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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.
> 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.
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.
referring from memory to little paper-bound books and dice sold in Berkeley, California.. yes there were kings and monarchy and Feudalism in the games. Granted the emphasis was on playing one or more characters that started at a "low level" and worked their way up, in many many ways, per their character type and other factors. Lots of changes from those versions but.. city characters might even pay taxes? A different thread comment says something about the Dungeon Master being the real core imagination factory and this is correct. Spelled out quest dungeons were few and carefully done -- the bulk of the printed content was rules and guidelines for the DM and players to use in a turn-based game of essentially their own stories with their own names of places and characters.
> The meaning of MEDIEVAL is at the heart of this. D&D is Medieval, as it has markedly and prominent medieval world characteristics.
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 (and much fantasy) is the inverse of theatres staging Shakespeare in modern dress. Macbeth can be made to look modern by having modern suits and a set resembling an office or whatever, but the language and cultural attitudes depicted are still renaissance.
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.
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.
> 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.
“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…
> 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.
I would have said the dragons were a much more obviously non-existent part, but sure.
Komodo dragons would like to have a word with you
I would say that things like afterlife, divine intervention and souls are non existent parts.
The clerics in Constantinople no doubt prayed very hard during the Fourth Crusade but it didn't work.
> 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.
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...
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
cool! Thanks for sharing this
> 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
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.
> 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.
Gygax didn't insist everyone play his way all the time, he didn't even play that way himself all the time. But he did deeply want a "standardized" way to play to exist, for things like tournaments.
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.
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.
Vancian magic is so unusual and unfit for most settings... Plus the idea in Vance's books is completely different from how it's used in the games.
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!
I have never liked the "20 = critical success = always succeeds", mainly because I can with a 5% chance end a "Destroy Sauron's ring" adventure in 40 seconds with "I attempt to destroy it by hitting it with a hammer, like, really hard."
"Always succeeds" is up to the DM's interpretation.
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".
Yeah, it was never in its literal sense but more like "you get the best possible outcome for this action".
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.
> 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.
No, because (even aside from the whole DM judgement and rolls only for things that can succeed thing):
“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.)
Simply put, a DM should not allow you to roll in that situation. You only roll for things you might possibly succeed at. If I had a player at my table say that, I'd simply reply "Your hammer bounces off of it with great force, but as you examine the ring, it is unharmed."
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.
And the "critical failure during combat causes accidental self-injury" rule quickly turns any combat-heavy campaign into slapstick comedy.
> 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:
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.
IIR by the time AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was published, there were already a bunch of blooming competing systems, with different dynamics between explicit and implicit, not to mention the combat systems. Those alternates include the Arduin Grimoires for example! Not everyone read or stuck with AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide but some did.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>But how, then, are we to recognize paradigm shifts?
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.
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.
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.
This is the thing: When you "draw the conclusion" you're making shit up. "The roman empire collapsed" <all good "because..." <beginning of making shit up.
All history books should begin with "A map is not the territory" to remind historians what's going on.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's because feudal is a technical term that has a long and misleading history of being used as a deliberately confusing term of abuse. The professors get ornery about it because they have to clear up the same misconceptions every year. For "dark age," many professors also try to take the opportunity to revise their students' perspective by deliberately highlighting brighter themes of art, philosophy, and so on to jazz up their introductions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know how the RPG hobby played out in Japan, but I'm unfamiliar with other countries' experience.
Has anyone written about this?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakar_och_Demoner was pretty big in sweden.
And has now come full circle to be played at my table in the US. The new version (under the name Dragonbane for its English version) is published by Free League Publishing and is quite good.
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.
Oh, so you own a Mercedes-AMG Project One, then? After all, that's the car with the highest production values.
Can you expand on the Japanese context?
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.
Call of Cthulhu was notable for the fact that players' combat skills were inevitably their weakest.
> unbeatable grudge monster .. with you up to that point.. but listen, unspeakable dread is just a few notches over "grudge" (!)
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.
For clarity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)
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.
I was talking about the original version of D&D that came in a box with three booklets and required Chainmail for combat.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
I know what you mean.
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.
Consider this: Why not write fantasies about non-anthropomorphized dogs or jellyfish?
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.
