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

[pawsplay]

Yes. Which means that medieval metallurgy has little to do with building railroads. Sure, there may have been some steel produced that was sufficiently strong to be used in this way, but it wasn't widespread, it wasn't useful for that purpose, and wasn't valued for that sort of thing.

In other words, the mind-set of those producing it was radically different from the mind-set of a modern individual. Which is the point.

How is the mindset of an illiterate Irishman pounding a forge in Ireland different than the mindset of an illiterate Irishman blowing a furnace in Buffalo?

 

[Storm Raven]

How is the mindset of an illiterate Irishman pounding a forge in Ireland different than the mindset of an illiterate Irishman blowing a furnace in Buffalo?

Because they are engaged in using a different technology. The idea of industrializing a process as opposed to having a crafting mentality is as much a shift in technology as figuring out that having stirrups makes it easier to ride a horse.

And the mentality of the Irishman is not necessarily what is critical here. The mentality of the individual guiding and directing the process is.

 

[pawsplay]

Because they are engaged in using a different technology. The idea of industrializing a process as opposed to having a crafting mentality is as much a shift in technology as figuring out that having stirrups makes it easier to ride a horse.

And the mentality of the Irishman is not necessarily what is critical here. The mentality of the individual guiding and directing the process is.

Put a mentality on a plate and slice it and maybe I can see what you're getting at.

I think the "medieval mentality" is a myth that endures because people tend to ignore context. If you want to call a steelman a modern inventor and the architects who built the medieval cathedrals medieval sorcerers, power to you. But I think you're dead wrong.

 

[TerraDave]

I wrote this long answer, but I am not sure we even know what medieval is (things like slavery, serfdom, heridatary rule...pre and postdate a tightly defined "medieval" period), and decided there was little point...

D&D is not modern, thats for sure. It is neither connected to modern real life, and it lacks the tropes of modern action adventure. It is a fantasy game where magic works, modern technology is absent and the world seems to be in this state of extremely violent near anarchy. With (in many campaign worlds and adventures) noble lords and ladies, knights and paladins, menacing goblins, serving wenches, peasents in need of defending...

Ya know what. It is medieval. Turned up to 11!!

 

[Storm Raven]

It has to be expressed as something. But as noted many times in the text, ordinary wealth is tied up in capital and commodities, not coin.

No, it isn't. It is expressed as pay, with a little talk about it perhaps being in trade, but most of the stuff assumes that people are circulating cash in a money based economy. Of course, the idea of capital and commodities, as opposed to tenancy and personal obligations, moves you more towards the modern.

Of course they were exceptional! Anyone who achieves great advancement is exceptional. We were talking about exceptions. Obviously, not everyone can be President of the United States at the same time, or king, or whatever.

They were exceptional, and yet, they didn't do what you said that people did. Wallace was already minor nobility and became . . . outlawed minor nobility. Joan was a peasant, and became a military leader for a extraordinarily brief period, and then she was betrayed and killed. So you have a pair of examples, neither of which really support the idea that social advancement is something that is commonplace (as appears to be the case in the default D&D world), and say little concerning the social divisions between say, commoners and nobility (which the default D&D assumption simply glosses over).

Knights were required to have "franchise", i.e. freedom. Scottish lairds, free farmers, German burghars, escaped peasants, craftsmen, and many others existed on a plane below true aristocrats but had freedom, saved wealth, and opportunity for advancement. German landsknechts and Swiss pikemen were also freemen, as were most ship captains.

Most PCs are not knights, nor are they from any kind of privileged background - at least as a default assumption. Sure there were free persons, but they had limited political authority, and severely curtailed prospects for advancement - and certainly nothing like you see in the default D&D campaign.

I think the tanner's guild would be surprised to learn that, or leaders of glass.

Study something like The Last Sorcerers and you would be surprised at how little was understood about hos those processes worked.

I think that the personalization of magic... that is, the need for a live spellcaster, the need to handcraft individual items, the inaccessiblity to the masses... makes it an excellent parallel to medieval science and technology, which lacked mass production. Eberron, of course, turns this assumption on its head.

Actually, throughout the renaissance, handcrafts were common, especially for very high technology items - clockmakers, gunsmiths and shipwrights built everything essentially to order. There were some technologies that were more mass produced, but there wasn't significant industrialization until much later (the 17th century at the earliest, and the 18th century to get things into full swing). The idea of the highly skilled craftsman who makes a unique and valuable product available to all who have the coin to pay for it taking center stage as an important social figure (as opposed to a landlord renting farms to tenants for service and produce) is moving into a more modern mind-set.

