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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5514945" data-attributes="member: 42582">This setting stuff is tricky.I think that D&D - especially post-OD&D and pre-4e - is fundamentally confused as to what it's setting is.AD&D 1st ed is written in places as if the setting is a Conan-esque one - faux history intended to serve not as a genuine game element, but rather as a backdrop to escapades. (And LotR, although it has a very different faux history, is actually comparable in this regard. If a person's response to LotR is "But how does a small, mostly autarkic population of hobbits maintain a living standard comparable to that of one of the centres of world production and trade in the 18th and early 19th centuries?" they have probably missed the point.)But then we get discussions of peasant revolts, taxation, social structures, etc all of which suggest that we are meant to take the sociology and economy of the setting seriously - even though it is a historically impossible setting (in part because of the magic, in part because of the anachronisms).In my view this issue is only compounded in 2nd ed AD&D and 3E, because of the great proliferation of settings (and yes, I know FR started in 1st ed but it's peak came later) which are presented not as backdrop but as serious elements in the game, which are meant to shape and constrain the way the fiction unfolds.One thing I like about 4e's approach - to an extent articulated in the DMG, but even more strongly articulated in Worlds & Monsters - is that it explicitly returns to the world as backdrop.I think it is possible to take some steps towards making quasi-mediaeval/feudal D&D semi-plausible - one of the most important steps (in my view) is to emphasise a culture among wizards and priests of such extreme conservatism that the idea of innovating by using magic as technology just never comes up (as sociology, this is more plausible if you're a Weberian than if you're a Marxist!). But the plausibility will, nevertheless, in my view be only a veneer. Feudal society is the upshot of a particular confluence of social, religious, technological, etc factors in Western and Central Europe that are simply not replicated in the typical D&D gameworld, and probably can't be given the difference that magic makes.That's why these days I tend to prefer a D&D game where the setting is a backdrop, and where the default assumption about priests and knights of Pelor or Bahamut is that they are good guys whose word can be relied upon. That is, I prefer an approach that is genre (heroic fantasy) first, and sociology a distant second.</blockquote>

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