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.
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.
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!
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
... 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
[+] [-] gavmor|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Supermancho|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pessimizer|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] upwardbound|1 year ago|reply
(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!
[+] [-] pdonis|1 year ago|reply
Original D&D may have been more or less that way, but anyone who read the AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide will see the opposite: a profusion of detail laid out by Gygax himself, with strong implications all over the place that this was The Correct Way to run a D&D (or at least Advanced D&D) campaign.
> the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table
I agree with this, and I think Gygax probably would have said the same if asked, but at least as far as AD&D is concerned, I think what Gygax meant by "at the table" was "at the table as long as things are run the way I think they should be run".
And of course no discussion of D&D and Gygax would be complete without the classic XKCD requiem:
https://xkcd.com/393/
[+] [-] lou1306|1 year ago|reply
[1]: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/
[+] [-] jcranmer|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sevensor|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] hibikir|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] brudgers|1 year ago|reply
The original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for adventuring between dungeons).
Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall. D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.
[+] [-] brudgers|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kagakuninja|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] netbioserror|1 year ago|reply
For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.
[+] [-] lacker|1 year ago|reply
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 ;-)
[+] [-] pnathan|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AStonesThrow|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] WereAllMadHere|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] baxuz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|1 year ago|reply
Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.
[+] [-] A_D_E_P_T|1 year ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] twoquestions|1 year ago|reply
It takes place billions of years in the future in what it calls the "9th World", when some mysterious beings just went away.
[+] [-] kombookcha|1 year ago|reply
The titular outsider hero falls from the stars in a little space pod as a baby and is raised by the local Viking-proxy culture ala Superman or Goku. Quite an engaging read if you're into this blend of sword and sorcery with background sci-fi elements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorgal
[+] [-] mcphage|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shinjitsu|1 year ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_4HBH6Z-Iw
[+] [-] eesmith|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tiborsaas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mglz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cthalupa|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wizardforhire|1 year ago|reply
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k5ulTt5Km3Y
[+] [-] slightwinder|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zahlman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] PeterCorless|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DEADMEAT|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] boccaff|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mybrid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pyuser583|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ajuc|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ElectricSpoon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] davidashe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stolenmerch|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] prmoustache|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shermantanktop|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] curtisblaine|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] paperplatter|1 year ago|reply
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.