Does D&D even have a component of "midieval" anymore?

[wingsandsword]

D&D takes the best from several eras and regions to create a fantasy world.

From antiquity it takes pantheism, and some classes such as Druids were loosely inspired by this era.

From the middle ages it takes castles as mighty forts, the Cleric derives in part from the Crusades and the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar of the era. The D&D barbarian also probably draws more than a little inspiration from the viking berserkers.

From the renaissance it takes plate armor and more elaborate technology, as well as a somewhat more modern social outlook, but tends to leave firearms and cannons out.

From feudal Japan and Imperial China it takes monks, repeating crossbows, and (at least in splatbooks) Ninja and Samurai).

Monsters and races are drawn from legends around the world, taking monsters from almost everywhere.

Sometimes some things seem totally anachronistic, like steam-engine using gnomes, but there were examples of crude steam engines existing as curiosities as far back as ancient Greece, there was just no use of them as anything besides novelties.

As was also pointed out, the overall look of society resembles the Wild West. Replace cowboys with adventurers, Indians with Orcs/Goblins/Hobgoblins, bandits are still bandits (still with wanted posters and bounties), guns are replaced with swords, foreigners with demihumans, forts with castles, Marshals with Knights, preachers become clerics, learned city folk with fancy inventions become wizards, Cattle Barons become Barons, and you have the same concept of a world where there are scattered villages and towns where wandering heroes ride around defeating various bad guys and the weapon in your hand is the strongest law.

The more I think of it, D&D is less "medieval" as it is "historic pastiche", blending elements of antiquity, medieval, renaissance, and the wild west along with totally fantastic magic to create a fantasy world that has superficial resemblance to what is typically thought of as medieval.

 

[T. Foster]

D&D takes the best from several eras and regions to create a fantasy world.

Very good post, but I feel it's worth pointing out that most of the non-medieval elements you cite are things that were added to the game later, and weren't there in the more explicitly medieval-based earliest editions.

From antiquity it takes pantheism, and some classes such as Druids were loosely inspired by this era.

Pantheism doesn't really exist in OD&D (as Delta has already described upthread, OD&D clerics are at least implicitly Christian -- "holy symbols" are described specifically as crosses, most of the level titles (except for Lama) come out of the Catholic church, and most of the spells are miracles straight out of the Old and New Testaments) and wasn't really introduced until AD&D (the OD&D supplement Gods, Demigods & Heroes gives combat-stats for various pagan deities but no info on characters worshipping them). The druid class is inspired by something from antiquity, but note what Gygax says about them in the 1E PH (p. 21): "Druids can be visualized as medieval cousins of what the ancient celtic sect of Druids would have become had it survived the Roman conquest." So, druids, in 1E AD&D at least, are a deliberate anachronism, an imagined medievalized version of an ancient sect.

Thus, even when pantheism was added to AD&D in Deities & Demigods, it was in this spirit -- a medievalized version of an ancient concept. Let's not overlook the real-world issues as well -- in OD&D it was okay to gloss over the issue and have clerics be implicitly Christian, but in the more detailed AD&D game it was no longer possible and the issue of who or what clerics are actually worshipping and getting their powers from had to be addressed, and it was (wisely) decided to use fictional deities (both from ancient mythology and authored literature) as a way to side-step real-world theological issues.

From the middle ages it takes castles as mighty forts, the Cleric derives in part from the Crusades and the Knights Hospitaller and Knights Templar of the era. The D&D barbarian also probably draws more than a little inspiration from the viking berserkers.

Paladins and cavaliers, at least as depicted in OD&D and 1E, are also clearly medieval (from Charlemagne and assorted Arthuriana). I wouldn't peg the barbarian as particularly medieval, since it so clearly comes from a modern literary source (Conan and the various ripoffs and pastiches that followed). Also, characters' dress as depicted in the artwork of Sutherland, Trampier, etc. was very medieval-inspired.

From the renaissance it takes plate armor and more elaborate technology, as well as a somewhat more modern social outlook, but tends to leave firearms and cannons out.

Plate armor wasn't introduced to D&D until 1985; prior to that the best armor available was plate-mail, which comes straight out of the 14th century. The same for most of the other Renaissance-era technology now found in D&D -- for instance, there were no rapiers in OD&D or 1E AD&D. As for the more modern social outlook, I think that owes more to 19th century America (which I'll get to in a bit below) than the Renaissance.

From feudal Japan and Imperial China it takes monks, repeating crossbows, and (at least in splatbooks) Ninja and Samurai).

