Historical periods, Problematic Elements, Gameplay, and Fun

[Reynard]

NOTE: let's see if we can keep this civil, even if we have to discuss some stuff that isn't necessarily pleasant.
I just finished a wonderful Great Courses lecture series called "Rome and the Barbarians" and am following it up with "The Vikings" -- both by Dr. Kenneth Harl. He is a great lecturer, very knowledgable as well as compelling. I recommend him to anyone.

Anyway, it makes me want to run a historical campaign set in the tumultuous "dark ages" after the fall of the Roman Empire but before the Middle Ages really got settled. But, in so doing there is no way to be both historically accurate and eliminate problematic elements. As an example, Vikings were both noble warriors that cared about their homes and families, and raiders, pillagers and slavers that descended on settlements like so many orcs.

So what do we do with that?

You could make a campaign in which the PCs are Celts and Germanics fighting the encroachment of Rome, casting them as the heroes, but you still have to deal with the human sacrifice and the slavery. Crusaders represent obvious problems, but so do the Arabs of the time. Can you use the invasions of the Mongols thoughtfully? If you want to play in the mythical age of Arthur, what do you do with the blatant classicism.

So my question really boils down to this: The history of human civilization is complex and in most cases we don't actually have unbiased sources for that history. but it is also rife with opportunity for adventure (especially if you include a dash of the mythology that dominated the pre-modern era). So what do we do as modern audiences, with the problematic realities of history as a setting for RPG play?

NOTE2: I realize that most of the above is written with a Eurocentric view and I understand that is based on my upbringing and preferences, but I think it still holds no matter where you shift the story to. The day before Cortez landed, the Aztec rulership were child sacrificing imperialists who crushed any opposition and dominated their ethnic neighbors. The day after, they were the victims of European expansion. There is no culture in the history of our world that has expanded without engaging in problematic behavior.

 

[Cadence]

What makes historically accurate - obviously no magic but is it diseases and infections killing lots of people, combat giving wounds like real life, and lots of different dialects and languages?

What game system are you thinking?

 

[Reynard]

What makes historically accurate - obviously no magic but is it diseases and infections killing lots of people, combat giving wounds like real life, and lots of different dialects and languages?

What game system are you thinking?

I am specifically thinking of cultures and historical events. I am not necessarily thinking of games that inherently embrace "realism" in the way you are describing -- mostly because I don't think it matters much. there are plenty of examples of great warriors dying of fever, as well as wounded champions living on for years afterward. Dying of dysentery is hardly the point. As such, the game system doesn't matter for what I am talking about. You might play a historical game in WHFRP1E and expect to die of the rot in one level, or play the same game in D&D and expect to be an epic hero. None of that impacts whether Vikings sold Slavs to the Arabs.

 

[Cadence]

I am specifically thinking of cultures and historical events. I am not necessarily thinking of games that inherently embrace "realism" in the way you are describing -- mostly because I don't think it matters much. there are plenty of examples of great warriors dying of fever, as well as wounded champions living on for years afterward. Dying of dysentery is hardly the point. As such, the game system doesn't matter for what I am talking about. You might play a historical game in WHFRP1E and expect to die of the rot in one level, or play the same game in D&D and expect to be an epic hero. None of that impacts whether Vikings sold Slavs to the Arabs.

A game playing epic leaders and folks lucky enough to avoid disease and an unlucky sword blow feels like a thing; if someone wasn't in that group we probably wouldn't read about them in the histories, so that makes sense. And I guess it might be hard to have a fun game without setting it up for the players to be special in that way.

It's not really so historic in the sense I was thinking of though if it has epic heroes in the D&D sense, or has any actual magic.

I'm not sure what kind of answer to give to "how do I get into playing a person who does awful things but is still the protagonist and doesn't worry about the bad stuff he's doing". Is there advice on that in the parts of VtM about playing the Sabbat, or is there a GTA type RPG that talks about playing the less than upstanding? While the settings are totally wrong for what you want, whatever answers they have might be helpful for what you're trying to navigate.

In any case, I'm interested to keep reading even if I have nothing to add.

 

[Einar Stormcrow]

A lot of that stuff, slavery, classism, human sacrifice, I'd probably just run it as it is, unless someone had a specific complaint. The ancient world was not a nice place, I think most people going into a game set there know this. Like Dark Sun back in the day, that never really messed with any of us. Or Conan, which I'm getting ready to run soon.

