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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mythusmage" data-source="post: 2462757" data-attributes="member: 571">Fox, Chicken, and GrainFeed grain to chicken. Feed chicken to fox. Take fox across river.Suspension of DisbeliefI agree with Fusangite, having to deal with things that really don't fit the setting ruins the feel.  Puzzles or riddles that rely on real world knowledge for example.Mundane names on the other hand I have no problem with. What bugs me are first level characters with names like, Grondborg Deathaxe. People who call themselves Grondborg Deathaxe at the age of 16 are asking to be sacrificed at the full moon by the lizardmen of the Foetid Glen. (And if they need help, I might have some stout hempen cord they can use to truss him up.)Technological AdvancesI recall a lecture series on local educational tv. In one episode the instructor pointed out an essential difference between Roman and American society. Americans emphasize the new, Romans emphasized the old. But even in American society it is possible for the new to fail if nobody sees a need for it.China failed to develop the gun because the Chinese saw no need for it. what they had in military technology sufficed for their needs. The Chinese did not develop movable type on the other hand because their system of writing made it faster and easier to use block printing. For them movable type was not an improvement.For the Europeans movable type was an improvement over block printing, and developing better guns gave one an, albeit temporary, advantage over the neighbors.What if the Roman dictator Sulla had solved the problem of succession? No Marius, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, or the Year of the Three Emperors. A stable empire that could employ its resources in expansion and pacifying new conquests. Could have made for a very different Europe.What if the Roman Catholic Church had put an emphasis on bodily cleanliness and sanitation?"As the Blood of the Lamb washes clean our souls, so let us wash clean our bodies that we may enter the Kingdom of Heaven clean in body and soul."May not have stopped the epidemics of the 14th and 15th centuries, but it may have ameliorated the effects and so lessened the psychological and sociological shock.Nothing had to happen as it did.BTW, I can see a world at a medieval level of technology and sociology for 30,000 years, if there was no pressure to advance in all that time. But it would not be a world tolerant of adventurers.</blockquote>

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