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

[Eric V]

You said you'd read the first several books of Game of Thrones, I thought. It's that not correct? Or have you blocked out the content of them?

Nowhere did he say he found "repeated underage rape" boring. You rolled a 20 on your Athletics(Str) check for that leap.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That could very well be it. I don't have much problem with individually evil people, but the stacking of institutional evils that really don't have viable solutions in a game session.

That's where you and I differ. I really value a realistic approach, and I just can't see a world without those institutional evils as making any sense to me, so that kind of stuff is almost always there somewhere.

That being said, I see the value to your group to avoiding those topics, and wish you good gaming.

 

[Belen]

I would say no, not always. A lot of fantasy settings don't have a historical progression modelled on real European history, and there's no particular requirement that they should. So it's not logical to assume that. It's merely a possibility. Plenty of societies developed with more or less use of forced labour/slavery. It's also interesting to me that some the most brutally slave-centric societies get like, ignored in the list of "slave-y" societies. The Vikings being a key one. Thralls were never a huge proportion of the population, but were a significant and noteworthy one, and sometimes they were freed, but that was hard slavery, no question about it. Yet you can definitely make a fantasy society that feels authentically "Viking" without using thralls at all - we know this because most fantasy Viking societies skip the thrall element! Including older ones (ironically this is more because people were either ignorant of the role of thralls, or trying to make Vikings look good, rather than out of any sensitivity or anything).

I daresay you could pretty easily make an authentic-seeming ancient Greek or Babylonian or Egyptian society without really having hard slaves either, just like oppressed workers and disenfranchised members of society, but who weren't actually owned.

Roman-style I think it's more difficult because Rome itself made slaves and enslaving people so central to its own worldview of itself, and that has very much propagated through history. People have tried but it tends to feel a bit more "fake" compared to say Vikings without thralls, even though both are equally ahistorical.

"Soft" slavery absolutely definitely gets a "pass" so yeah isn't an issue to have in a setting imo. Indeed we're actually at a cultural point where there's some excessive playing-down of how unpleasant some "soft" slavery* was (and from all parts of the political spectrum - not just the ends but also the center!). Just avoid the term slavery or any actual chains that aren't strictly carceral.

* = For example, re: indentured people coming to the US - people are like "Oh well they mostly only had 5-20 year indentures!" and that's absolutely true - but an awful lot of them did not live long enough to see the end of their indenture (what was killing them - primarily disease, malnutrition/starvation, etc. is a whole other discussion).

Slavery is a part of less advanced societies.

It was something that hit me when I first read Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. In the book, the main characters are faced with a choice of murdering a bunch of war prisoners (people who were forced to be cannibals) or enslaving them and making them work to grow food. They could not just let a bunch of cannibals who had laid waste to the surrounding area go and they did not want to murder them.

They also had to make a decision in whether to send troops to save a power plant and this is where one character made a plea to save the plant using the argument that you only have the morals that you can afford. Saving the power plant meant saving a technology base that would mean that they may not need slavery because power would afford them the ability to grow food with fewer people.

Technology allows a society to have morals that a non-technic society cannot afford. It frees up people to live lives that are not just about basic needs. It means that instead of having a small class of elites supported by a massive labor force, that you get to have a larger number of people who can become merchants and scholars. Even the "labor force" can afford a better standard of living.

Now, magic can afford higher morals as well but it is also a rare resource and far more expensive that manual labor. In D&D, there are different morals because those of the morals a society can hold and a lot of people model them.

I am not saying that slavery was ever good. It was not but the horror is that may have been the least bad choice afforded to those older societies. (Note: the US could have afforded better morals.)

I am not defending slavery. Ever.

I am also a major proponent of technology as a way to better the lives of people and give us the ability to have and develop better societal morals.

I know this was long-winded but I think this is one reason why many GMs rely on historical precedents for how things work.