Where I would personally have an issue would be racism in a more modern context. Say, running a game set in the 1920s in America. That's a trigger to me, but at the same time...that's what the world was like. Am I doing a disservice to the people who suffered through it by not depicting it honestly?

 

[deganawida]

Well, one way to look at it is that the modern conception of nation states with established ethical principles used in formulation didn’t exist. Everything in the smaller nations is tribal or cultural. You may not agree with or like what your people are doing, but they are YOUR PEOPLE, and everyone else is out to take land and loot and lives from YOUR PEOPLE. The world is a lot less civilized, and foreigners have no rights as they are not part of your tribe (language group, kingdom, it’s still more tribal than we are accustomed to). Thus, good becomes oriented towards survival of YOUR PEOPLE (sorry for repeated capitalization, but trying to emphasize it while using phone), and evil are the foreigners trying to take from them.

It doesn’t erase the values dissonance, but helps frame it in such a way that you can still have some fun and recognize that things aren’t capital G Good, while still allowing for drama through maintaining loyalty to the tribe. Remember as well, Dante Alighieri had traitors reserved for the worst punishments because of that sort of tribal (or feudal) loyalty.

 

[Jahydin]

So what do we do as modern audiences, with the problematic realities of history as a setting for RPG play?

I mean, that comes down to personal opinion. It's your creation, so you get to decide. Then whoever you play with can decide what they feel comfortable with. From there you either compromise or tell them gently this isn't the game for them.

 

[Reynard]

I mean, that comes down to personal opinion. It's your creation, so you get to decide. Then whoever you play with can decide what they feel comfortable with. From there you either compromise or tell them gently this isn't the game for them.

I wasn't asking for advice, I was curious what YOU would do.

 

[Jahydin]

I wasn't asking for advice, I was curious what YOU would do.

Oh, maybe change your question form "we" to "you" then?

 

[Reynard]

Oh, maybe change your question form "we" to "you" then?

I honestly don't know what you mean. I asked what you would do, pretty directly. I didn't ask what you thought I should do. The question is: what would you, running this game, do in regards to historical unpleasantness?

 

[Lanefan]

Oh, maybe change your question form "we" to "you" then?

"We", as in all of us collectively and separately, can still answer this.

My answer: play it as it lay, warts and all.

 

[overgeeked]

I play a lot of Call of Cthulhu, which centers warty historical periods (1920s, 1890s, and others) and centers an utterly vile historical person (H.P. Lovecraft), but I prize player safety, player inclusion, and having fun around the table infinitely more than historical accuracy. Playing in the historical USA I would only include a few disapproving looks about women dressed in any way the time period wouldn't like, but not include NPCs spouting sexism at women characters. I've kicked players for RPing the sexism of the 1920s. It has absolutely no place at my tables. Historical accuracy be damned. This applies to racism and all other kinds of bigotry. The people at the table are more important. This is a game. Not a historical reenactment with textbooks open to make sure we get everything exactly right. I do my best to make things historically accurate outside of the social expectations. And I've discovered quite a few weird bits of history as a result.

 

[zarionofarabel]

If I was running a historical game with historical accuracy being a main theme, I would make it historically accurate.

 

[the Jester]

I honestly don't know what you mean. I asked what you would do, pretty directly. I didn't ask what you thought I should do. The question is: what would you, running this game, do in regards to historical unpleasantness?

So my first answer was going to be "Depends on the group", but given this clarification, I would run it with all the warts included. I know that's not for everyone, and if I had someone who was put off by that, I would be open to discussing it, but that's my preferred style, and it seems to be okay with all the people I play D&D with, based on my knowledge of them as people as well as experiences we've had with e.g. Deadlands and the like, in pseudohistorical settings.

Even in my own homebrewed D&D world, there is lots of racism, from the classic "elves and dwarves tend to not like each other" to the perhaps more sketchy "a lot of the prejudices against gnomes are modeled on anti-Semitic tropes from the real world" approach I adopted waaaaay back before I even recognized it as problematic that has continued by virtue of it being established canon. There are also analogs to colonial powers, including ones where the prejudices are within one race and based on culture or ethnicity, e.g. the (human) Forinthian Empire exploited, colonized, and horribly abused many many MANY other human ethnicities.

