When modern ethics collide with medieval ethics

[wingsandsword]

Which baby is more likely to live to its first birthday - the peasant baby or the noble one? Which baby is going to be stronger at one year old? The peasant baby who has barely gotten enough food to live, sometimes going without food for a day or two, or the noble child who has been raised with the help of a wet nurse and has been able to supplement his diet with fresh fruits and vegetables on a daily basis? Now, repeat those diets and that upbringing for the next 12 years, and which child is now a healthier and more robust teenager? With very rare exceptions (i.e. PCs), it will be the noble child.

Which person is more likely to get infected from a wound - the peasant who lives in a filthy mud-ridden hovel, or the noble who lives in a clean and well maintained villa with servants to tend to his needs and a healer/doctor/nurse to look after him in sickness?

I would either give nobles bonuses to stats, or give peasants/serfs penalties. But, to each their own.

D&D, 3.x at least, did kind of factor that in with the point buy system.

You could easily look at a 15 point generic NPC with all 10's and 11's as a commoner in that system. IIRC, all 10's and 11's was even thought of as the medieval commoner standard in the original system design.

A 25 point typical PC would be from minor nobility, or merchant classes, particularly well off peasantry, or raised by a religious order.

A 32 point exceptional PC could be from nobility, wealthy merchants, or well favored from a religious order.

 

[gamerprinter]

Which person is more likely to get infected from a wound - the peasant who lives in a filthy mud-ridden hovel, or the noble who lives in a clean and well maintained villa with servants to tend to his needs and a healer/doctor/nurse to look after him in sickness?

I would either give nobles bonuses to stats, or give peasants/serfs penalties. But, to each their own.

Your statements on diet is true. However, in old Japan, the physicians weren't noble caste members, they were Commoners. Surgeons on the other hand were Hinin caste members (Eta, the bottom caste). While the nobles were certainly the first getting care by these physicians, it wasn't exclusive.

Consider in old Japan, touching 'bloody things' was considered disgraceful. A homemaker could prepare meat for food, without this consideration, however butchers are members of the Hinin caste, because no one of higher caste considered handling dead animals as anything, but tainted. This also means that surgeons skilled in giving medical aid through cutting of the flesh was members of the bottom caste. So the best medical aid an skills available in feudal Japan were of the lower castes. Medical care was available to them, as they are the 'first responders'.

My family on my mothers side in Japan were highly respected physicians that served the Daimyo in Shimaneken district in western Japan for almost 1,000 years - so I know this to be true.

 

[S'mon]

I've never seen anything in the Deadlands book that indicated to me that racism disappeared with the end of slavery any more than it did in the real world...

It was actually the anti-Yankee implications I was concerned about! And I'm married to a staunch Southerner.

 

[El Mahdi]

In real history, Kings believed they ruled because their deity said so...

Well, I'm sure some believed that they truly ruled by divine mandate. I'm also sure others didn't believe a whit in any true divine anything, and used it as convenient justification.

The only thing that truly mattered was that the masses believed they ruled by divine mandate.

Real history, much like real modern life, is almost never black and white...

 

[Janx]

The nobles are also the ones with often far greater access to better and healthier foods and drinks, far better medical care, and far better and cleaner living conditions. Peasants/serfs lived from day to day and often barely had enough food to scrape by with a meager existence.

Which baby is more likely to live to its first birthday - the peasant baby or the noble one? Which baby is going to be stronger at one year old? The peasant baby who has barely gotten enough food to live, sometimes going without food for a day or two, or the noble child who has been raised with the help of a wet nurse and has been able to supplement his diet with fresh fruits and vegetables on a daily basis? Now, repeat those diets and that upbringing for the next 12 years, and which child is now a healthier and more robust teenager? With very rare exceptions (i.e. PCs), it will be the noble child.

Which person is more likely to get infected from a wound - the peasant who lives in a filthy mud-ridden hovel, or the noble who lives in a clean and well maintained villa with servants to tend to his needs and a healer/doctor/nurse to look after him in sickness?

I would either give nobles bonuses to stats, or give peasants/serfs penalties. But, to each their own.

I agree with your thinking. It supports my thesis from one of my blog articles. That you can rant and rave about how some rule is against reality and have a broken game or you can find evidence that supports the rule.

[MENTION=1231]Kaodi[/MENTION] doesn't want to accept the premise that Nobles are BETTER than peasants in somebody's D&D campaign because of his reasoning.

There is equally valid reasoning that supports the premise that Nobles are BETTER.