Slavery has never been a major component in my games and it is always a condition that is opposed by characters when it is used and as I mainly use point of light, then it is also not generally a factor as slavery tends to be a force multiplier to provide food etc to cities and nations rather than small communities.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It's like you didn't even read the post and a) decided to go with your own vile interpretation and b) ignore the fact that I said I don't dwell on these things.

I'm sorry. In part, your post was just a jumping off point for my frustrations with the topic. You just had a few triggering phrases that had me grinding my teeth.

I think of it like this, overall. Gotham is a great setting to read about, in small doses. Batman fits Gotham, and it is good that Gotham is so terrible that Batman can never truly win, because then we keep getting Batman stories. But, when I play DnD, I want to reach an ending that is good, while playing a character that is good. And if my character encounters "Gotham City" while adventuring... I can't actually do anything about it. My DnD party can't end racism, solve slavery, get rid of addiction, crush poverty, get rid of starvation, clean out government corruption, remove crime... it is too much. Any solutions we offer in the span of a game are either too little to really change anything, or would derail everything and spend years mired in it. But I'm playing a good person with the ability to make the world a better place, unlike real life where everything sucks and I can't change anything.

It is fine for me to read a story about someone doing small good in the face of pervasive evil. But when I'm playing that? When it is me that is struggling against a tide that history shows me will just swallow my efforts and leave things teetering on disaster? I just find it too depressing.

An adventure where we go to "Gotham" and it is terrible, but we learn about the demon sealed beneath it, and go to stop a cult where we destroy the demon and make things better? I could do that. Just passing through and being reminded that the world sucks and all your efforts cannot make it better? I can turn on the 7 o'clock news just fine, and it is worse anyways. I'm much happier, as a world-builder, just taking the worst parts of human nature, setting them aside, and not using them in my world-building. Trust me, there is plenty of bad leftover to make the world grey.

 

[Desdichado]

But I’m still not sure what point you’re trying to make.

Don't worry about it. It's not worth it anyway.

 

[Aldarc]

OIC.

I read three? Maybe. It was some omnibus thing or other. Fifteen years ago? Can’t really remember much of it at all. Was so bored by the end I was skipping entire chapters.

Would have been a great novel. Thousands of pages? Yeah not particularly interested.

But I’m still not sure what point you’re trying to make.

I stopped reading after Book 4: AFFC. It increasingly felt like GRRM lost the focus of the narrative as the page count, POV characters, and scope of the story kept expanding.

I have lost my patience with the '90s era large multi-volume fantasy epics. I am now more drawn to fantasy novels that know how to tell a good, self-contained story in one book. Maybe the author revisits their setting with the same characters. That's fine.* But I want a single book with a beginning, middle, and end. (I had a similar experience with anime and TV series but that's for another time.)

* A good example of this in action IMHO is Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea stories.

I'm reminded of a professor I had in my masters program. He assigned a five page essay. (Actually it was a word count that I can't remember, but it came out approximately to five pages.) It was pretty normal for a lot of professors, including this one in other classes, to assign 15-25+ page analytic research papers. However, this time, the professor wanted only five pages. He wanted to force us to write in a concise, cogent manner without the verbosity, fluff, and other BS that often plagues student papers. Make a good and compelling argument with less words.

This is what I want for fiction. I want authors to give me a good and compelling story in one book.

 

[Desdichado]

Nowhere did he say he found "repeated underage rape" boring. You rolled a 20 on your Athletics(Str) check for that leap.

Critical success! Awesome! I actually kind of agree with his point. I wouldn't want stuff laying around that I'd be embarrassed about because I didn't have a problem with it in twenty years either. Nothing in any (official) D&D product from any era or edition would rise to that level for me. The first fifty pages of Game of Thrones did. I'm glad I got it at the library, got turned off of it early and took it back rather than having a copy laying around that my kids or grandkids could find.

EDIT: Well, maybe that's not entirely true. The current crop of D&d stuff is super cringey and won't age well. Then again, I haven't bought anything since before the 3.x era ended.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Now, magic can afford higher morals as well but it is also a rare resource and far more expensive that manual labor.