I have slavery, I have religious conflicts, I have complicated things where the orcs of one particular continent struggled to get accepted as a "civilized" race for decades or even centuries. There are cultures that are terribly sexist, both with males on top and with females on top.

But here's the thing. Those prejudices aren't built in to the people, they are cultural norms. The pcs from those cultures are assumed to understand those prejudices but not necessarily to share them. And things like bigotry, religious division, colonization, etc, are things that I depict as true to the world but BAD. When I roleplay a murderer, there's no question that he's the bad guy (assuming the pcs know he's a murderer- exceptions may apply if they don't know The Truth yet). When I roleplay a bigot, it's clear that the bigotry is not at all a positive trait. Even when I RP bigotry against traditional enemy races, such as orcs or gnolls or goblins, I try to make it very clear that this isn't something for heroic pcs to emulate; it's something that they can try to overcome or change, that they have the opportunity to lead people away from. Slavers are not the good guys. Religious persecution isn't what the good guys do, even if the church they follow does; the good guys are reformers.

Although I totally get why a lot of folks don't want any prejudice or slavery or whatnot in their game, I like to give my players a reason to consider the bad guys bad guys other than just "they're the antagonist of this adventure". Things like prejudice, persecution, exploitation, slaving, murder, kidnapping children, etc, etc, ad nauseam- that's all stuff that I consider to be Wrong, and I strive to depict it as Wrong in game. The bad guys do bad things; those who do bad things are bad guys. And some of those bad guys can be reformed or turned around or shown the light, but some are irredeemable bad guys who are there to be straight up defeated by Our Heroes.

I think evil, wrong, bad things serve a purpose in the game. If I had a player who was made uncomfortable by such things, I'd have to have a talk with them and see where to go with it. Might be that I'd stay away from certain topics. Might be that there could be some "light touch" on certain topics adopted. And it might be that I'd recommend they drop my game. It just depends on what it is- I certainly would not want a player in my game who was squeamish about my descriptions in combat, or who couldn't handle spider-like monsters, or who was legitimately disturbed by any mention of religion. Those are things that I don't think I would have fun eliminating from my game, or honestly even could eliminate without a massive amount of mental work and constantly second-guessing myself. But I am fortunate not to have anyone in my groups that can't hang with our playstyle.

 

[TerraDave]

For years I ran a pastiched earth homebrew (its were my nom de enworld comes from). All the stuff in the OP was in the background, but played very lightly. The focus was the PC's fight against weirder and weirder monster and comic threats.

If the focus is instead to be primarily human vs. human conflict, then its trickier. You could bystep that--all these groups, or at least members of them, did actually cooperate for long periods of time.

The D&D approach would be to have roman, gaul, german, etc as some kind of background element, and then they all work together to fight an Orcus cult, or something like that. Which of course involves going into some ancient and strangely elaborate underground pre/nonhuman ruins and incredibly dangerous wilderness areas.

 

[Cadence]

I wasn't asking for advice, I was curious what YOU would do.

Doh! I read it as asking all of us for advice too.

What I would do is probably better said by two posts above:

I play a lot of Call of Cthulhu, which centers warty historical periods (1920s, 1890s, and others) and centers an utterly vile historical person (H.P. Lovecraft), but I prize player safety, player inclusion, and having fun around the table infinitely more than historical accuracy. Playing in the historical USA I would only include a few disapproving looks about women dressed in any way the time period wouldn't like, but not include NPCs spouting sexism at women characters. I've kicked players for RPing the sexism of the 1920s. It has absolutely no place at my tables. Historical accuracy be damned. This applies to racism and all other kinds of bigotry. The people at the table are more important. This is a game. Not a historical reenactment with textbooks open to make sure we get everything exactly right. I do my best to make things historically accurate outside of the social expectations. And I've discovered quite a few weird bits of history as a result.

... and:

But here's the thing. Those prejudices aren't built in to the people, they are cultural norms. The pcs from those cultures are assumed to understand those prejudices but not necessarily to share them. And things like bigotry, religious division, colonization, etc, are things that I depict as true to the world but BAD. When I roleplay a murderer, there's no question that he's the bad guy (assuming the pcs know he's a murderer- exceptions may apply if they don't know The Truth yet). When I roleplay a bigot, it's clear that the bigotry is not at all a positive trait. Even when I RP bigotry against traditional enemy races, such as orcs or gnolls or goblins, I try to make it very clear that this isn't something for heroic pcs to emulate; it's something that they can try to overcome or change, that they have the opportunity to lead people away from. Slavers are not the good guys. Religious persecution isn't what the good guys do, even if the church they follow does; the good guys are reformers.