Many stories throughout history have spoken to deeper metaphysical truths rather than reflecting contemporary society and its ills. There's a perfect modern example. While calling it a "story" is a stretch because of its creator's famed preference for leaving the bits scattered about and letting players put together the pieces, once reassembled, Elden Ring's background lore is an excellent counter-example.
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.
> Many stories throughout history have spoken to deeper metaphysical truths rather than reflecting contemporary society and its ills.
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.
>I really wish authors would write books that authentically described an alien society
How does one "authentically" describe something no human has ever encountered?
Can you go elaborate on this concept of baristacore? I'm guessing you mean something broader than Legends and Lattes?
Imagine a LARP group out of Williamsburg.
Did you coin this term? I can't find it anywhere online but I _LOVE_ it.
Never heard this term in the context of fantasy gaming, but I'm stealing it.
Despite never directly playing AD&D or any other TTRPG, I consistently get sucked into the fandom aspects of it, including a period of binging the Mann Shorts productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW8kYzDNw1I
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.
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.
>>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).
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.
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.
verisimilitude, not coherency. The real world doesn't appear coherent, why would a fantasy one. The consistent application of style and rules- that gives verisimilitude, and that's what counts.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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?
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.
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.
You just made me realize that what made the latest Dungeons and Dragons movie so fun is that it cribbed a lot from Discworld. It has an irreverent sense of humor but never sacrifices the consistency of its world for a cheap joke.
Each book is internally consistent but across the books it is not. So maybe not the best example.
I don't think this is true though.
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.
> 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.
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.
I wouldn't count sparse details as lacking realism. (I'm not defending the premise of LOTR being realistic.)
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.
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...
Since the planet is covered with independently evolved farming communities, I think it's plenty realistic to allow one in a book.
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?
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.
Ah, so that’s why Sam calls Frodo ‘Mister Frodo’
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! :)
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 Grzędowicz: this twist is so obvious that all the build-up feels kinda insulting to the reader's intelligence.
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...
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.
I sorta wish the Horizon video games’ presentation indulged the present perspective more rather than eyewink at every turn.
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.
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.
So Thundarr the Barbarian?
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.
It's like Mckenzie Wark's argument in Gamer Theory that no matter what civ you play in Civilization, the win condition is alway becoming America. https://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/index.html@p=102...
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'
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?
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.
You can't get 1 gold piece = 10 silver piece without a consistent monetary scheme. That was in OD&D at https://archive.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=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.
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.
People analyze works of fiction all the time.
"'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'.
Comment was deleted :(
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.
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.
If you haven't played Horizon Zero Dawn, I highly recommend it :)
The follow on sequel was a bit hit-or-miss though. :(
Or it might be a reconstruction of a broken world after the events of Ra (https://qntm.org/ra)
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...
Case in point, Spelljammer
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.
Mystara was earth-but-hollow, with the good stuff on the inside
... Why would people be fighting with swords and maces in such a setting? And why would the rulebook present a clear dichotomy between arcane and divine magic? Or suggest bringing in Tolkien references?
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.
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.
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.
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.
They've demonstrated an interest in watching talented others do serious role-play (and also acting, which is largely orthogonal); but does that really translate into a desire to try it themselves?
In this episode of HN we learn that people want adventure and excitement and not a Medieval court simulator.
Honestly, I would expect a fair number of people on HN to want a medieval court simulator.
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).
Wow, negative score on my comment. People seem to feel so strongly about this. I was punished.
I feel like a Troubleshooter that mouthed off to Friend Computer!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Wouldn't that lend credence to the author's claims? That it only appears to be a medieval society, but is instead something very different (a liberal capitalist world after grand social dissolution). After all, the two adventure/roleplaying game series that Bethesda is/was known for are The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, the latter, at least, explicitly taking place in a post-apocalyptic universe.
I think the discussion itself is kind of a weird one to have. Most of the author's point is about OD&D, but OD&D itself was a very short lived phenomenon. People pretty rapidly moved to either the AD&D or B/X line of products, and there are some departures in the rules, and both lines added official rulebooks that do explicitly contain things that go against a lot of the author's points. And basically every table from the start has had a pile of house rules (or at least generalized processes) to handle situations not explicitly called out in the rulebooks. Much of the question of feudalism is more of a campaign setting question than a rules question - plenty of people played campaigns back in the day in settings where there was royalty, where you would have to purchase or otherwise acquire land rather than just plopping down your claim somewhere.