It's all very well and good to talk about paradigm shifts, but tell me, on what day and date, and where, did the Renaissance begin?

Now you are just being the southern end of a northbound horse.

Was there some specific event that caused people to start "pioneering" instead of merely "experimenting?" If the Renaissance began in Italy, what were people in England doing at the time?

The renaissance took place at different times in different places - evolving in the regions bordering the Mediterranean first and filtering outwards. The paradigm shift took time - and you know that it did. Your "day and date" crap is just a smokescreen you use to make yourself look like you know something special, when all you are really doing is demonstrating the paltry nature of your argument. There was a shift in how society was organized. It didn't take place on a particular day, and it didn't happen everywhere at once, nor did the ideas come fully formed or take root fully everywhere - nothing ever does (and demanding that someone identify such a day and date reveals the requester to be a non-serious individual), but it did take place. The attitudes and assumptions of a 15th century spaniard would be almost incomprehensible to a 13th century castillian, and vice versa. The way Henry V viewed the world was very different from how Henry VIII viewed the world.

 

[tzor]

D&D has never really been medieval. One can argue that it was very close to the period between the classical medieval and the renaissance, with one very important exception – instead of having the spice trade as a result of demand of spices from crusaders who had tasted the goods of the middle east we have adventurers in what is basically a “gold rush” that involved treasure hordes and not actual gold ore.

Sad to say that many people don’t really understand either the “dark ages,” (Why are they dark anyway? I did hear a joke about how a supernova recorded in China was never recorded by the monks of the dark ages, so perhaps it was just exceptionally overcast?) the medieval period, the renaissance, the baroque, etc. Few people understand the differences between capitalism and feudalism. And most importantly, none of this was really important to the creators of the D&D (and then the AD&D game).

Technology also spanned the centuries, from barbarian armors to that of the high renaissance. So too did weapons. Oddly enough the forces that drove the development of those weapons and armors are completely absent from the setting. In the medieval mindset armor, arms, and spurs were the proper right of knights, not of ordinary folk. (It is generally not understood that the knight was in effect an order of armored cavalry.)

So to suggest any relationship between D&D and the medieval period one has to look at the example of a retired old man recalling his high school days. Don’t expect it to be exceptionally accurate. Expect some modern notions to creep in. Expect at lot of flavor and a little exaggeration.

 

[wingsandsword]

And both were executed for their efforts. Both were considered to be exceptional and, in Joan's case, heretical. You aren't making much of an argument by trotting them out.

PC's are exceptional by nature, so the historic figures who are exceptional, heroic, and often violate social and religious norms are the kind of people that make good role models for PC's. I've often heard Joan of Arc used as a good example of many D&D archetypes: the Paladin, the PC who goes from first level to high level in only a year or two of adventuring, the commoner who rises to greatness, ect.

As for heretical, if you want authentic medieval catholicism in your D&D game, that's in it's own way going far out of the normal for D&D that it's almost not even D&D anymore (I know, I tried it once, see my prior post, trying to avoid too much religious discussion, but it's safe to say that the beliefs were distinctly different enough to be very disorienting for modern players). The closest things there are to the medieval Catholic Church in D&D is the Church of St. Cuthbert in Greyhawk and the Church of Helm in Forgotten Realms, and even then the resemblance is limited and their power is greatly limited by the fact they are only one of many religions practiced.

 

[Storm Raven]

I think the "medieval mentality" is a myth that endures because people tend to ignore context. If you want to call a steelman a modern inventor and the architects who built the medieval cathedrals medieval sorcerers, power to you. But I think you're dead wrong.

I don't think I called medieval architects medieval sorcerers. But feel free to make stuff up to support your argument. I did say that their work was not particularly revolutionary, nor was it a significant technological advance because much of it it wasn't new - the Romans, for example, used flying butresses, medieval architects were frequently simply copying stuff that had been done before.

 

[Deset Gled]

D&D is to medieval as the movie Hackers is to programming.

D+D is to medieval as Tim Burton's Batman is to the 1920/30s. Its meant to feel like you're in that time period, even though none of the actual day-to-day occurances resemble that period in any way.

It's hard to model medieval history without ripping the fun out of most RPGs. Most medieval problems, like the plague, food shortages, religious conflict, social unrest, etc, make for encounters that are too political or too boring (the cleric casts Cure Disease...again) to actually base an entire game off of. I don't expect too much historical accuracy out of a game with mythical creatures and magic anyway.

 

[Prince of Happiness]

I see medievalism in D&D much like medievalism is used in much of the source material: Useful at the author's/DM's discretion, and best use as a conflict/adventure source and whatever detail behooves you to set up a campaign area.