If you want to play in the D&D campaign, better get with the program. Stop arguing with the game premise.

If you have a personal issue that the game says Nobles are better than peasants, seperate that out from a problem with the game premise. The problem is not the game and its internal logic doesn't need to be argued against.

That doesn't disrespect your concern, but put it in the correct box. You personally find the social structure in the game to be "wrong". I can't argue with that (well I could, but I can't really change your mind or prove you are wrong). That's OK. If you can't accept the premise, bow out of the campaign.

Personally, I don't see how the premise makes my PC a bad guy. My PC is a noble. He is better than peasants. He expects courtesy when being spoken to. He may discipline a lessor who is discourteous but not to an extreme because he is not cruel. He owns several house slaves who maintain his estate that he bought on auction from a cruel rival family that had been disgraced. He treats them well and sees to their needs. This PC is the very model of a "good" person within the definition of an imaginary feudal society.

Last on the docket, though I could accept a strong feudal society premise for the campaign (heck, I assume its the standard, albeit watered down in strictness), I'd be wary of racial or gender discrimination as [MENTION=89822]Jon_Dahl[/MENTION] proposes.

It's one thing to tell a player "you can be a peasant or a noble, but nobles are better than peasants" and the player can choose what social role they want to play from. It's another thing to cross into even more personal issues of race and gender. My default assumption is that more players want to play their own gender than not. So following "historical" accuracy on the role of women diminishes the fun for female gamers. I'm inclined to not stick with that for the sake of respecting my female players interests.

For a bunch of white guys, exploring racism through characters like Drizz't is probably fine (I'm from a land where everybody's white. racism is not something we're familiar with). It strikes a bit more closely to home though for a black player, so maybe that's topic to stay away from out of respect for their real hardships.

How does gender and race differ from social status? Mostly because player's choice of social status doesn't carry as much personal weight. A poor player is more likely to be just fine playing a Noble PC as a poor PC. He may not like playing a female PC who is going to have lower stats, be insulted AND threatened with rape.

 

[Kaodi]

[MENTION=1231]Kaodi[/MENTION] doesn't want to accept the premise that Nobles are BETTER than peasants in somebody's D&D campaign because of his reasoning.

There is equally valid reasoning that supports the premise that Nobles are BETTER.

If you want to play in the D&D campaign, better get with the program. Stop arguing with the game premise.

If you have a personal issue that the game says Nobles are better than peasants, seperate that out from a problem with the game premise. The problem is not the game and its internal logic doesn't need to be argued against.

That doesn't disrespect your concern, but put it in the correct box. You personally find the social structure in the game to be "wrong". I can't argue with that (well I could, but I can't really change your mind or prove you are wrong). That's OK. If you can't accept the premise, bow out of the campaign.

This is just confused. For one, are you speaking to me here, or are you speaking to Jeffl having mentioned me?

Second, it is unclear whether you are speaking about a specific game, or have all of a sudden generalized to the game of D&D.

Third, you still do not seem to be differentiating between the reality of better and the perception of better. Obviously there is plenty of historical support for the perception of better. But even if the campaign premise includes social structures that assume that nobles are innately better from birth, it does not actually follow that the campaign premise includes that they are in fact innately better. One could even argue that it might make for a better campaign if the nobility are not innately better, because it means there is an inherent conflict in the system from which to draw ideas from.

 

[JonWake]

Beware of painting history in too-broad strokes. In the Middle Ages, you had the Cathars, Benedictine monks, and the peasant rebellions of Watt Tyler. None of these groups thought that power meant righteousness.

Medieval knights fell to combat exhaustion, grew weary of bloodshed and retired. Local priests often interpreted scripture in radical ways, an unending headache for the church.

The high middle ages saw more economic mobility than perhaps in even modern America. Women owned businesses. In England, they could divorce and petition for property.

Even those in power acted diversely. The church spent forty years trying to talk the Cathars into recanting, staging public debates, sending hundreds of experts on scripture, and finally giving up when a legate was murdered on the road to Rome.

Short version: people don't change, their circumstances do and social pressures do. Being a Communist in Medieval England or a feminist in 12th century France might be odd, but it certainly wouldn't be unheard of.

 

[Kaodi]

The nobles are also the ones with often far greater access to better and healthier foods and drinks, far better medical care, and far better and cleaner living conditions. Peasants/serfs lived from day to day and often barely had enough food to scrape by with a meager existence.

