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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1986719" data-attributes="member: 6533">At no point did I state that you based your opinion of the middle ages solely on Aquinas, I simply used him to demonstrate the relative value of a form of proof since you had done the same and he is a good example.  I assure you Fusangite, that your ethos as an educated, respectable, and, yea, even brilliant interpreter of culture is not under question let alone attack.  To me, with my admittedly easy standards, your character is unassailable if I have taken too many liberties based on that assumption I apologize.  And though I have no proof I would testify based on intuitive assesment alone that your games are a world of fun and good times.  So rest assured that where I use the term you here I use it generally and bearing in mind that we have set up a deal of straw men in order to make this general, and fun, argument possible.  For instance, I use the term traditional partially because I don't know that I've seen a term that fits the stance better but mostly because it's the term we've been using and we all know enough what it means by this point in the conversation to use it safely.But, yes, I would argue that the standards of evidence for engaging in cultural simulation in RPG play should be higher than those of university presses, doctoral examining committees, and peer-reviewed academic journals, but primarily because you are engaging in very different form of argument not because the standards of evidence used by those insitutions is poor. For any of the above things the burden of evidence is simply to prove that a good argument can be made for a thing having being real. A far smaller burden of proof than proving what may or may not have been possible given the parameters of the time period.You can make fine arguments for the probable and general content of thought for a period and its a fine, fun, and useful activity, but, firstly, it is simply an argument and always was simply an argument and thus bears within it a great deal of flexibility and, secondly, it's a far cry from an determination on the range of the possible or the strength of the necessary.In terms of suspension of disbelief, I think that the real argument is that the parameters need to be set by genre in the larger and mechanical sense not by content.  To my mind any other standard is one that is essentially built on prejuidice, again little p sense, and probably not as useful to the greater sense of the performance.  You need to realize where you are and what you are doing before you forget it.Poetic license isn't simply a fiat, it's a recognition of the inherent difference in the type of argument that is being made and the manner in which it reflects reality differently.  And RPGs exist in the realm of the poet, however far removed from Keats they may be.  Bottom line I think cultural simulation is a poor activity for the realm of the speculative which RPGs participate in, and I think the genre resists it.  Now, I'll yell at movies for botching the armor all the dang time I'm watching it, but that's because a lot of movies are making a different sort of thing than RPGs do.  Cinema on Alexander the Great is making a statement on an adventure and building a piece of intellectual history, a movie about Indiana Jones is actually having an adventure.There's a level at which what your doing with cultural simulation makes a big difference, I'll grant, so that you can use anthropological monographs perfectly appropriately either to justify a specific thought with a general one or to dispel a general myth that might stand as the justification for a specific thought, but I don't think that you stand on good ground when you use such a monograph to tramp down on the capacity of an individual author to create an individual instance.Basicly, if someone comes up with a 'Roman' character who has a highly developed theories of secular government, inviolable individual liberty, and believes in the presumption of innocence then I don't think anyone is much in a position to say, "Hey, that doesn't make sense."  On the other hand, if someone were to say that those were beliefs widely held by Romans and their families or that the Romans came up with those ideas to give to us then I think it would irresponsible not to try to correct that misconception.And, on the far other hand, there is a level at which the speculative, fantastic, adventure genre is perfect for cultural simulation, but it is a kitchen sink sort of cultural simulation.  One that takes into account the fact that cultural simulation really only results from speculation that occurs outside of the culture in question necessarilly breaking the fourth wall that novels try so desperately to achieve.  In fiction, I think I would point to Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy as the near perfect example of this.  A very fine literary treatment of history, one that is absolutely culturally simulationist in its approach to academic material and the thought of the time period, yet one that perfectly fits those three categories of speculative, fantastic, and adventurous by breaking apart the simulationist mode so that samurai Irishmen end up in North America, a puritan builds a computer, and Newton is ressurected by the power of Solomon's gold.  All of those elements serve the approach to history by demonstrating the power of the larger system and generality that is history's strength beyond its work toward accuracy.  I might also say something about satire, big S, here, but it's a whole nother argument.And further it makes it fun, not just in a 'this is neat' sense but in a damning, exalting, honest to goodness literary aesthetic sense.</blockquote>

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