How mediaeval is D&D, anyway?

[Jhaelen]

My friends and I have always played D&D as Medieval with Magic on top.

Really? You must be in the minority, then.

For me D&D has always been an over-the-top epic fantasy thing.

If I'm in the mood to play in a medieval setting I'm playing Ars Magica instead. Mythic Europe is the setting if you're interested in a realistic mix of medieval + magic.

 

[Phlebas]

Teaching Assistant. A graduate student involved in the teaching of undergraduates, usually running a tutorial section (where a professor teaches a large lecture), a single section of a low-level course, or a lab course in the sciences.

As I understand it, it was in response to the post-WWII enrollment boom, when all the soldiers returned from Europe at once and many of them went to university, that the larger schools turned to their graduate students as a way to ease the burden on faculty. At the same time, it's a principal way to provide financial support to graduate students..

Ah, post-grad students they were called in my day (that sounds like i'm getting old) - not really sure that it makes a huge amount of difference though. The round of lectures, tutorials, exams and - if your lucky - the occasional explosion in a lab though has survived pretty unchanged.

My Campaign is set around a huge magical university that has much more in common with Unseen University than the one i went too. (Apart from the explosions in the labs...)

Oh, I wasn't suggesting that universities per se were a modern phenomenon -- not at all. But as with other social institutions, its forms and culture vary a lot with time and place. I don't expect very much in 20th century North America looks too much like its counterpart in 14th century Europe.

I had a freind who went to cambridge, and from what he said it still pretty closely resembled 14th century europe in a lot of places

We might be drifting the topic a little but isn't the fact that groups will bring in their modern day experiences / impressions into the detail of a fantasy setting a little different from saying it isn't (loosely) medieval based. Surely thats just allowing DM's to set up a 'familiar' scenario for their players to interact with than fundamentally changing the setting?