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Would a typical D&D town allow adventurers to walk around?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6364574" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>It is a fine novella, but that's not what it is about. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>It's not like people ran around 24/7 in mail. And there is a reason robbers generally stole a person's clothes - it was generally the most valuable thing they possessed. The regalia of nobility in cloth was just as much beyond the means of a peasant as the mail was.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Yes, it does. Which demonstrates that prior to the introduction of passports and other positive means of identification, strangers and particularly strangers across cultural boundaries simply didn't trust each other. Odysseus, Frodo, Beowulf, Aragorn and the like are not trying to establish that they are strangers - they are trying to establish that they are not strangers. Much of the free commerce - and I mean that in the older sense of the word and not merely the modern - of modern society is built on the idea that we don't need to establish trust. We don't worry over much about our honor and our reputation because we don't need these things to function in the society. We don't worry about being shunned. We assume our money is good everywhere. People don't care who we are or who they are doing business with. In a world of unstable currency, no financial institutions, no credit ratings, no criminal background checks, no means of establishing identity or a person's history, being known is essential to ordinary relationships. The markers of ones identification is the tangible witness of ones body. If someone can't vouch for you - "I know him, he has a scar on his shoulder" - what can you do? That's why branding was such a terrible, effective, and arguably needed punishment. It let someone imprint an identity on you that a stranger could recognize.</p><p></p><p>If two strangers had to establish their identity, they had to do so through a mutual acquaintance. Who do you know? Beowulf isn't known to the border guard. So he proves his identity by recounting the experiences someone who was Beowulf would have to know. "You can believe I am Beowulf, because I know who Beowulf is, and you can trust me because someone has shared with me the intimate details of the lives of people you trust." Aragorn does the same thing. "You don't know me, but you can believe I'm a friend, because I know things about you and your people only a friend would know." It's like saying, "I'm a friend of a friend, and I can prove it because I've been reading your facebook feed." Faramir asks the same thing of Frodo. "If you really knew my brother, describe him to me. By what signs was Boromir known?"</p><p></p><p>So the world without passports is hardly easier for the game of D&D to handle than the Qin dynasty. That's why I don't really do a fully medieval game. Not only is it just about impossible for players to mentally handle, but the entire concept of 'adventurers' as its usually done in D&D doesn't make much sense in a society were almost no one has the right to travel or bear arms. You could do it, and it might be interesting, but the social roles the PC's would initially find themselves in would be constraining.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6364574, member: 4937"] It is a fine novella, but that's not what it is about. It's not like people ran around 24/7 in mail. And there is a reason robbers generally stole a person's clothes - it was generally the most valuable thing they possessed. The regalia of nobility in cloth was just as much beyond the means of a peasant as the mail was. Yes, it does. Which demonstrates that prior to the introduction of passports and other positive means of identification, strangers and particularly strangers across cultural boundaries simply didn't trust each other. Odysseus, Frodo, Beowulf, Aragorn and the like are not trying to establish that they are strangers - they are trying to establish that they are not strangers. Much of the free commerce - and I mean that in the older sense of the word and not merely the modern - of modern society is built on the idea that we don't need to establish trust. We don't worry over much about our honor and our reputation because we don't need these things to function in the society. We don't worry about being shunned. We assume our money is good everywhere. People don't care who we are or who they are doing business with. In a world of unstable currency, no financial institutions, no credit ratings, no criminal background checks, no means of establishing identity or a person's history, being known is essential to ordinary relationships. The markers of ones identification is the tangible witness of ones body. If someone can't vouch for you - "I know him, he has a scar on his shoulder" - what can you do? That's why branding was such a terrible, effective, and arguably needed punishment. It let someone imprint an identity on you that a stranger could recognize. If two strangers had to establish their identity, they had to do so through a mutual acquaintance. Who do you know? Beowulf isn't known to the border guard. So he proves his identity by recounting the experiences someone who was Beowulf would have to know. "You can believe I am Beowulf, because I know who Beowulf is, and you can trust me because someone has shared with me the intimate details of the lives of people you trust." Aragorn does the same thing. "You don't know me, but you can believe I'm a friend, because I know things about you and your people only a friend would know." It's like saying, "I'm a friend of a friend, and I can prove it because I've been reading your facebook feed." Faramir asks the same thing of Frodo. "If you really knew my brother, describe him to me. By what signs was Boromir known?" So the world without passports is hardly easier for the game of D&D to handle than the Qin dynasty. That's why I don't really do a fully medieval game. Not only is it just about impossible for players to mentally handle, but the entire concept of 'adventurers' as its usually done in D&D doesn't make much sense in a society were almost no one has the right to travel or bear arms. You could do it, and it might be interesting, but the social roles the PC's would initially find themselves in would be constraining. [/QUOTE]
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