Gez said:
What was medieval feudalism ?
Nobles owned Land, land owner were nobles. (Some nobles didn't owned lands, but they were then vassal knights of a land-owner noble).
Nobles had owe of fealty between them.
Commoners were either burgher, villein or serf. Serfs were part of the land they lived on. Villein were rich peasant that owned their villa (latin meaning, i.e. house). Burgher lived in burgs.
How's that incompatible with D&D ?
- Clerics will be either nobles or rich burghers. They'll be fine with such a society. They've been raised in it, it's how things work. If they see injustice, like sick and starving serfs, they'll try to better their lot with some spells that will heal them and bless the fields and cattle they work on.
- Druids will like the serf thingie, people being litterally owned by the land. They'll find that the model of power where the lord is the one who own the land is the only one that makes sense.
- Wizards, even more than clerics, will be either nobles or rich burghers. They won't bother with how the society work, unless they're nobles.
- Sorcerers may hail from anywhere. If you go with the bloodline thingie, most families with sorcerers will be noble themselves, either from start or because one of their ancestor had been ennobled in reward for helping the lord with sorcery. Even if they're not noble, they will devote more interest in discovering, awakening and taming their powers than in starting a revolution.
- Bards will behave either like bards and skalds (and stay in their hometown, schooling children, and singing the prowess of the chef and his heroic warriors) or like minstrels (and wander from town to town, entairtaining the nobility and spreading news and gossip). Neither role has any interest in upsetting the political order.
- Rogues will typically live in the underground society. By definition, they have no will of upsetting the balance, they'll just want to stay below the radar of the autority, whatever it is (feudal, imperial, democratic, theocratic, communist, anarcho-syndicalist, oligarchic, gerontocratic, militaristic, they don't care).
- Monks live in their secluded mountain monastery. They depend on the noble supporting them. They have no interest in politics.
- Paladin are most often noble themselves. They will be the first to support their kings. The word paladin, by the way, was coined on the same root that the word palace. These guys are the elite order of noble knights, even if some commoners are in their rank.
- Rangers, unless they are Aragorn son of Aratorn, known as Strider, will have no interest at all in the political system. If they are Aragorn, they'll want to be king, not to destroy feudalism.
- Fighters will typically work for a noble, be payed by that noble, etc.
- Barbarians, by definition, will be foreigners in a feudal system. As such, they are a clear minority. They won't try to indoctrinate feudal folk into barbarianism, as they will either despise these "soft-skinned guys who're there just so we may plunder their wives, rape their cattle, and roast their harvests, or something like that, don't remember well my one-liner" or admire "the civilized people from the cities, who build stone tent that climb in the sky, and have plentiful food even in the dead of winter".
I suppose its not. These are all good thoughts
For comparison my game world is a little odd is places.
I take humans with a distorted 20th/21st century mind set, drop them in a world with tons of magic and an absolute proof of life after death (in this case reincarnation)
Midrea (my game world) is in no way and organic world, in fact none of the native animals larger than a vole or a few small predators are left.
The world has been so throughly altered by magic its no anything like it would have been with natural evoloution. The previous inhabitants (an unpleasnt race called the shapers) were a little, umm Nuts. "Don't like that mountain?" No problem.... flatten it
As for a Noble class , they met a terrible fate IMC.
Most of them were horribly slian and soul bound into crystals by Anarachist Necromancers
I think the best running gag for my kingdom would be "In Midrea your need to know the plural of apocolypse"
I think if you limit magic items (especially at will items) and spellcasters, yeah I think you can get by with the same stuff you see on our world.
However if you follow the PHB guidelines --- You will end up with a rather magical world-- along the lines of the Realms