I appreciate most of your post, but I want to zoom into this point in particular and ask... is it?

I played a post-apocalypse game where my character was a Fey Warlock. We needed to grow food to feed the survivors from the city, which the DM thought would be a major challenge... but I had Plant Growth.

Plant growth is available at 5th level to Nature Clerics, Druids, Archfey Warlocks, and Bards. 5th level is not an unreasonably high level. And with this you can double food production in a half-mile radius, and that effect lasts 1 year. So, if you were to have a single mid-level nature cleric whose duty was to perform this ritual in the farmlands, and let us say he only worked half the year. He could empower the growth of 90 square miles of farm land, or 57,600 acres. which then would produce the equivalent crops of 115,200 acres.

Now sure, this isn't country-sized land we are talking about. It is much more of a county-size of land. But that is a single person, working for a divine power, for half the year. And even if you had 0.5% of 0.5% of a kingdom's population who were nature priests and reach 5th level... in a population of 1 million that is still 25 people. And that is just accounting for mortals casting spells.

There are good-aligned dragons, there are good aligned giants, there are celestials. Regional effects of certain dragons increase plant growth in a six mile radius, same with Ki'rin or the Cradle of the Hill Scion. Once you account for the gods, the fey, the elementals, the dragons, the giants, and then add long-lived races like elves, dwarves, gnomes... is magic actually that rare and expensive? How hard would it be for a Goddess of Agriculture to have her shrines be ritual sites where, as long as the proper rites are done every harvest, the land is blessed with Plant Growth? How difficult would it be for an Ancient Bronze Dragon who likes fresh fish to set up a magical beacon that increases the spawning of fish near his lair, which would just naturally cause a boost in fishing for the nearby port city? How many times do you need to have a friendly giant help establish an orchard of massive trees that grow massive fruit?

And yeah, these things can all break, they can all be destroyed, but that is sort of the point of having adventurers, right? And most DnD settings are ancient places, with magical artifacts all over the place. It just seems like it would be rather easy for all the immortal goods in the world to have left some impact on the lives of ordinary people.

 

[Raiztt]

That could very well be it. I don't have much problem with individually evil people, but the stacking of institutional evils that really don't have viable solutions in a game session.

This is really interesting to me as highlighting how different people are/groups are.

I ran a game where the PCs were briefly in the underground city of dark dwarves, who are famously slavers, and the PCs, every one of them had the position of "Damn, that sucks - ok now let's get back to doing what we came here to do". Not "Okay, we need to pause our current task to launch a liberation campaign".

Some people are better at compartmentalizing.

 

[Belen]

Now sure, this isn't country-sized land we are talking about. It is much more of a county-size of land. But that is a single person, working for a divine power, for half the year. And even if you had 0.5% of 0.5% of a kingdom's population who were nature priests and reach 5th level... in a population of 1 million that is still 25 people. And that is just accounting for mortals casting spells.

And yeah, these things can all break, they can all be destroyed, but that is sort of the point of having adventurers, right? And most DnD settings are ancient places, with magical artifacts all over the place. It just seems like it would be rather easy for all the immortal goods in the world to have left some impact on the lives of ordinary people.

Ok, I have ran high fantasy games such as this before as a magic as tech idea where there were more modern ideals.

My D&D worlds almost always treat magic a hyper-rare. This includes having common leveled NPCs. For instance, most clergy are priests. A cleric, for instance, is similar to a Paladin in that they are "called," to service.

Leveled NPCs are those heroes who adventured or gained levels. This is one reason why the player characters are "special" in the campaign. They are not common adventurers.

I think you have some pretty valid arguments for creating base assumptions for a setting that does allow for a higher moral value and I think core WOTC D&D is using those assumptions.

Most of my worlds use a different set because I want the players to be the heroes of the setting. The bad guys often have levels because they go around gaining XP for doing bad things. I just most often restrict arcane and divine magic. Most villages would never see anyone who could heal and even major cities would find it rare and so few people would not be able to support large populations with their magic.