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

[pawsplay]

It used to be pretty medieval, but with certain aspects in place purely for game reasons. AD&D was more medieval than Basic D&D. Really, though it has more in common with other anachronistic settings such as Hyperborea, Melnibone, the Dying Earth, etc.

Tolkien was quite Dark Ages... plate armor is quite a rarity, you'll notice, along with the lack of crossbows.

The new D&D is more like "wahooooo!!! Leather belts and big honkin' swords!!!"

 

[-SIN-]

D&D is a rule-set, nothing more.

The Campaign Settings are responsible for the content.

So is D&D less medieval? No, not really (Aside from it's neanderthalian clunkyness)...

Are the Settings? No. I think the settings were designed to be as they are now, more or less. Also, as some posters pointed out, the medieval era wasn't a particularly nice one, so would not really be suitable for young children to play...

Another way to look at it is this:

The game is called Dungeon's & Dragon's, correct?

Does your game still contain both of these elements, to some degree?

Yes?... The it's still the same old game... But on the flipside, was the medieval period renowned for it's fire-breathing dragons, or it's sprawling complexes of dungeons?...

 

[Storm Raven]

It used to be pretty medieval, but with certain aspects in place purely for game reasons.

I would disagree. D&D has never been "medieval" in anything but the most superficial sense. Almost no one plays the game with a medieval mindset, and the default assumptions in the books certainly don't support that idea, and so on. Just having a money based economy in which coins are the common way to buy things and wages are the default method of compensating employees is a very modern non-medieval idea, and those are the dominant assumptions in most D&D campaigns. The ideas of personal advancement, technological (magical) progress and so on simply divorce the game from anything that could really be termed medieval. The game ignores the brutality, the foulness, the disease, and the unfairness (by our standards) of medieval society.

And why is the game like this? Because we, the people who play the game, have a modern mindset, and anything truly medieval would be so alien to us that it would be very difficult to pull off, and probably not much fun to play. (I will say that, from time to time, I have tried to run a campaign in which the default assumptions were much more like those of the medieval period - it has never worked well, even when dealing with knowledgeable and willing players, because as modern individuals we fall so easily and wuickly into modern ways of thinking).

D&D, as it is commonly played, seems to me to be a reasonably good approximation of the late 17th, 18th, or early 19th century eras, with magic filling in in large part for the technological advances of the time. Decrying Eberron, to my mind, is simply complaining that a setting made explicit what has been pretty much implicit all along.

 

[pawsplay]

Just having a money based economy in which coins are the common way to buy things and wages are the default method of compensating employees is a very modern non-medieval idea,

That's true for adventurers, but not the general public.

and those are the dominant assumptions in most D&D campaigns.

... where the abstraction of gold pieces became reified as an abundance of coins.

The ideas of personal advancement,

By strength in arms? Totally medieval.

technological (magical) progress

Substantial technological progress was made in the medieval era. Improvements in leaded glass, steel, architecture, riding gear, and ballistics all occured in the medieval era. The crossbow as invented and subsequently banned by the Church. And it was a time of huge advancements in the field of shoes (you pretty much went from fur slippers and sandals for about two thousand years to suddenly having sewn leather boots, wooden shoes, and the first hard-soled leather shoes).

 

[Delta]

Was it ever really all that medieval?

OD&D Vol. 1 p. 5 calls it "fantastic-medieval wargame play". It goes on:

Actually, the scope need not be restricted to the medieval; it can stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future, but such expansion is recommended only at such time as the possibilities in the medieval aspect have been thoroughly explored.

 

[shilsen]

I don't have that much experience with earlier editions, havign only started playing D&D in 1999, near the fag end of 2e, but from what I've read D&D was never really close to medieval. The Renaissance is a much better period to compare it to, and even then, much of it seemed shoehorned into a pseudo-Renaissance feel to me.

One of the reasons I find the (admittedly rare) complaints we see on ENWorld about anachronism in D&D quite amusing is that I've always figured an authentically medieval or Renaissance feel in D&D would be really strange. The medieval and Renaissance periods (focusing on Europe, esp. western Europe, here) were the results of a large number of historical events/movements, some of which were really arbitrary or coincidental. Having a fantasy world with magic, monsters and all the other appurtenances thereof which accurately replicated such periods without the existence of said events/movements always seemed quite hokey to me. An accurately medieval/Renaissance feel in a fantasy world which has never seen the rise of Christianity, the Black Death, the Crusades, the Protestant Reformation, etc. makes no sense to me.

