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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5377267" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't believe you have even attempted to argue so limited of a point.  On the contrary, your point appears to be that people have no reason to exclude guns from fantasy on the basis of either realism or fantasy.  It is against that point and many others you have made that I'm arguing.  For example, I'm arguing that the presence or absence of guns doesn't force the choice of feudalism, and that your assertion that Gygax excluded guns in a mistaken belief that doing so was required to protect feudalism seems to have little basis in fact given that relatively few of Gygax's nation states are truly feudal and how much interest Gygax had in antiquity (Egypt for example) and low fantasy (and how relatively little he had in High Fantasy).   To be frank, I suspect Gygax's readings on medieval history were a bit deeper than Charles Oman as well, and your take on this - that everyone but you is ignorant of history and has no valid reasoning to support their opinions - seems to be manly a necessary strawman to justify your claim that everyone else is objectively wrong.Your argument?  Your argument is that feudalism was done in by the pike, that Gygax banned guns to protect feudalism, and that cowboys have no place in fantasy (or something like that, I couldn't tell what the point was, just that you were snarky).Complaining about my inability to compose nice Ciceronian structure not only seems to me to be grasping a bit, but in all admitted lack of modesty, strikes me as an attempted blow that is unlikely to scotch me much.   I get alot of valid complaints, but my inability to form working paragraphs generally isn't one of them.Why do you imagine that entrenching the rules of heroic myth into the very physics of reality ends us up with a meritocracy?  In heroic myth, the Hero is very much who he is because of his birth and not despite it.   If there is a Hero in the story, chances are that the Hero is the scion of a Hero as well.  This is true from Heracles to Beowulf to Tolkien.   Heroic myth doesn't change things to a meritocracy; rather, it makes true the justifications of hereditary aristocracies.About the time you feel the need let fly your second blasphemous flourish is your oratory, you are losing your argument.   From David's band of 30, to the Illiad, to King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table, to the Song of Roland, the Heroic myth is marked by the ability of the few to overcome the many.   And in heroic ages, whether the Bronze Age of the greeks or the Iron Age of the Hittites or the age of the Knight or Samuraii, because of the interaction of technologies available at the time, this wasn't merely a myth but an occasional fact.   The armored trained warrior, operating together with his fellows, could in fact overcome odds of 10 to 1 or more.  This is much like the admission that you've not read the thread, but you are sure that everyone else is objectively wrong.It might not.  The people in the medieval world believed that they could talk to God and structured their society as if they could talk to God, and really I'm not so sure that you can decide objectively how the world would work if suddenly you had a bunch of meddlesome quarrelsome gods talking to people on a regular basis.  Personally, I think you are wrong on all three counts.  Like I said, I don't find it very creditable when you claim this is the full extent of your point or points.  You've also claimed knowledge of the inner workings of Gygax's mind that seem at odds with his published works, and further claimed that the idea that Knights and guns don't mix not only has no basis in reality (which is debateable) but no basis in fantasy (which is ludicrous).</blockquote>

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