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.
It's a fairly common trope in old-school CRPGs. M&M and Wizardry are some other prominent examples of "wizards & spaceships".
I'm not seeing the connection with Bethesda, am I missing something?
There's a company that is famous for two series, one is a fantasy roleplaying game, one is a post-apocalyptic role-playing game, but the story and the structure of the games are nearly identical and the in the latter the mechanics and gameplay make a lot more sense in the context of the story than in the former.
But societal, cultural and political concepts and traditions are technology too.
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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.
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!"
Interesting.
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.
Yeah if you're leaning towards someone playing older rule sets or OSR, you're definitely going to find it to be rare. I have never seen tables with that overlap (very in-person roleplay heavy + older style rulesets) personally.
I think we're on the same page then if I understand you. My preference would be for old rule sets and not in person roleplay heavy. i.e. play styles that more mirror the norm of the older days. Thanks!
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
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.
> 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.
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.)
Disclaimer is very relevant because TFA seems to be very specifically discussing the original DnD, which is not what 90+% of people will think of when reading "D&D", which I think is confusing some of the discussion here. I think other settings like the ones you mentioned have a more developed society that in most cases does not necessarily fit "American dream fantasy" and is inspired by something more medieval or something else, although I still get the impression some of the things said still apply: "Most of D&D’s thousands of imitators, in game and fiction, preserve the game’s democratic bones (cash economy, guns for hire, rags to riches stories) while overlaying a medieval-European skin."
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.
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
I’m amused that people use the actual canon and not just asserting a god into existence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
That would be bad DMing and isn’t an issue with using an existing pantheon or not.
You made up god may turn out to be an arch-fey who got a little in over his head.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's actually a race in D&D, the Kuo-toa, that did exactly that.
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.
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.
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.
I assume you haven't read anything written by Vance, because magicians in there are so much more like wizards, especially in the '70s, and arguably still today, than anything Gandalf ever did. Such as their continual quest to amass more spells and their memorizing of The Excellent Prismatic Spray.
If you read the books D&D lists as influences, it's pretty obvious where most of this stuff comes from.
Agreed. And not only the spells: magicians in Dying Earth (Vance) behave pretty much like the psychopathic murder-hobo trope of the D&D player stereotype.
Vance's magicians are childish, petty, reckless, vindictive and power hungry.
Hah yeah. I like to say that D&D has the soul of Vance with a coating of Tolkein. It's not 100% true as there's lots of influences, but as a DM reading that series made me think "this explains so much".
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?
D&D was definitely, uh, borrowed quite heavily from Tolkein. Even using creatures that Tolkein invented.
Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII
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.
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.
Elves were more imps than tall, eternal sages. See Santa’s elves.
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.
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.
> Elves were more imps than tall, eternal sages. See Santa’s elves.
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.
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.
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.
Damn peddled pastoral conservatism! I far prefer the pansexual libertines of Baldur's Gate 3.
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.
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 :)
Pretty much, except World War 1.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel say what?
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.
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.
"Inspired by events, and write them into your story" is what an "allegory" is.
An allegory is a moral fable. It's a similar genre to Aesop's fables or parables. A relatively familiar example is Animal Farm.
> 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_of_the_R...
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
Didn't he write mostly before the public knew about the bomb?
Legends of magic rings (and crystal balls) that have malign influence are much older than Tolkien.
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.
The Ring provided much more power than that, especially to bend (masses of) people to your will, see their minds, etc. It was believed that if Sauron got it, he would be unstoppable. IIRC, some character said it provided power matching the user's 'stature'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I think the Osgiliath battle lasted for many years? Not exactly trenches, but it was the only suitable river crossing in that area
It was one swift attack that managed to push the Gondorians out of the eastern half of the town, that also marked the beginning of the war, and one surprise attack with boats 9 months later to take the western half that a few weeks before the end of the war.
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.
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.
Wasn't "one ring to rule them all" a metaphor for nukes?
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
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.
> Tolkein, I think, is pretty much Beowulf + WWII
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).
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.
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.