That's also why the "modern in medieval drag" criticism strikes me as a little silly. D&D as "authentic" medieval or Renaissance would be nonsensical, without such vast change to the ruleset (the drastic reduction or outright removal of magic, for one) that it would be unrecognizable as D&D. A D&D setting, IMNSHO, should have a mixture of medieval, Renaissance, & modern elements, as well as more than a few that have had no existence in our world. One obvious reason is to create familiarity and allow players to identify with characters and the setting. The other reason is simply because the existence of the mechanical elements of D&D need to be recognized in the setting. That's one of the reasons why Eberron works well for me as a campaign setting. As Storm Raven said above, it makes explicit what has been implicit all along, tries to envision a world and societ(y/ies) which actually respond to the mechanics of the people, creatures and forces living within it, and also retains enough elements that we are familiar with to allow players to enter and interact with it. That's the kind of mixture of gamist and simulationist elements I was trying to put in my games from almost the moment I started playing D&D, and I'm glad it's being done now.

 

[pawsplay]

Well, I don't think anyone expects D&D to be medieval history. I myself prefer D&D to make sense in having those elements which the medieval period also had. Which is to say, if people ride horses, a horse should have a similar economic value. If feudalism exists, agrarianism should be the norm. etc.

In many respects I base my D&D after ancient Greece or early medieval India, both places where a complex, cosmopolitan polytheism thrived.

 

[Storm Raven]

That's true for adventurers, but not the general public.

Actually, if you look at the assumptions in the books, wages and a money economy are assumed for pretty much everybody. Your campaign may operate differently, but the published campaign settings and the way the books handle this sort of thing as a default operate using the very modern assumptions of

... where the abstraction of gold pieces became reified as an abundance of coins.

And yet, this remains a very modern mind set. A medival mindset revolves around transactions involving obligations, land, tenancy, rents and so on. it is a system that works for its intended purpose, but it is pretty boring to play.

By strength in arms? Totally medieval.

You must be joking. A peasant farmer can, by dint of his strength in arms work his way up to becoming a noble, or a king? Give an actual example of a commoner ascending to the throne during the era. Most examples of someone fighting their way to the top involve people who started pretty far up the ladder to begin with - usually they were related to the rulers to begin with.

Substantial technological progress was made in the medieval era. Improvements in leaded glass, steel, architecture, riding gear, and ballistics all occured in the medieval era. The crossbow as invented and subsequently banned by the Church. And it was a time of huge advancements in the field of shoes (you pretty much went from fur slippers and sandals for about two thousand years to suddenly having sewn leather boots, wooden shoes, and the first hard-soled leather shoes).

Most of these are little more than trivial refinements on things that had already existed, or involved simply rediscovering something that existed before (like the crossbow, originally developed in the ancient world). And none of these were regarded as a positive good in and of themselves (witness things like the attempted banning of the crossbow, because it threatened to upset the established social order). Contrast this to later periods in which technological progress was not only regarded as useful, but lauded and rewarded as a good thing in and of its own sake.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Generally speaking, I think D&D is based on the medieval world but with the fantasy element thrown in. I think a lot of the medieval gets lost not because of the game, but because the (vast) majority of D&D players don't have a clue what the medieval world was really like. They have impressions of what it was like, but those impressions are jaded by the fantasy element of D&D and Hollywood entertainment in general. Throw in the fact that the real medieval world had nowhere near the freedom that D&D players want and expect, and that undermines the basic premise of the medieval world from the get-go.

 

[FireLance]

Medieval is to D&D what the dough is to pizza. You start out with it as a base, then you add whatever other things you want: pirates, ninjas, robots, dinosaurs, genies, sticks turning into snakes, space ships, laser guns, tentacled monstrosities, rust monsters, beholders, donut-shaped cities, kings who have inherited powers from dead gods, cities ruled by immortal god-kings, monks, samurai, modern morals, modern jurisprudence, shifters, warforged, incarnum, swordsages, warblades, etc.