Repeating crossbows weren't a part of OD&D or 1E. The monk was, but like the druid was designed as a deliberate fish-out-of-water anachronism, inspired, presumably, by the similarly anachronistic "Shaolin Monk in the Old West" premise of the tv show Kung Fu (which was running in primetime contemporary with the monk class' first appearance in OD&D Supplement II). Oriental monks were not, I don't think, ever intended to ever be a part of standard D&D-world society, they were always supposed to be a rare anomaly. (It's perhaps also worth noting that in later years (c. 1983 on) Gary Gygax expressed regret at including the monk class in the standard AD&D rules, and intended to move it to a separate Oriental game/setting in the revised edition.) Ninja and samurai were popular house-rules, and appeared in Dragon magazine and third-party supplements, but were never part of "official D&D" until 1985, and even then they were specifically introduced as part of the Oriental Adventures sub-game/setting.

Monsters and races are drawn from legends around the world, taking monsters from almost everywhere.

Absolutely, though there are a fair number of monsters that do come specifically from medieval bestiaries.

Sometimes some things seem totally anachronistic, like steam-engine using gnomes, but there were examples of crude steam engines existing as curiosities as far back as ancient Greece, there was just no use of them as anything besides novelties.

Steam-engine gnomes were introduced via Dragonlance in 1984 and were not a part of D&D prior to that (though there were other wholly anachronistic elements prior to that -- usually sci-fi technology from crashed spaceships! See both Blackmoor and AD&D module S3). Also note that from its earliest days D&D allowed, and even encouraged, travel to different planes and dimensions which wouldn't necessarily have a medieval flavor, and that characters could bring back anomalous/anachronistic artifacts -- one of Gygax's early accounts of play in Greyhawk Castle ("Expedition to the Black Reservoir") features a character using a ray-gun brought back from a trip to Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure, and the Greyhawk quasi-deity Murlynd (from module EX2) has many anachronistic artifacts in his house (which is itself located on the Wonderland demiplane) -- but these were always set as contrasts and anomalies in the otherwise-medieval-based world.

As was also pointed out, the overall look of society resembles the Wild West. Replace cowboys with adventurers, Indians with Orcs/Goblins/Hobgoblins, bandits are still bandits (still with wanted posters and bounties), guns are replaced with swords, foreigners with demihumans, forts with castles, Marshals with Knights, preachers become clerics, learned city folk with fancy inventions become wizards, Cattle Barons become Barons, and you have the same concept of a world where there are scattered villages and towns where wandering heroes ride around defeating various bad guys and the weapon in your hand is the strongest law.

This is absolutely spot-on, and I think is the key to the non-medieval aspect of early D&D. Whereas the elements from other historical eras and locations are by and large either later additions or deliberate anomalies (such as the monk and druid and sci-fi technology from other planes), the "Wild West" aspect as you describe it is absolutely fundamental to the game and has been present from the very beginning (and, like the medieval element, was I think stronger then than it is now). What you're really getting in D&D, then, are the trappings and appearance of the "legendary medieval" superimposed atop the social order of the "legendary Wild West," a combination of quintessentially European folklore with quintessentially American folklore. No wonder D&D is so appealing! (And as much as I'd like to give Gygax and/or Arneson credit for this brilliant fusion, I suspect the actual innovator was Robert Howard, and that D&D was just following naturally in the path he set out via his Conan stories.)

 

[Psion]

And on what day did this vast and enormous change take place?

Welcome to the beard fallacy (aka continuum fallacy, heap fallacy.)

 

[Emirikol]

Have I got a game for you! I give you...
Advunced Peasants and Crapmongers (by our friends at Totalitarian Scum Regime Games)

http://www.geocities.com/rowenaknill/jokes/peasants.html

WOW! What a game system! It sounds like one of those Slavelord's scenarios!

jh

 

[WizarDru]

So the terms Medieval and Dark Ages are, themselves, considered anachronistic now, yes?

The question of whether D&D was ever truly 'medieval' is, I think, something of a misnomer. IMHO, Gygax clearly was attempting to 'kitchen-sink' all of his favorite concepts from all of his favorite literature, movies and TV shows as the whim struck him. So we see elements that are inspired by Tolkien, Vance, Howard, Lieber, Anderson, Lovecraft and whoever else passed his fancy at that particular moment.

D&D has medieval window dressing, to be sure...but so many elements of a classical medieval society are simply not present. D&D characters are inherently mobile...they travel from place to place with ease. They have ready access to technologies that, in the real world, were spread out over a vast array of time. There is no cultural or technological disparity nor very little scarcity of certain resources. A great deal of lip service is paid to the idea of such things, but the reality of the rules, game books and modules don't back them up. Characters seem to be able to ignore or somehow sidestep things like the feudal system until or unless it becomes necessary to do so. The monarchs of Greyhawk being high-level characters was an act performed out of necessity...if the PCs become 14th level characters, what's to stop Robilar from killing the Overking and taking power? Better make him an 18th level thief.

