D&D 5E What’s So Great About Medieval Europe?

[Guest 6801328]

meh. D&D is medieval based because the game started out heavily influenced by LOTR (in spite of what EGG said)… the basic appeal of the game was 'hey, you can play an elf and fight orcs in this vaguely medieval world'... the nice thing about D&D is that it's bendable enough that if you don't want to use a medieval setting, you can make up something you do like...

Or, whatever EGG intended, a lot of the people who played the game were big Tolkien fans, and bent it to their preferences.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I had kind of a shower thought on orcs.

If you want to run a serious setting where the orcs are more "ugly humans" than "malevolent spawn of the god of destruction," you should probably look more at nomadic raiding societies than violent 20th-century ideologies like Nazism.

What does the tribal raider see when he looks at civilization? We tend to assume that he, like city-dweller, sees himself as "primitive" and civilization as "advanced," and longs to live in a stone building in a city, be part of the development of new technologies, and only doesn't because the city-dwellers are keeping him out.

But what we often see is that the raider's view of the world isn't "primitive" vs "advanced," but "strong" vs "weak." He sees agrarian civilization in terms of those sleepy villages of weak men, who waste all their time growing tired in the fields, who never learn how to wield spear or bow, who are fit for little more than to die by the sword when the snows melt and the time is ripe for plunder.

The history of civilization is hardly one of continual expanse. There are plenty of examples of those raiding nomads getting the upper hand over cities and showing very little interest in preserving or adopting their ways. To us in the 20th century, we've got that 20/20 hindsight that civilization ultimately won, but to a Comanche warrior in 1760, or a Mongolian horse archer in 1240, his territory has been continually expanding, he's slaughtered his enemies, and if the world of cities and farms has anything he can use to become a more deadly raider, he's had little difficulty obtaining it. Why would he ever adopt their ways? They are weak, and he is strong.

Note that in our world, civilization's decisive victory over nomadic raiders was in the 19th century, over 400 years after the invention of firearms. In the D&D world, when it comes to war-making, orcs and elves aren't nearly at the disparity that, say, Americans and Comanche were at in 1870. What we have, then, are two radically incompatible and opposed ways of life, in a world where the people at civilization's boundaries are easy picking for the raiders beyond them. To the elf, the orc is a violent, uncultured savage, whose way of life is mindless, destructive brutality. To the orc, the world consists of hunters and prey, and these foolish elves have adopted a way of life that makes them weak...if the elf wants to be prey, then the orc is happy to oblige.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Re: Tolkien and Gygax.

Gary probably found The Lord of the Rings to be too long and slow moving for his tastes, judging by the rest of Appendix N. But that doesn't have anything to do with whether he thought Tolkien-ian content was appropriate in the games he created.

D&D has always been an indiscriminate magpie when it comes to its choice of sources.

 

[Ace]

Ken Hite described early D&D as

The original D&D seems, quite obviously, to be a pastiche of Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard adventure stories, set in a Tolkeinian world of Moorcockian morality, using Jack Vance's magic system, redacted for multiple protagonists. No wonder things are confused.

These days it includes more renaissance era and steampunk along with a mess of other "rule of cool" stuff grafted on.

It works best if you either don't try for realism or ignore inconvenient implications of the system. Its fun and that's what matters.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Yep, and I'd hate to live in Jeruselem or it's surroundings during a crusade.

Not even Jeruselem. The Whole of Europe was a shitshow during the first crusade. All the Crusaders (And people who decided to give up on being crusaders.) Mostly just robbed and pillaged their way around Europe on the way to Constantinople.

 

[The Green Hermit]

What does the tribal raider see when he looks at civilization? We tend to assume that he, like city-dweller, sees himself as "primitive" and civilization as "advanced," and longs to live in a stone building in a city, be part of the development of new technologies, and only doesn't because the city-dwellers are keeping him out.

But what we often see is that the raider's view of the world isn't "primitive" vs "advanced," but "strong" vs "weak." He sees agrarian civilization in terms of those sleepy villages of weak men, who waste all their time growing tired in the fields, who never learn how to wield spear or bow, who are fit for little more than to die by the sword when the snows melt and the time is ripe for plunder.

The history of civilization is hardly one of continual expanse. There are plenty of examples of those raiding nomads getting the upper hand over cities and showing very little interest in preserving or adopting their ways. To us in the 20th century, we've got that 20/20 hindsight that civilization ultimately won, but to a Comanche warrior in 1760, or a Mongolian horse archer in 1240, his territory has been continually expanding, he's slaughtered his enemies, and if the world of cities and farms has anything he can use to become a more deadly raider, he's had little difficulty obtaining it. Why would he ever adopt their ways? They are weak, and he is strong.

This is how I've always envisioned orcs as well.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Not even Jeruselem. The Whole of Europe was a shitshow during the first crusade. All the Crusaders (And people who decided to give up on being crusaders.) Mostly just robbed and pillaged their way around Europe on the way to Constantinople.

Well, they cut a swath, there was plenty of land largely untouched, and the other crusades were very external.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Well, they cut a swath, there was plenty of land largely untouched, and the other crusades were very external.

Well not quite. Some prospective crusaders just turned into bandits and did not even go to Constantinople.

There was a good series of videos on the fiasco that was the 1st Crusade, and how most of it was largely just sacking towns in Europe instead of the guys they were supposed to be fighting.

 

[Zardnaar]

Not even Jeruselem. The Whole of Europe was a shitshow during the first crusade. All the Crusaders (And people who decided to give up on being crusaders.) Mostly just robbed and pillaged their way around Europe on the way to Constantinople.

That was more business as usual back than. Everyone did it.

The Crusade started because the ghazi were doing the same thing to the Byzantines. Or at Crete a few decades earlier. Emperor wrote a letter to the Pope.

You got 3 days to surrender if you didn't pillaging and the slave market was one outcome.

Hell Mistra had that fate on the 1820s. The ruins are still there if you care to visit.

Like most things humans bungled it.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

That was more business as usual back than. Everyone did it.

Yep thats why Medieval Europe sucked.