D&D General D&D Assumptions Ain't What They Used To Be

[TwoSix]

Does it though? In 20+ years as a GM I've not included slavery or rape or child abuse as story beats or setting fluff. Happy to report no player yet as asked me where those things happen or if they can invent them. its entirely possible.

Sure, if no one ever mentions it, then it doesn’t matter. But it sounded to me like we were talking about a DM making an assertion about the absolute non-existence of something within that setting.

It’s a tricky line to walk for me. If the DM says “Hey, this topic really bothers me, so we’re going to X-card this topic and never talk about it in game”, that’s totally fine. It’s a DM who says “It’s canonically true in my setting that this bad thing never happens because I don’t like thinking about it” with nothing behind it that I’m not a fan of. There’s plenty of medievalisms I don’t like in my games that I explain away with magitech because having it as pure fiat would bother me.

Not a huge issue that would stop me from playing, just an aesthetic issue for me.

 

[Mannahnin]

What I don't get is the toxic hall monitor attitude that Karens and busybodies have where they think that everyone who's playing it "wrong" need to be corrected or called out or shamed for their own good, or whatever. Seriously, if it's not your game, it's none of your business, and the real problem is you.

The thing is, no one is really doing that.

Yeah, that happens all the time, actually.

People criticize your home game?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I wrote my capstone paper on the historiography of witchcraft. In 900, the Canon Episcopi established belief in witchcraft was delusional but it was delusion based on ideas the devil had planted in someone's head. During the 15th century, as belief in witchcraft became more widespread throughout Europe, the Pope gave the Inquisition permission to prosecute it. Once the witch-hunting craze got into full swing in the 16th century, it's not just the RCC we're talking about it's Protestants as well.

I promise you the craze wasn't caused by one priest who wrote a book. Changing beliefs regarding witchcraft could be seen in the 12th and 13th centuries and eventually the idea of diabolism came into fashion. It took a while to spread though. It didn't get to Scotland until the 16th century when they jumped on it with their own set of trials in 1590-91 and again in 1597.

Notice your dates. The Witch-Hunting craze went into full swing by the 16th century, or the 1500's. The Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, which I referred to was published in 1486. Now, was he solely responsible for the entire thing? No. But while I have not written a paper on the subject, I have listened to many lectures by experts in the field who point to this guy as a major ignition point of the movement. And before he had written the book, he had brought charges against the woman who had rejected him of witchcraft, which was prosecuted... and found to hold no basis.

I'm not saying you are wrong about your dates or knowledge, simply that as we peel back layers of motivation, it becomes more clear that the motivations behind spreading fear of Diabolism were often not earnest belief. The motivations were often very human, very cruel, and very political by the people spreading it. Not supernatural fears.

You didn't. You mentioned their sacrifices, but one of the things the Aztecs did was demand their neighbors send some of their people who were then sacrificed and eaten. I imagine this practice was one of the reasons the Spanish had an easy time finding allies. But you're right. Most cultural cannibalism revolves around funerary rites and aren't really all that nefarious. That really wasn't the case for the Aztecs. They were an empire and weren't any nicer than most other empires.

But this is about gaming. There are all sorts of elements you can include in a gaming world. Evil religious orders capturing and cannibalizing prisoners to their dark gods? Yeah, sounds good.

Oh yeah, I don't disagree the Aztec Empire was just as bad as most other empires. And sure, you could include these sort of things in your game. But remember where my original response came from? It was responding to Micah who said "Most of which are if anything more evil than slavery. Never really understood why slavery is somehow a worse evil than cannibalism or human sacrifice."

So, I attempted to explain. I only used the Aztecs as an example of human sacrifice because they are one of the few religions I know well enough to comment on. In actuality, we have found that most reports of human sacrifice throughout history... are likely either lies or misunderstanding executions. And I would rather dispel misunderstandings and make sure things are seen in a proper context, than not.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This may be because D&D is a heroic fantasy game which typically doesn't include sexual assault or child abuse. The Drow have existed in D&D for a number of years and that nasty bunch worshipping Lloth are a bunch of no good, low down slavers. Slavery might not be in your game, but it's not unheard of in D&D as a whole.


And? I've never had this particular problem in any game I ran. If the PCs ever sold a slave it was under the guise of getting a man on the inside. And if some people do play their game like that, so what?

Do you have a lot of people blocked in this thread? The "so what" is Daasul seemingly insisting that since we can't create a world where it is impossible for people to take bad actions, a world without slavery is the same as a world with slavery, if the PCs choose to create the institution of slavery... unless there is an omni-psychic god preventing the creation of slavery.

This has nothing to do with sneaking a man into a slave ring as an infiltration. It is about the PCs looking at a world where slavery doesn't exist and saying "well, there is an untapped market for me to make money"

 

[Micah Sweet]

Do you have a lot of people blocked in this thread? The "so what" is Daasul seemingly insisting that since we can't create a world where it is impossible for people to take bad actions, a world without slavery is the same as a world with slavery, if the PCs choose to create the institution of slavery... unless there is an omni-psychic god preventing the creation of slavery.

