Eldritch_Lord
Adventurer
There is no difference between PC-stuff and NPC-stuff except for the existence of NPC classes, and nothing prevents a PC from taking NPC stuff or vice versa. PCs aren't Super Special Snowflakes that are completely unique in the world. Yes, the DM can (and apparently, in your case, usually does) hand-wave NPC stuff, but they gain the same levels, use the same rules, and have the same abilities as PCs do. It may be too much trouble to get nitpicky with the numbers in many cases, but the rules are there.
My point was that you have the paladin class, CoDzillas, and other characters resembling templars/inquisitors serving churches that really don't fit--Ehlonna doesn't really strike me as the type to command her followers to go out and stamp out evil, yet you can have a "Purge the undead!" paladin worshiper of Ehlonna, and most PC clerics of Ehlonna are going to be doing the same thing--but the rest of the trappings of the Templars aren't really there.
The Church of St. Cuthbert could easily order a crusade against evil, and that church somewhat resembles the Catholic Church...as could Kord's church, which doesn't resemble the Catholic Church at all. For that matter, you could have a bunch of LG wizards and rogue launch a crusade into the Abyss. Crusades don't make you like the Catholic Church, the sociopolitical structure and temporal power surrounding you do.
No more power by virtue of being a priest, I said. Yes, there are several churches who do have plenty of temporal power, and thus their priests have some as well--but powerful wizards, druids, rogues, fighters, etc. can have the same power. A medieval layperson could never have the kind of power a priest or bishop did, who had the full power of the government and the Church behind him and whom the local people trusted implicitly in spiritual matters, but it's perfectly possible for a Pelorite to live under a Kordite with plenty of political power and for the Pelorite to view him as no authority on the divine while acknowledging his political power.
I don't see how I'm claiming to play the "right" way at all. The real-world Crusades were part religious mission, part military campaign, part political strategy, and part land-grab on the part of knights. Islam was no more evil than Catholicism was, and no more wrong or right, so anything painting the other as "the bad guys" was necessarily propaganda. In D&D, if you call a "crusade" on evil, you can 'port right into the Abyss, the demons pin on your evil-dar, and you can hack away with the assurance that the creatures you're killing are, in fact, evil. There are many things in D&D that are very vague and gray, morally speaking, but "LG paladin goes and smites demons" isn't really one of them.
Do note that I said the medieval Catholic Church specifically. Druids and rogues were not exactly part of the Church.
Let's.
Considering that (A) Cimmeria was more Bronze Age than Medieval and (B) Conan is best represented in D&D by a fighter/rogue, I would disagree. If you had used Vikings, that would have worked better, but they were pre-medieval.
Shakespeare was also called a bard; does that make the bard English?
You're right that the 1e bard was very much based off Celtic culture; they were fighter/thief/druids, had more of a focus on poetry and arts, belonged to colleges with Gaelic names and so forth. However, by 2e and later into 3e, that flavor fell away to some degree--as per to Wikipedia, "According to the second edition Player's Handbook, the bard class is a more generalized character than the more precise historical term, which applied only to certain groups of Celtic poets who sang the history of their tribes in long, recitative poems.[3] The book cites historical and legendary examples of bards such as Alan-a-Dale, Will Scarlet, Amergin, and even Homer, noting that every culture has its storyteller or poet, whether such as person is called bard, skald, fili, jongleur, or another name.[3]"
The current and 2e bards aren't really Celtic at all, but rather a jack-of-all-trades class with a much greater focus on deception and magic tricks than storytelling and poetry. That sort of bard is much closer to the illusionist of 1e than any real storyteller.
Again, the 1e cleric was very much based on the Catholic priest--one picture even had him in the Roman collar! And of course most low-level cleric spells are based on the myths of Jesus's miracles. However, again the cleric has changed over the years; the 2e cleric was but a subset of priest rather than a super-class on its own, meaning that the cleric was bumped down from a full class to just a subclass equal to the druid. The 3e cleric can wield bladed weapons, cast what would be considered very non-cleric-y spells in prior editions, and otherwise break the mold of the Catholic templar.
I never claimed that D&D was based on the Renaissance, and I never mentioned the Romans at all. I said the technology level and society were closer to the Renaissance than medieval times, so saying "Look! It's not Renaissance!" doesn't prove anything.
It's definitely much closer than D&D is.
9-Rogue. The Rogue can be seen as pretty generic too... Still as far as D&D is concerned, just check the art, and tell me if that isn't Medieval.
Robin Hood is written all over the place...(ok Robin is both a Ranger and a Rogue...
Robin Hood, the dashing scoundrel who's deadly with a bow, is represented by the dirty fighter who sucks with a bow after 30 feet? No, my friend, the rogue started out as a thief, and is essentially based on Bilbo the Burglar and the Gray Mouser.
Gandalf and Merlin resemble wizards in name only; they have the Knowledge skills and the cantrips, but both could be better represented by bards--and let me remind you that one was a constrained archon and the other was a tiefling.
Someone already posted Gygax's quote about how D&D would require some work to run in a medieval world. And Elminster looking like Gandalf doesn't mean that they or their worlds are similar in any way; you could just as easily compare him to Santa Claus, with the white beard, the funny way of speaking, the ability to teleport and read kids' minds, and the extradimensional storage.
1) D&D magic isn't real-world magic. Magic in D&D is a repeatable, testable, natural phenomenon--in a word, science. No one goes around burning witches in D&D because (A) frankly, pissing off a D&D wizard powerful enough to become noticed as an "evil witch" is suicide and (B) their magic is as beneficial as it can be harmful.
2) I don't use magic-as-technology, but have you looked at what low-level spellcasters can do for a town? Many cantrips and orisons resemble technological advances in that they solve medieval problems the way technology did. Disease kills your population thanks to poor living conditions? Prestidigitation + cure disease. Famine kills your crops? Plant growth + create water. And so forth--and remember, every little town has 3+ caster in it, which is enough to minister to the whole town.
As noted in the second paragraph of the article, the sort of plate armor pictured in D&D is the Renaissance-era helmed Gothic armor rather than the earlier styles.
1) I'll give you this one; I was thinking specifically of the halberd and guisarme, which didn't come into popular use until the very tail end of the Middle Ages.
2) Rapier? Scimitar? Yes, the majority come from the medieval period, but there are plenty of weapons that were developed later or even outside of Europe. And, surprise surprise, the Renaissance period saw the use of these new weapons as well as the older ones.
Flying cities?
Right... I forgot how they appeared during the Renaissance for the first time...
Magocracies and meddling gods
Yep... forgot how they appeared during the Renaissance too...
(On a side Note: The catholic church & the Inquissition, was a magocracy if you think about it?
*sigh*
Once again, I haven't been saying D&D resembles the real world, I've been saying that, if it resembles anything in the real world, it's closer to Renaissance-level technology and social norms. Flying cities are very much a non-medieval construct.
And the Catholic Church wasn't a mageocracy (or, more properly, a theocracy), seeing as their priests couldn't do anything useful for their populace the way D&D priests can.
As I noted above in the section on class origins, 1e was definitely more grounded in medieval Europe. D&D has come a long way since then, and hasn't been "Medieval Europe + MAGIC!" since midway through 2e. In fact, one could draw interesting parallels between the 2e/3e transition and all of its caster-favoring changes and the Industrial Revolution.
