How faithful should a culture be adapted in an RPG?

[AbdulAlhazred]

In recent times there has been a increase (as far as I can tell) of having or at least demanding faithful adaptations of cultures into RPGs.
But most of the time those adaptations leave out parts of the culture people find distasteful or evil (and are thus only used for dedicated BBEG cultures). Things like slavery, human sacrifices, ect.

But I wonder how faithful a adaptation of a culture is in the end when you leave out, sometimes quite significant, parts of it. You can't simply remove slavery from ancient Rome and still have a faithful representation of it. Slavery was a central part of how their society worked. Same for human sacrifices and the Aztecs.

What is your stance on this? Do you think a adaptations which leaves out all of the bad aspects are still faithful? Or would you prefer to have both the good and the bad paths when content is supposed to adapt and represent a real world culture?

Haven't read the rest of the thread yet, so forgive me if I am going over the same ground again:

So, think for instance about 'human sacrifices and the Aztecs'. To YOU (and probably to be fair to the vast majority of the living descendants of the Aztecs) this was some sort of ghastly and reprehensible practice. To the Aztecs themselves it was a holy act! Had they failed to provide these sacrifices the world itself would die! I'm not a super expert on Aztec and general Mesoamerican lore and myth, but clearly they were not carrying out these rituals with a plan of being some sort of horrific evil dudes. Not at all, they saw themselves as highly upstanding moral people who were doing their duty.

Obviously there are also OTHER perspectives on whatever the Aztecs were doing. I'm sure the subject people whom they were mostly sacrificing were not seeing it quite the same way. So these are EXCEPTIONALLY complicated matters and there's no easy way to say they are handled correctly if you depict a society like this!

Now, the above is a pretty extreme thing, it gets even more tricky when we are dealing with something like the treatment of and attitudes towards women in some part of medieval Western Europe! Clearly there are still a considerable number of people around who hold exactly those same attitudes today, and a lot of our institutions, etc. still represent this kind of thing, even where it is now considered a bad thing. How we should approach that is quite a hairball, and given that we're (speaking as a person of Western European descent) the inheritors of that culture, surely nobody ELSE has a better claim to depicting it (or maybe they do, which is an interesting question).

Heck, do I know 'an answer', nope! I am of the opinion that there isn't any single answer. Probably if you are going to do a depiction of a culture you are not knowledgeable about, you would be wise to consult people who are, and who have experience with this sort of thing. Sadly game designers rarely have the means to do that, so often RPG products of that ilk manage to evoke some facepalms... (at best).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This isn't obvious to me.

A lot of D&D settings seem to adapt a romanticised version of mediaeval European cultural tropes and social structures. Why isn't the same approach reasonable when it comes to, say, China or Japan or Mali?

Maybe it is, but TSR OA (for example) does that, and commits MANY rather egregious sins in the process! So, sure, you can do it, and I mostly agree with your assertion, but you still have to know your material and understand how it has been historically (mis)treated, etc. Especially with a culture like Japan this could be quite tricky!