This has nothing to do with sneaking a man into a slave ring as an infiltration. It is about the PCs looking at a world where slavery doesn't exist and saying "well, there is an untapped market for me to make money"

And I'm saying that I have a hard time imagining a world where slavery doesn't and never has existed.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Look, you can do what you want in your own game, and if you and your players are uncomfortable with slavery and racism of course you can decide those things never existed in your world. But I literally cannot see how such a world squares with anything resembling reality in the sense of how society has worked in many, many cultures throughout history, up to and including today. For example, historically most slaves were captured during war (chattel slavery is a more modern concept). Giving the assumption that war still happens in your world, what happens to the losing side? Are they let go? Killed to a man? How are captives dealt with in general? If you're not going to answer these questions the way many real world cultures did, how are you answering them?

Clerics. Warlocks. Sorcerers. Paladins.

The thing that slave-holders always feared the most, was a slave uprising. They prevented this in many ways, but all of those ways relied on the slave population being weaker than the guards or soldiers that could suppress them. That doesn't work in a fantasy setting where a random child can be born with the ability to explode people. Or where an oath of Vengeance can empower them to turn any object into a deadly weapon. Where the gods can be called down or the devils can whisper in people's ears. It doesn't make sense to take the risk, because you are just sitting on a powder keg. Even in DnD lore we see this, with the Nilbog and how it is treated by the Bugbears and Hobgoblins.

So what happens to the losing side in a war? Same thing that happens in the modern day I would suppose. The soldiers are beaten, the new government rolls in and takes charge. Maybe they don't and they just have the old government stay as a vassal state paying them money. Prisoners of War can be a thing without it being slavery.

I know people despise "modern" concepts in their DnD games, but ancient assumptions often fail when magic offers so many modern equivalences. Heck, you have gods of war, they are gods able to peer across the multiverse, they could go to their temples and lay out ground rules and then smite any army that breaks them. So between Divine Law, Magic, and common sense... you can cover a lot of ground on having DnD cultures not act like the peasant armies of 1000's Europe.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Clerics. Warlocks. Sorcerers. Paladins.

The thing that slave-holders always feared the most, was a slave uprising. They prevented this in many ways, but all of those ways relied on the slave population being weaker than the guards or soldiers that could suppress them. That doesn't work in a fantasy setting where a random child can be born with the ability to explode people. Or where an oath of Vengeance can empower them to turn any object into a deadly weapon. Where the gods can be called down or the devils can whisper in people's ears. It doesn't make sense to take the risk, because you are just sitting on a powder keg. Even in DnD lore we see this, with the Nilbog and how it is treated by the Bugbears and Hobgoblins.

So what happens to the losing side in a war? Same thing that happens in the modern day I would suppose. The soldiers are beaten, the new government rolls in and takes charge. Maybe they don't and they just have the old government stay as a vassal state paying them money. Prisoners of War can be a thing without it being slavery.

I know people despise "modern" concepts in their DnD games, but ancient assumptions often fail when magic offers so many modern equivalences. Heck, you have gods of war, they are gods able to peer across the multiverse, they could go to their temples and lay out ground rules and then smite any army that breaks them. So between Divine Law, Magic, and common sense... you can cover a lot of ground on having DnD cultures not act like the peasant armies of 1000's Europe.

What do you do with captives prior to the end of a war? Just keep them somewhere? Kill them all?

In fairness to your point, you are clearly positing a world with much more prevalent magic than I would ever run. To me, there simply isn't enough magic broadly available to completely upend society, and if there were, said society would in no way resemble what we tend to get in D&D. I therefore tend to err on the side of reality when a choice of this kind must be made.

You can of course do differently, and that's fine. Thank you for explaining your position to me.

 

[Desdichado]

People criticize your home game?

Sometimes yeah. Specifically, I mean. More generally, people criticize my home game without necessarily knowing about my home game in a generic sense all the time.

 

[Desdichado]

What the "hall monitors" as you refer to them are doing, however, is pointing out that including these sorts of things directly into the game is perhaps not the best way to go. It can go so very, very wrong. Just releasing it into the wild and letting things fall where they may is not conducive to a healthy hobby. We had that for years. Where we would get books and settings and whatnot that are of questionable value. "Well just don't play it" is probably the least productive response there is.

That sword cuts both ways. Just add it or change it because you don't want something in the book is the same thing. It literally isn't any different, except that when you're hall monitoring instead of someone else, you seem to think that's ok, and when you're giving people the least productive response there is, that's ok.

A productive response is, "I don't want to see certain things in my game" not "this stuff shouldn't be in any game, and if some misanthrope wants to add them, he's on his own because I'm policing what I think should be allowed to be published."

But of course WotC can publish whatever they think will meet their needs as a business, of course. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence that D&D probably peaked a few years ago. I'm sure a lot of people will argue that that's even true, and that's fair, and more will argue that even if it is there's plenty of possible reasons for that. Personally, I think D&D losing it's edge is a contributor, just like being somewhat edgy was a major contributor to its success in the early 80s.

 

[Reynard]

I tend to see the presence of evil in our RPG worlds as a tool to define what is good. More specifically, the evil that is present is often what the heroes of the story are likely to be fighting against.

I get the appeal of having a world in which injustice is pervasive and the protagonists just accept it as part of their world. There is a verisimilitude to that, and it can feel viscerally real to have Conan shoulder his way through the slave markets on his way from the docks to the gambling halls.

However, even though I understand the appeal, I am not much interested in playing that, or forcing my players to experience that world. I am much happier and more comfortable with the big operatic evils of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars than the banal evils of Conan and Game of Thrones. I just like my heroes heroic in the modern sense.