How mediaeval is D&D, anyway?

[Eltharon]

Its modern life without gunpowder. Really. Cleric medical care is as good if not better then hospital care, everyone is literate, fast travel is easy, the economy is based on independent stores and farmers, society is a meritocracy...etc. But if thats whats fun, then do it.
If you want feudal systems, serfs, knights who wear mail not plate, and people who die at 30, play HarnWorld or something vaguely similar. (thats what I do, though normal DnD is a nice break)

 

[mhacdebhandia]

What do you reckon?

I reckong Dungeons & Dragons is exactly as medieval as "Cugel the Clever" by Jack Vance, "Ill Met In Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber, and "The Tower of the Elephant" by Robert E. Howard.

 

[Li Shenron]

Its modern life without gunpowder. Really. Cleric medical care is as good if not better then hospital care, everyone is literate, fast travel is easy, the economy is based on independent stores and farmers, society is a meritocracy...etc. But if thats whats fun, then do it.
If you want feudal systems, serfs, knights who wear mail not plate, and people who die at 30, play HarnWorld or something vaguely similar. (thats what I do, though normal DnD is a nice break)

Totally agree.

I think we tend too much to think about the technological differences: no cars, no electricity, no telephones... hey it must be the middle ages!

But really the characters live like they are in the modern world, and that's simply because of how the players think.
Knowledge for example is very easy to get because no one bothers in-game to make books as rare and valuable as they were in the middle ages, and the worst that a DM requires is a quick trip to the city library to find any information.
The economy is thrieving because players have a hard time thinking something very different from their real life, and doing something else would make the game much more difficult and raise the typical rant that "D&D is about fighting monsters, not economy".

 

[TerraDave]

I think we just had this discussion...and I basically agree with Delta and Aeric...

D&D is not realistic: It is not a realistic depiction of any era. And like most stories and games, it does not wallow in the misreable details of day to day life. But again, it doesn't do this for any era.

D&D is not modern: Healing someone with techniques developed scientifically is modern. Healing them because your god gives you the power to is not. D&D does not have fast cars, automatic weapons, or the other tropes of moder action adventure. It does not have charecters going to the dentist, waiting at the airport, getting colds, working in cubicles, or any of those details of modern day life. And it gets worse...

D&D charecters kill sentient beings and take their stuff: What most PCs do is not very nice. Its not specifically medieval, and the game helps rationalize it, but the point is for charecters to behave in a way they really couldn't get away with in their own lives, or for that matter in most civilized places, at least outside of particulalrly violent era.

D&D is closer to medieval then anything else: No printing press, no guns, rigid class structure (don't forget those commoners, their part of the rules now), late medieval weapons and armor inconsistent with an ancient world setting...And in many campaing settings rule by kings and nobles, urban guilds, water and wind power, castles and walled cities, and of course the acurate belief in a whole range of creatures and other superstitions, no matter how warped for our gaming pleasure, which have medieval roots.

 

[Eltharon]

In tech, its certainly medieval (1400-ish, sans gunpowder). But in Faerun, for example, the class system is very iffy. Anyone can rise to power by being high level, even peasants. The feudal system really isn't very regulated, its more like a renaissance town with burghers then the medieval system.
It's not modern, either, as I would classify modern as a game with automatic weapons, cars, planes, and cell phones, but I would say that the characters lead very modern-ish lives. After all, everything in a modern campaign could be replicated with magic. Printing presses are just enchanted quills, guns are just some form of magic weapon, magic carpets, airships and teleportation take the place of planes. All modern convienances are easily replicated with magic.
But as I said before, no-one will walk into a DnD game and call it modern. Because a modern game is about playing with guns, not wands, and planes, not magic carpets, even if they have the same rules.

 

[Celebrim]

Didn't we just have this thread? Pages and pages of it?

 

[dougmander]

D&D is an evocation of a fantasy medieval world with strong elements of orientalist romance.

The two descriptors that most properly describe what D&D's creators were attempting to invoke are "medievalist" and "orientalist". In the 19th century, artists, writers, and academics became enamored of the middle ages as a romantic setting -- Tennyson, Sir Walter Scott, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 to name but a few examples. Concurrently, a fascination with the exotic aspects of the near east produced artists like Ingres, the growing popularity of the Arabian Nights, and attempts to create both visual and narrative pastiches that evoked an exotic eastern setting, like Coleridge's Khubla Khan. This aesthetic has since been called "orientalism." These two movements were not concerned with historical or cultural accuracy, but with creating a fantasy of long ago or far away. You can trace the influence of these movements through the fiction of Lord Dunsany, who in turn influenced HPL and REH, and on to DeCamp, Fritz Leiber and Jack Vance, and finally to D&D.

All this is by way of saying, D&D is not "medieval" in the sense of the historical middle ages, but in its early incarnations, anyway, was firmly rooted in the medievalist and orientalist traditions that recast the middle ages and the classical civilzations of the near east as romantic fantasy worlds.

 

[Raven Crowking]

but even there... find me a King Arthur story that revolves around the economics of serfdom, mentions subinfeudation, or really even mentions them other than as 'peasants'.

A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.

Closest I can come, and that's not really a romance, either.

 

[Contrarian]

It says it's medieval. It's more medieval than any other time period.

I think Delta deserves a prize for The Simplest Answer to A Tiresome Question.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

D&D is FANTASY with a bunch of Medieval physical trappings, and a very few social ones. These are mixed generously with early Renaissance trappings and some highly notable, even jarring, directly anachronistic modern ones (especially social). People are correct to say that it doesn't particularly represent any era. I say that this is because it is hugely dependant upon individual playstyles and mindsets as to how it's intended to play out, and how it's actually perceived. As DM I may run my game in a certain way hoping to evoke associations to a certain era, but my players may prefer to think of it as an entirely different era and focus on details I hadn't intended or thought about. Players, in turn, are certain to sieze upon those aspects that they feel are more likely to be FUN and damn the realism, to which a good DM will respond by concentrating more on that fun and less on "accuracy" to any given era.