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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2882425" data-attributes="member: 7240">Alright. Now that I can see you are comfortable with lots of follow-up questions, let me ask a few questions about what constitutes slavery for you.As you, of course, know, there are many models of slavery, legally, socially and economically. At one extreme you have modern chattel slavery like that of the French, British and US in the 18th and 19th centuries where procreation, socialization, movement, etc. of slaves was very specifically and directly regulated. At the other end, you have Russia's Imperial (as opposed to Aristocratic) Serfs in the same period -- people tied to the land and forced to pay tribute but operating in essentially self-governing communities or villages.Could you please link the paragraphs that precede this statement a little more closely with what you are saying? You describe this neat phenomenon where magi are attracted to join a particular kingdom -- then you state that this resulted in society having three elite estates but I'm not really sure how these things connect. Which group are the magi? Are they the aristocrats? If so, let me rephrase my criticism: my concern is that the customs you have devised for non-aristocrats don't make sense of people who don't have considerable heritable privilege. Also, I do not understand how you can make an estate, like the aristocracy, identical to a particular profession. Given how contingent the magi's power is on that of this particular regime, they seem a little more like a service gentry and a little less like an aristocracy. By the way, I like your imperial cult idea. It is an interesting fusion of Roman-style imperial cults with an indigenous culture-hero concept like Glooscap, god of the Micmacs. It is an elegant melding of two things people would not normally put together.Now here I'm in real trouble. Doesn't the church use magic? Or do you just mean arcane magic? If the aristocracy are not the magi, I can't manage to figure out where you tell me anything about the aristocrats in the history component of your post. Did I miss something?How empirically-based is the church's test? It seems to me that if the test is genuinely empirical, there might be real problems. Families would amass power but would be unable to join the aristocracy; this seems like a recipe for instability. Most aristocratic systems, to survive, have to be able to absorb people whose blood has not historically been noble.Have you looked at the creation of Saudi Arabia from 1910-30? I recommend that you do. Aristocratic systems based around a single family are exceedingly rare and complex to maintain. Saudi Arabia is the only place I can think of that has pulled this off and so I would recommend you read up on it. You see, in feudal systems, the king is the king because through whatever means at his disposal, he gets the aristocrats to transfer power up to him in the pyramidal structure. In imperial despotisms, power resides in the emperor and is transfered down to people like provincial governors. Such systems, when working properly, produce more of a service gentry or weak aristocracy; such noble groups tend to have a relatively weak hereditary component because they are kept in line by the threat of the family falling out of imperial favour and losing its power. Systems with provincial governors and the like tend to have a bit more of a revolving door in terms of important aristocratic families, except in Saudi Arabia... so do check it out.I have a few concerns about where you are going here but before I launch into them, let me ask you a hypothetical question: what would happen if a powerful noble decided to pay a private tutor to educate his children at home?This seems really strange. In every polygynist society I can think of, non-elite men could not financially afford more than one wife and the number of wives has varied directly with the status, wealth and power of the husband. As with arranged marriage, I think you are giving commoners a custom that does not make economic sense for people of their station.This seems strange to me. Who owns the land on which commoners live and work? How are peasant soldiers levied in the event of war? Unless the church is central to the answer to these questions, I am not sure why the church would operate as a buffer. Also, the way you have defined the church, as an entity more obsessed with lineage and blood than the aristocrats themselves, I do not understand why it would be such a commoner-friendly institution.What motivates the parents of commoners to choose spouses? And what gives them the power to exercise the influence they do? With aristocrats, the answer to these questions is obvious; for commoners, it is not.Does this mean that second and third wives tend to be of significantly lower social standing? I can't imagine a father wanting his daughter to be an nth wife when he she could become somebody's first wife.So, what motivations or incentives would a first wife have for this addition to her family? I can see many downsides and very few upsides.Wouldn't an aristocratic woman's preference be to have servants instead? As for common women, you have not sold me on how the man can afford to have all those wives and all those children.I have to stop you here. I think that this particular portrayal of sexuality in your game will definitely undermine suspension of disbelief unless your game populated by very romantically ignorant young men. The motives and behaviours of these women are so unlike anything we can see in the historical or anthropological record that, in my view, your social system would strain the suspension of disbelief of most female or romantically experienced male players.This was the case, on paper, for marriages pretty much everywhere in Europe and Asia until very recently. Universally, cultures solved this through 'don't ask don't tell' infidelity and the occasional death; it should be indicative that nobody solved it in the way your propose except for some very short and ill-fated utopian social experiments in North America in the past two centuries.Hence me spending time on this stuff. My style comes off as combative and adversarial often but I hope that it, at the very least, makes GMs ask themselves questions they otherwise would not. I am grateful that you have taken my responses in that spirit.</blockquote>

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