[OT] Medieval Special Ops

[LostSoul]

I think the main objective PCs should have while fighting wars is to combat the high-level NPCs the opposing army has! Otherwise armies wouldn't be much of a big deal. Fireball here, Whirlwind Attack there... goodbye army!

This makes D&D work really well from a dramatic standpoint.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

cf Hong's Third Law: "Thinking too hard about fantasy is bad".

Yes, I know. But my point isn't that we should think harder about fantasy, but to actually relax and let things be fantastic. That is, don't worry about what fits into a medieval world; magic would have so profoundly changed things that the world wouldn't be recognizable to us anyway. D&D isn't a simulation of medieval life.

 

[hong]

D&D isn't a simulation of medieval life.

Can't really argue with that.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Perhaps that might be better phrased as "the more you're willing to gloss over the implications of magic, the more authentically fantastical D&D becomes".

I'm not sure if that is a good way to rephrase what I wrote. Actually, it isn't anything like what I was getting at, now that I've re-read it. If anything, they way I look at is a lot looser than the way you're interpreting it. It just naturally has always struck me that magic, if it existed, would have changed things a lot more profoundly than would be represented by a medieval Europe setting. It wasn't anything that my group ever really thought about back in 1979; the default never was a "bring out your dead" type of setting - it was "wahoo - anything goes" from the get-go. Just like when I first started reading comics; I always just assumed comic book worlds were a lot different than the real world, due to all the tights-wearing rabble-rousers running around tossing the landscape over. So it always strikes me as strange when someone sees D&D as having a default medieval setting. And I mean "strange" as in "different," not "strange" as in "bad."

 

[hong]

So it always strikes me as strange when someone sees D&D as having a default medieval setting. And I mean "strange" as in "different," not "strange" as in "bad."

Ah, right. I'm coming from the point of view of someone who's seen 1,000-post threads on rec.games.frp.dnd about world-building in the presence of magic. You will not believe the contortions people get into, when trying to estimate just how spells like create food and water, cure disease, fabricate et al, have on a medieval economy. And that's not even getting into the biggies like raise dead, resurrection or dominate person.

What makes it all the more futile is that the conclusions people reach on such threads usually depend on untestable assumptions about how prevalent magic is, the availability of competing resources, and the attitude that people have to magic within the game world. Hence the attitude I take of not asking unanswerable questions in the first place, which can be condensed down to "thinking too hard is bad".