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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9709261" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I had plenty of spare time 30+ years ago, I spent a lot of time coming up with "realistic" patterns of social and intellectual development for my version of Greyhawk and its religions and wizard guilds, based on my own knowledge of the history of philosophy and theology (which was and is reasonably good). Later on, when one of the players was playing a PC with legal training, I also did a bit of work on legal codes, based on my own knowledge of Roman law (which was and is middling).These efforts really didn't have much effect on play. I don't know if anyone but me, as GM, noticed much of the work I had done. I did refer to it from time to time, though, to explain certain features of the setting - mostly its pre-modern ones, and especially the absence of free choice of occupation (especially wizardly occupation) and the absence of a free market in productive activities more generally. The players would sometimes find those things frustrating (in the context of their desired action declarations) or irrational (if just judging the setting by their own standards for rational social organisation), and having an explanation grounded in plausible history and sociology helped a bit.These days I tend to prefer to just expressly affirm certain tropes. I think it's just as effective in building table consensus, and less work.</blockquote>