sphere, sometimes anything before 1e is called Classic D&D.
OD&D predates both and was the original release.
"... 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?
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.
It's depopulated because of the black plague.
In reality our ancestors have always dealt with a silent god. Something that even in medieval society did not go unnoticed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
The point, as I understand it, is that there are other terms that would fit the setting somewhat, and medieval does not fit the setting at all (save for in terms of technology). So if you're going to call it something, why medieval as opposed to Renaissance or post-feudal or wild west or Middle Ages anarchy or "the time of the murder hobos"?
Uncharitably: it sounds cool and most people won’t know better or even care
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.
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.
Interestingly enough, this is subverted in the first edition of AD&D- XP for killing was negligible, you got most of your XP based on gold/treasures amassed, once you hit the XP requirement for the next level you had to pay a mentor or trainer NPC ridiculous amounts of gold to have them train you for in-game weeks to actually gain it. If the DM felt that your characters play style did not reflect your classes archetype in a way that would allow them to "learn" ie if you played a magic user and never cast spells or used magic items he could deny you the level outright or impose a leveling or XP penalty on you. But understandably enough getting a report card from your DM every session on how you're playing your character "wrong" wasn't popular enough to stick around as a mechanic.
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.