Search results

D&D has always had a tendency to struggle with acknowledging some basic features of pre-modern social orders!

I'm not trying to promote a universal norm. I'm just expressing a view that I have, and one that I thought @Micah Sweet - to whom I was replying - might appreciate.

Sure, they might be a necessary component of a sufficient condition for fascism. But they are far from sufficient on their own. And they are absence from Greyhawk. Whereas full plate - at least in my imagination, which as I've posted is not especially well-informed on the history of metallurgy...

I know what fascism is. It emerges in modernity, in response to particular changes in social and economic life. A peasant society and economy, of the sort that typical D&D worlds (including Greyhawk) envisage doesn't have those elements. Just to pick a couple from your list, a peasant economy...

Not really. I know a great deal more about historical and political sociology, than I do about the history of metallurgy. So in my imagination, the metallurgical techniques needed to produce plate armour can be imagined to develop within a predominantly agrarian economy, especially one that has...

I don't know what this means. The PCs don't exist, and so game perspective doesn't apply to them. And within the fiction, why is it unfair that someone might be punished by their god for breaking a divine commandment? Thank you for posting a reason.

I realise that. This proposition - which is a statement about the fiction - entails nothing about who is exposed to what risks in the play of the game. That is a matter about the actual rules and procedures of play; not about the fiction. In terms of game play, can you see the difference between...

D&D relies very heavily on discrete rules components - generally presented as either spells or magic items. This has been a feature of the game since its inception. 3E, 4e and 5e change this only insofar as they use structurally similar rules components to represent other abilities also. Trying...

This is nonsense. The Forge is still archived, as best I'm aware, and you can read thread after thread stepping people through problems in their games, and offering solutions. It was from reading those threads that I learned how to analyse my own play, and - as a result - how to systematically...

Do you have a reason for your assertion that there is no unfairness? I mean, both the player of the fighter and the player of the paladin have picked valid "playing pieces" for the game, and are participating in the same sort of way. The rules that govern the resolution of the actions they...

Well, as I said, verisimilitude in the setting is reasonably important to me. That's why I take the bits of Greyhawk that work in that respect, and generally ignore the stuff - political anachronism, Boot Hill cross-overs and the like - that don't.

The consequences here isn't something handed down by impersonal forces. It's decision-making by the GM. I think this is what @TiQuinn has in mind in referring to fairness - as in, it's not fair that some players are exposed to the risk of the GM deciding that they should lose their class...

Because you think about what the players have said before you write the next page or two of your novel!

Consistency and historical accuracy are closely connected. I mean, political movements don't come from nowhere. Fascism is a political response to certain features of modernity, so it doesn't make sense in an economy and society that is overwhelmingly agrarian with some pastoralism on the...

I don't think this is true at all. The best-known terminology still seems to be that that moved out of rec.games and into the Forge; and the purpose of that was to create a language (i) for designers, and (ii) to help characterise the various things we're doing when we play RPGs. The single...

It is for me, given my preference for verisimilitude.

I've used the Scarlet Brotherhood quite a bit in my GH play, but never really incorporated the racial superiority aspect, which always struck me as a bit silly. (Especially in a game which tends to use mechanics to express those sorts of differences, and doesn't apply such mechanics to different...

As do I. (Maybe not as much as you, I don't know, but enough to be dangerous at least.) But WotC doesn't draft with the sort of care that would readily support a formalisation of their rules. They are very informal in their use of referring terms, and the way they express generalisations.

That's an aspect of Gygax's game I've always ignored in my own play. But fascism is arguably anachronistic even for the Old West, depending I guess on one's view of Louis Napoleon's regime.

I've got no view about the balance issue. Just a view about drafting and interpretation, which is something I know a fair bit about.