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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2883622" data-attributes="member: 7240">Okay Kamikaze Midget, I’m procrastinating writing an essay so I’ll respond to your posts now.This is not correct. The entities that ruled people were city governments and feudal lords. The ability to enforce laws in fiefs or cities that disagreed with them was contingent upon one’s ability to mobilize sufficient military force that could smash the defiant lord or city government. There were virtually no national institutions that enabled contact or governance between the throne and individuals unmediated by the power of a local bishop, abbot or lord, except on the lands that a royal family held as its own fief.To provide a modern analogy, think of a medieval king as equivalent to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Without the consent of powerful lords (comparable to nation states like China, the US, etc.), the king does not have sufficient resources to put down a rebel lord. Furthermore, although the kingdom has various institutions (compare to UNESCO, WHO, UNICEF, UNEP, UNHCR), these institutions are designed to interact with lords not citizens and are essentially invisible at the level of the populace being ruled. Similarly, if one is in trouble, one appeals to one’s local lord not to the remote and irrelevant throne.From the perspective of non-priests, this is true. One sacrifices to the appropriate god based on the god’s region or portfolio. But institutionally, it functions as a collection of cults. Aside from the Brahmin system in India, one cannot be a generalized priest; one must be a priest of a single particular god. And clearly, the D&D rules are not talking about Hindu polytheism; there is no Brahmin equivalent in D&D. Priests are always of a single particular god and their acolytes and initiates are members of the cult associated with this god. This is what I meant by you shifting the goalposts. You were making an argument about institutions. I replied that, from an institutional perspective, polytheistic systems are a collection of cults. Therefore, there can be no role for a kind of national high priest as you posit. Powerful national high priests emerge only in monotheistic systems (and not even in Hinduism I might add) as in ancient Judea, Samaria, Byzantium, Imperial Russia, etc.You are saying that there were no priests whatsoever in Norse polytheism. This seems a very doubtful claim to me. Every polytheistic system I have studied had priests.But the institutional reality and the lay experience are not identical. We are not talking about lay culture; we are talking about institutional formation.What I said was that they were movements backing cosmological systems for seeing a unity within the matrix of polytheism. But philosophies, unlike religions, function, to use a modern term in Marxist political thought, like vanguard organizations rather than mass organizations. Platonism was a way for elite Romans to comprehend the polytheistic reality in which they lived. But Aristotelian, Platonic and Pythagorean academies, from an institutional perspective did not constitute the kind of power base a church in a monotheistic system would because they did not reach down to the common level. Common lay worshippers were happily making sacrifices to the god of the river over there, or what have you.Incorrect. Each philosophy had at its core a cosmological system that resembled monotheism because in Classical thought, the naturalistic fallacy was implicit. Every philosophy presented itself as the logical entailment of natural law.Epicurean ideas about morality were inextricably yoked to a belief in an eternal, uncaused, atomic universe in which gods, human beings, etc. coalesced out of random collisions of atoms. Stoic ideas about morality arose directly from their theory of the divine logos. For Aristotelians, their belief in hierarchical, corporate, ordered society was directly entailed by their theories of causation, physics and their belief in the nous. Platonic ethics were yoked to the idea the superiority of the world of forms to the sense-perceptible world. Once again you have taken an idea about how things work in the modern world, in this case ethics, and applied it in a totally ahistorical way to the past.I have no problem with this assertion. But simply because a system of thought entails that a place be run a particular way, it in no way follows that the people controlling the institution that produces the thought will therefore be in charge. For instance, Eastern Orthodox state theory was historically the basis for the subordination of church to state. To bring it down to a personal level, Confucius was not only a political failure; he didn’t even get promoted in the imperial bureaucracy.I see the problem developing here. You are conflating institutions and ideologies. This is a mistake. In order for you to come up with reasoning that makes sense, you will need to clearly distinguish between the ideology produced by an institution and the power of the institution itself.First of all, Intimidate works as long as the conditions for intimidation remain the same. The inequality in power that makes most of the difference is not something that changes when your back is turned. Operationally, there is little difference between Diplomacy and Intimidate. If conditions change, it doesn’t matter how charming you are and how much your peasants love you; they will go along with the guy whose siege engine just destroyed your gate. That’s not to say there are not other incentives for being popular with your peasants but, at the end of the day, what is going to matter is your ability to protect them and your ability to kill them. If you don’t have those things, all the good will in the world won’t make any difference.Secondly, a village of first-level commoners just isn’t going to be able to do much in a revolt, given the RAW. How much is 100 peasants worth in a revolt if you have a party of 12th level characters, half of whom are casters with evocation magic?Aristocrats have cumulative hit points and BAB progression like everybody else.But when you are not around, they remain rational actors. They don’t forget you have the power to kill and replace them. Not that I am suggesting constantly threatening people is the logical way to go once you have power. But when it comes to transferring power, it makes way more sense.This is an incorrect reading of Islamic history. Islam was the ideological basis on which the Bedouin attacked and triumphed over the group you are talking about, led by Mohammed, an angry dissident on the outs with this group.Whatever? This is like saying “that colour – you know, green, blue, orange – whatever.” If you treat “tradition,” “institution,” and “ideology” as synonyms, is impossible to have a discussion about social organization. These terms cannot be used interchangeably because they refer to different components of a social order. By conflating them, you are able to sustain inaccurate beliefs about institutions.Actually, which fiefs comprised a particular monarchical state was in pretty regular flux. Not until about 600 years into the Middle Ages is there any kind of monarchical or dynastic stability at all. And what Snoweel and I are arguing is that the fluidity and ephemeral nature of kingdoms in early medieval vassalage would likely hold permanent sway in a D&D world because of the way power and demography work.Of course there will be operators who can gain power without the capacity for direct coercive force. The case we are making is that the conditions in a D&D world will be such that these individuals would be much rarer and would have much less power. Certainly, these individuals finding their way to the top of kingdoms would be profoundly exceptional. As in Carolingian times, a kingdom might be able to survive at most two generations without a powerful martial figure in control.My reading of this is quite different than yours. My idea of a low-level aristocrat is someone like Edward VI – a king too young or incompetent to rule in his own right and effectively controlled by a regency. Someone like Ivan the Terrible might start out cowed and marginalized in his own court and would have to accumulate aristocrat levels until he was the martially significant based on his BAB, hit points and, yes, diplomacy skill, something than can’t be very high unless the individual in question is high-level.What Snoweel is asking is how they arise in society given that there have always been high-level characters. The PCs are not born into a world of first-level characters. They are born into a world with level distribution based on the DMG’s demographics.Okay. But we are talking about a D&D world.As I mentioned before, you are conflating two different definitions of “institution.” You use the term “institution” sometimes to mean “organization” and at other times to mean, “concept or tradition.” I think the best way out of this is to use the term “organization” when you are referring to organizations and “ideology” or “concept” when you are referring to things that are intellectual constructs with no specific organizational being. That way you can avoid the absurdity of arguing that the following things constitute organizations through which one can exert power:The fact that imperial governance existed as a universal idea in the minds of medievals did not bring it into being in the physical world. Much as medieval people believed, overwhelmingly, in the desirability of reanimating the Roman Empire, they were organizationally unable to do so except in situations where individuals were personally powerful enough to give that dream being. But the Carolingian and Ottonian attempts at doing so died as soon as a weak ruler or succession problem came along and their empires collapsed into nothingness within a few years.</blockquote>

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