Also for me same experience, only difference is the setting, I was playing Dragonlance
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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.
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.
1e literally had examples on how to blend the game with other games such as Boot Hill, Gamma World, etc.
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?
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_Barrier_Peak...
> 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.
I never played 1e, I started with ADnD 2e.
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.
Every campaign I can remember from that era was customized enough that the players and DM would joke about it being "2.5e".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Yeah, there's a lot of spatial and social compression. Bethesda RPGs are the same way, again for technical reasons.
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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.
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.
> 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?
> 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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd expect nothing less from a crowd that's informed enough to reference Dunning-Kruger and Gell-Man effects but not self-aware enough to realize they themselves will still fall for them.
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!
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If anything it's much more Renaissance than medieval, what with the prominence of aesthetic-defining heavy armors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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').
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.
British fantasy RPGs in general have far more Jabberwocky (1977) in them than the American ones.
Basically everything is covered in shit.
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.
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/7hzz1l...
The original blog post is gone I think,
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.
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.
> epic high fantasy
In the early days it was much more of a low fantasy environment. The epic high fantasy angle grew over time.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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...
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.
> 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.
TIL. I thought that Greyhawk and Dragonlance came after Forgotten Realms!
This Wikipedia article has a good timeline showing when the various D&D settings were first released:
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).
Note that Blackmoor existed as a game setting before D&D was ever published. Arguably it's where the role playing aspect of it came from, as Dave Arneson was heavily influenced by, and participated in, Braunstein games.
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The author was specifically referring to the original 3 book rules, which pre-dated Forgotten Realms by 13 years.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Was looking for this!
I can’t wait for this buzzkill to state that Warhammer 40K is “anti-future.”
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.
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.
> Core d&d is lord of the rings and the hobbit, with much more powerful magic.
Originally it was much more Conan the Barbarian & other such pulp fantasy stories than LOTR.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I don’t think they rolled dice to decide who won in combat either. I agree, what are we doing here??
> 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.
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Counterpoint: Why in god's name would I want to play a fantasy adventure in a "realistic" medieval setting?
Because Ars Magica is a really good game.
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!)
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...
Fair enough but that's not fantasy.
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.
Having tried it myself: because it can be really fun! More magic, more dragons, more princesses does not inherently make a story better.
Why should you hate the idea?
I mean, I don't think the author is claiming that you should; they're just saying that it's not medieval.
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> 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.
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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
I believe you are correct; OD&D is the holmes/moldvay/etc. books that existed before AD&D, but I'm not certain.
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
Fascinating, thanks! One of the things I love about D&D is that there's so much historical density to it.
As an atheist D&D always annoyed me, but it was created by Americans so nothing you can do about that.But it gets especially weird when everyone knows demons and hell exist.
In reality our ancestors have always dealt with a silent god. Something that even in medieval society did not go unnoticed.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think Conan the Barbarian is pre-antique. That is set in period somewhat before written history. So in sense it not anti-medieval.
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?
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.
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.
Popular on HN: https://acoup.blog/tag/lord-of-the-rings/
D&D is the fever dream of late medieval merchants, guildsman, and other proto-bourgeoisie.
It's depopulated because of the black plague.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Duh. D&D has only ever had a “medieval aesthetic” going all the way back to “Advanced” 1st edition.
cf "Papers & Paychecks": https://www.explorersdesign.com/content/images/2024/04/7f35a...
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.
"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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
‘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.
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.
Markets, however, have always existed as long their have been towns, see Braudel.
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.
This problem has been recognised more or less since capitalism was conceptualised; Adam Smith warned about it, for instance.
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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
No, it's not "anti-medieval" it's medieval fantasy. Or in the words of the greats “Rules for Fantastic Medieval War Games”.
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…
Sure, but then why call it medieval at all? The term only fits if you define "medieval" as unspecified "olden times" (or circularly, "what D&D calls medieval").
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"?
Charitably: because of what you mentioned, it gives people an idea of the level of non-magical technology and helps build the world.
Uncharitably: it sounds cool and most people won’t know better or even care
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.
Sorry did you read it, the point was there is literally nothing medieval/feudal except the fact that there are swords and pointy sticks.
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!
If you want to see an actual fantasy feudal setting check out Burning Wheel.
ACKS fixes this
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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