Which baby is more likely to live to its first birthday - the peasant baby or the noble one? Which baby is going to be stronger at one year old? The peasant baby who has barely gotten enough food to live, sometimes going without food for a day or two, or the noble child who has been raised with the help of a wet nurse and has been able to supplement his diet with fresh fruits and vegetables on a daily basis? Now, repeat those diets and that upbringing for the next 12 years, and which child is now a healthier and more robust teenager? With very rare exceptions (i.e. PCs), it will be the noble child.

Which person is more likely to get infected from a wound - the peasant who lives in a filthy mud-ridden hovel, or the noble who lives in a clean and well maintained villa with servants to tend to his needs and a healer/doctor/nurse to look after him in sickness?

I would either give nobles bonuses to stats, or give peasants/serfs penalties. But, to each their own.

Some good points, but I think some major caveats are warranted.

For one, you can definitely reasonable argue that nobility would be, on average, stronger and healthier. But that only encompasses two stats in D&D. So if you were using point buy to model this, all the extra points from the commoner level vs. the noble level would have to go in strength and constitution.

However... consider the arguments of Social Darwinists (generally a bad lot, but they might be good enough for this). If more peasant children die than noble children, it might stand to reason that the average peasant child is going to have a stronger inherent constitution because they are the ones that " made their fort saves " . This will be balanced out somewhat by later upbringing.

Another thing to consider: if we are operating on the assumption that most commoners spend their days doing backbreaking labour, and that most nobles spend at least some of their days in leisure, does it not stand to reason that many of the commoners may in fact be stronger than many of the nobles? I had read, for instance, an interesting essay positing that the rise and fall of the English longbow had much to do with the society supporting it producing enough strong commoners who were actually capable of drawing it.

Lastly, I am not sure what mud huts have to do with the constitution scores of commoners or nobles. If you stick a noble in a mud hut, they should not fare any better.

 

[Umbran]

The nobles are also the ones with often far greater access to better and healthier foods and drinks, far better medical care, and far better and cleaner living conditions.

Be careful that you don't over-romanticize noble life. They're also more inbred, and more prone to debilitating gout from rich diets. And did you know that castles tended to be more cold, damp, and drafty in the winter than most peasant hovels?

And, "better medical care" sounds good, until you remember that you're talking about the time before germ theory and antibiotics, and with some very odd ideas about how to treat disease. You're talking about a time without refrigerated rapid transport of foods across continents.

Now, in a world with magic, if you've got someone who can create fresh fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, and a cleric with magic to cure disease, you might have a point. Of course, if you have a fantasy world where this situation has existed for thousands of years, you also have an argument for how the peasant stock will be hardier - having survived ills without magical support, rather than depending on magic for support.

 

[Janx]

This is just confused. For one, are you speaking to me here, or are you speaking to Jeffl having mentioned me?

Second, it is unclear whether you are speaking about a specific game, or have all of a sudden generalized to the game of D&D.

Third, you still do not seem to be differentiating between the reality of better and the perception of better. Obviously there is plenty of historical support for the perception of better. But even if the campaign premise includes social structures that assume that nobles are innately better from birth, it does not actually follow that the campaign premise includes that they are in fact innately better. One could even argue that it might make for a better campaign if the nobility are not innately better, because it means there is an inherent conflict in the system from which to draw ideas from.

My apologies. I am continuing the discussion you and I are having.

You seem to be against "Nobles being better than peasants".

I am proposing that in a hypothetical gaming group that you and I are in, if the GM says "Nobles are better than peasants in society" then your reasoning doesn't matter. Only that the world works the way the GM says it does.

I am juxtaposing history, and fantasy gaming (just like fantasy gaming does). History gives us an example where society said "Nobles are better than peasants" and I've read more fantasy that follows that pattern, albeit some more harshly than others.

It is a fantasy trope that commoners do not mouth of to nobles without consequence (even if only minor shock by NPCs).

From my perspective, I expect every player to know and assume that because it is a common fantasy trope (because it is a borrowed historical trope).

I was a bit surprised by Elf Witch's guess that the guards were really rude fakes. But that's the part of the trope that is variable.

Yes, in D&D, a majority of campaign nobles are better than peasants socially and expect to be treated as such.

However, in the event of an offense, what can be considered "acceptable" has a migh higher degree of variability by gaming group/GM.

Obviously, not every D&D campaign is this way. But if you cataloged everyone, especially the ones running as a "traditional" fantasy RPG roughly based on medieval europe but with no designs on historical accuracy, you'll find a majority of them place Nobles higher. It's almost the definition of the term Noble.