Things like conflicting currencies aren't really in the game...and why should they be? That's not really very much fun. Neither is dealing with incurable illnesses, overpopulation (or rapid depopulation), decades-long wars, famines and other things that aren't really that interesting in large doses. I keep thinking of the character of Hob Gadling in Gaiman's Sandman when he visits a modern Renfaire and laments how it's a sugar-coated version of the past. D&D is like that, and for good reason.

D&D is medieval in the same way that Robert Boorman's Excalibur is medieval...which is to say not really that much at all. But that misses the point: it's as medieval as it needs to be to enable the game to be fun. Which is fine by me.

 

[gizmo33]

It would be like me making a movie based on an Anne Rice vampire novel, but giving all the characters buzz-cuts and making them wear platemail or football jersyes. Then I could say "oh, what?" and act like I didn't know what I just did.

And then when some poor fan of the books says something about "Victorian era", I could point out that it's not historically accurate that men wore lipstick back then, so therefore the top-hats and all the rest of it go too and now I've turned the culture of the setting into a joke.

So IMO everyone is pretty obviously aware of what consitutes the "medieval" part of DnD - as well as what is meant by the word in the context of the game. Any other thread like "isn't it funny that my bard uses a trombone" pretty much implicitly assumes people understand what this culture is.

 

[gizmo33]

Vancian magic is medieval?

No, obviously not. My point is that 3E core rules kept 99% of prior editions culture in place. Things like AoOs and 5 ft steps aren't relevant to culture. Paladins riding special war horses, familiars, Vancian magic, etc. - all those things remained unchanged. So there was no comprehensive and systematic attempt at a cultural change within the game. The cultural changes occured in the artwork, and in later additions to the game (splat books). Those designers seemed largely unfamiliar with the "medievalisms" in the earlier game - if people now wear nose-rings, then why is salt worth as much as silver? Why are people still hand-writing their spell books? No printing press? Why not? IMO the designers seem to be unfamiliar with the pseudo-medieval motifs used by earlier editions - they adopted them in a clunky fashion, not really sure of what they were doing.

 

[hong]

Operational definition of medieval: HAS swords but NO guns

Thus
D&D -> medieval
Star Wars -> not medieval
Shadowrun -> not medieval
Vampire -> not medieval

 

[Prince of Happiness]

"Can I get a knife and fork?"

"There were no utensils in medieval times hence there are no utensils at Medieval Times. Would you like a refill on your Pepsi?"

"There were no utensils but there was Pepsi?"

" *sigh* Dude, I have a lot of tables." - Cable Guy

You could switch out forks or knives in the above movie dialogue about this or that or whatever, and it'd match insane numbers of D&D setting conversations.

 

[Mycanid]

An interesting thread to read for sure.

The original name of the thread was whether or no D&D had a component of medieval anymore.

By the very fact that it has items of that level of technology (whether for a personal use, or artistic use, or what have you) means that it does still have such a component. Many of the classes and prestige classes (such a hospitaler, paladin, etc.) have their origin idea wise in historical people from the medieval time period. So ... at the very least all this points to the fact that yes, DnD does have components of the medieval built into the game mechanics still.

This, however, does not mean that it is SOLELY medieval. It is not an either/or black/white situation here. But rather a Both/And situation. And I believe all of those who have posted in the thread agree to such. There were always elements that were obviously from a "fantasy" setting, a modern mindset, etc., etc. mixed in.

As far as can understand the OP, he felt that the present versions of the system are moving more and more away from a higher % of the medieval element of things that he felt were in the earlier versions of the games.

Now I agree with this assessment of his, and I personally like the earlier versions of the games as presented. Papersandpaychecks, for example, pointed out in one of his posts that many of the first "Renaissance" type technology elements were introduced in 1983 with the Unearthed Arcana book. Later on blunderbusses and such were added, for example.

Some of the versions of DnD can be easily regarded as having fewer of these medieval elements - such as the Forgotten Realms setting - and some barely any aspects at all - such as Eberron.

But the game as such, in its present manifestation (3.5 rules), outside of a specific setting, does in fact have fewer elements of medievalism in it simply because together with it are mixed together other elements that were not there as the "defaults" to the degree that they were in the older editions.

So then ... here come my two conclusions from all this:

I feel that the reason the rules sets have been presented as they are at present is simply to provide as many as possible general guidelines for people to come to the books and create/take away the elements for a setting they desire. They are meant to be guidelines, not straitjackets - i.e. you MUST have gunpowder in your game, or you must NOT have it.

I have seen so many homebrew settings throughout the threads here in ENWorld, that I am quite certain that any DM and/or players are quite capable or choosing or casting away whatever elements of the game % wise they like. And I have faith in their creativity and stubbornness to do so!