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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6842106" data-attributes="member: 4937">Before I get into this, let me back up and explain why this is the case.  Everyone has seen the Disney princess films, right?  Most people looking at them would think that they belong to this unfeudalism setting you are describing.  In fact, if you analyze the social structures, technology, and most of all the costuming they are with the exception of Sleeping Beauty very late period pieces - mostly set in the 19th century.  There is something I think very important going on here which has a very big impact on running RPGs.   When people are asked to imagine the past, there is a limit to what most of them can imagine.  Most people can't actually grasp the very real differences in the way society was organized and the way people thought and behaved more than a century or so into the past.  Asked to imagine 'the middle ages' and feudalism, most people can get no closer than the first half of the 19th century with a few additional anachronistic trappings.  Thus you end up with something like a knight in plate mail traipsing through a Dickensonian town.  I believe this observation is even partly behind the evolution in the trope settings we see in fantasy.  As time marches on, the trope fantasy world is evolving into being more and more like the later half of the 19th century than the first, with not the foretaste of a burgeoning industrial revolution, but the products of it.  Thus, typical worlds are becoming more and more Steampunk, and more and more gunpowder is becoming a part of those worlds.Keep that hypothesis in the back of your mind as we go forward.So this is Tolkienism.  It's Tolkien that creates worlds which are huge tracts of empty wilderness in which their are isolated pockets of civilization.  He does this because he's channeling not the High Middle ages that most people are familiar with and which we've been discussing, but the dark ages world of Beowulf with its proto-feudalism and comparatively empty low population density world.  It's the same sort of world that you find in Homer, where a tiny tiny portion of the Aegean sea can become the setting for a years long Odyssey through the unknown.  Homer wasn't describing the world his Greek hearers lived in, but the same dimly imagined past of their great-great-grandfathers.  Tolkien can reach further back with power because he was a keen student and scholar of that distant world.  He could bring it near to the reader in a way that on the average most people can't, and even then - as evidenced by all the bad translations of his world into a D&D game world - they probably won't get most of it (and yes, I am simplifying my Tolkien here).Not surprisingly, if you listen to Gygax, the details of his setting weren't largely drawn from the real middle ages, but just as much drawn from his own culture's gone but not yet forgotten past - the American Frontier.  Asked to explain what his setting was like, he'd reach back to ideas like the Klondike gold rush.  The D&D world is very much a cowboy world of frontier justice with some pseudo-feudal trappings.  Gygax had some very keen insights into some aspects of the feudal system, but often he would break them for game purposes, and at times he'd just get things dead wrong.  Because of Gygax, everyone for example in gaming calls a warsword or an armingword, a longsword and he repeats the Ivanhoe anachronism 'chain mail' and 'plate mail' until its engrained in everyone's vocabulary.  The political situation in most D&D settings is not feudal.  It's early-modern to in some cases post-Enlightenment.  Most nations aren't ruled by a Fuedal King, but a Sovereign King whose vassals while important are largely quelled and subservient.  Most of the arms of the nation aren't owed to a distributed feudal system were the noble's labor is taxed, but rather there are large standing national armies who serve for pay and not out of loyalty or as a form of tax payment.  And there are a smattering of Constitutional Monoarchies and Republics about the map.Unless they are actually the villain, which is very common, because we tend to see authority figures as natural villains and not natural heroes. This is probably the most startling departure from the feudal system as it actually was.  The feudal system was driven in no small part by a lack of coinage.  The lack of coinage drove everything toward barter, including the taxes and the daily functioning of government.   And I have to tell you, it's annoying to run your game any other way but abundant coinage.  Indeed, 'realistic coinage' is one of those ideas I've had to put aside as simply not worth the hassle it becomes when you implement it, particularly when you have a large group.  My economy has some nods to realism - everything is priced in silver as the base coinage and not gold, for example - but actual realistic monetary concerns are only going to show up if I have an entire table filled with historically literate economists who want to play that game.And this gets back to my main point, which is that while you can go realistic if you want, expect the game to bog down to a crawl as you try to give the players the equivalent of 20 hours of college coursework in medieval history over the course of the campaign.  And this might not work too well if the main aesthetic of play of some of the players is not historical simulation, but rather kicking doors down, killing the monsters, and taking their stuff.   It's good to be able to analyze what really goes into the makeup of a setting and to understand all of its parts, but you are also going to have to make some compromises for the sake of gameplay if you want to run the game smoothly.  So unless you have a whole table full of Latin speaking medieval historians, asking them to imagine living in a real feudal system should probably be considered a bridge too far.  Or at the very least, you should be easing your players into the setting slowly, by having them come from an Unfeudalism part of your world and gradually move into a part of your world with more realistic Feudalism, exposing both the player and the character to the novelty at the same time instead of demanding that the player animate a character according to beliefs and knowledge the player can't possibly have.Sounds like a good idea, for several reasons.I rather pride myself on having bizarre detailed systems of government around the world that have believable in universe roots.   My answer to what a fantasy government can look like is, "Just about anything if you are willing to take the time to imagine how the situation came to pass and why it endures."  Remember, just as the fantasy world contains features the real world doesn't, so there are structures that could exist and arguably should exist that you don't find in the real world.  You can still inform the world with your knowledge of historical feudalism, but you don't have to be hide bound to it.  The important thing is to be conscious of what you are doing and why rather than blindly imitating.So for example, gender equality is a common unfeudalism thing that is present in many gaming worlds.  There are a lot of different reasons for that, some of them arguably quite good.  But there are plenty of in game reasons you can have to justify why that fantasy world doesn't work like the real one.  In the real world, evolution gives humans a shared simian legacy of gender dimorphism where in the male of the species is evolved to be a predator and protector.  Male humans are about 25% stronger than females pound for pound, and about 25% larger.  In a world where the only effective means of making war is based on physical strength and with the human propensity for combat, it's natural you end up with a lot of governments revolving around a male aristocratic warrior caste that controls most of the political power.  And while that certainly could happen in a fantasy world, in a fantasy world none of that has to be true either in detail or outcome.  Indeed, none of that has to be true regardless of whether or not you have a world that true to history has almost all soldiers be male rather than an anachronistic fully integrated armed forces.  After all, the ancient Greeks - about as sexist of a group as you'll ever find - imagined a world containing a fully female army.  And in a world where ordinary people can drop fireballs and toss lightning bolts, the core fighting force of a nation doesn't have to be guys swinging swords.  It's quite easy to imagine a social structures in a fantasy world where wizards or clerics ended up forming the aristocracy rather than armored cavalry, in which case this might be a case of Girls Do it Better.To make something believable, all you have to do is put enough color in to get your group to suspend disbelief.  If you put as much as a page of thought into how the countries social and political structures evolved, and its even the least bit coherent, your group is going to swallow it hook line and sinker after about the fifth time they ask a question and you have a ready answer.  Pretty quickly, they'll just assume you have got all the details already thought out, and move on with play (unless you are actually dealing with a guy that speaks Old English and has a Phd in History, in which case, better crack some books).</blockquote>

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