 

[Fenris-77]

I have no issue with either slavery or human sacrifice in a game (generally speaking). Both are widely present in fantasy fiction anyway. I'm not even sure why anyone would hand-wring about it. I mean if players at the table have hard lines about either then sure, but barring that whatever.

I also think it's vitally important to consider that perhaps the PCs might be heroes, if the game in question even needs heroes, rather than wrap yourself in knots trying to cast one whole culture or another as the heroes (or villains). The latter is where RPGs have traditionally fallen on their faces IMO, aside from it being just plain lazy thinking in terms of historical analogue. Anyway, I don't see a problem.

 

[Teo Twawki]

Am I doing a disservice to the people who suffered through it by not depicting it honestly?

From at least several perspectives, yes.

A few personally relevant perspectives I can address are those of a teacher of cultural studies, a teacher of critical theory, a historical fiction teacher, as a gamer of predominantly historical and contemporaneous rpgs, and a demographic that has been overlooked, denigrated, and manipulated by colonialism for about eight hundred years.

Critical thinking might challenge the gm and players to deal with unpleasant historical facts that are relevant to the game being played in a manner that is respectful of the history that took place and the people harmed or hindered by such facts, as well as what and why things were learned from them. Cultural studies education has a keystone--or cornerstone--side effect of learning genuine empathy for other people and places in history or contemporary times. I often present the argument that gaming (like good fiction) allows others to participate in the events and practices of cultures not our own in order to examine in a relatively safe medium things that would other be hazardous or even fatal to engage with. But we have to engage with it to learn about it and understand it. Good historical fiction demands to not gloss over nor look away from the unpleasant aspects of our past lest we sanitize history and ignore the suffering and survival of those who experienced it first-hand.

My own culture and heritage has been subjected to invasion, occupation, external oppression, internal decay, warfare, slaughter, and genocide since before the Ottomans ushered in a few centuries of it in the late 1300s. My hometown hosted the trigger of World War I. My own lifetime saw the disintegration of a country, the bloody birth of about 8 others, the return of genocide to Europe, and the longest military siege in modern history. Most of which was ignored as long as possible by the surround world and still is glossed over by both fact and fiction. I admit, it's grimly humorous when I read an rpg book that, if it mentions the region at all, it presents a highly-colonized brief paragraph about us. I can extrapolate from my own lifetime and education, that if presented with such depictions, historical individuals and collectives would likely feel slightly to some degree by being ignored. ...not as slightly as the plight of racism and oppression in their lifetimes, but disrespected to some degree.

As a student once said in class: "It's lame to just look the other way at slavery and racism in history because we feel uncomfortable discussing it here and now. We owe it to ourselves to not be that lame."

I agree with the sentiment. But I also feel that each person has to come to terms with history in their own manner. No one should be bullied to believe something if if we think it's the Right Thing® to Believe. It's not likely anyone's going to kick in your door and force your game group to present the horrors of history in an authentic manner.

Personally, I find it great fun to learn about history, ethics, others cultures, and myself when I read a novel, watch a movie, or play an rpg.

My two cents worth, anyway. Value may vary according to exchange rate.

 

[Tonguez]

Remember that PCs are individuals and most often extraordinary individuals.

Take Abū al-Misk Kāfūr, (died AD 968), who was an Ethiopian slave of Muḥammad ibn Tughj. Kāfūr’s was a scholar and became tutor to Muhammads children, and was then promoted as a military officer where he led campaigns against Syria. After Muhammad died Kafur was made guardian of his sons and thus became defacto ruler of Egypt noted for luxury and magnificence of his court despite Egypt suffering plague, famine and earthquakes during his rule.

So you have a historic era with all the trappings of slavery, class oppression, war, poverty, disease and excess as background to the rise of a heroic scholar-fighter who became King

 

[Jahydin]

I honestly don't know what you mean. I asked what you would do, pretty directly. I didn't ask what you thought I should do. The question is: what would you, running this game, do in regards to historical unpleasantness?

Sorry, the original post read something like:

"I was watching cooking videos on how to make a Cuban sandwich, but there were a lot of problematic ingredients. You know, like pulled pork and ham. I'm really hungry for a Cuban though. What sandwich should we make?"