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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fanboy2000" data-source="post: 5827559" data-attributes="member: 19998">This, I think, is where things get strange. I want to get talk about something brought up by the response to this your post.Lets say we have a DM who's trying to hue closely to medieval concepts about gender roles and class. One player wants to make a female paladin who was raised on a farm. The problem is that woman weren't allowed to be knights in medieval times. The idea of elevating one to a status that might put them on equal footing with men (or even in charge of them) was unthinkable.But that's not all, Joan of Arc was such a person. She didn't do it for any modern feminist reasons, she wasn't trying to buck the system. She believed she had a special calling to protect her country. She seems to have fulfilled it.What we have is a Reality is Unrealistic problem. The DM is trying to create a world that makes sense using rules that, IRL, weren't always followed. I once asked Jef Lobe at World Con (the only time I was at World Con) when he was on a panel why people always complained about so-and-so acting out of character when people IRL acted out of character all that time and no one calls it that. He response? Real life doesn't have to make sense.There's a flaw in this reasoning, but I want to discuss it in the context of what you said in a follow-up.Background is a funny thing. The same background details can be used to justify two different outcomes. For example, having a strict upbringing can be used to explain a strict PC, or a rebellious one. Rebels exist in many cultures and in many time periods.More to the point, I think this illustrates a reason Ugh the Funny (often Half-Orc) Barbarian exists, even in "serious" campaigns. Such a PCs behavior is easy to explain and it gives the player freedom to act.Well, there were morons in medieval times.More specifically, D&D also draws heavily on fiction, and a such characters are common in fiction. Conan was a total jerk to people in power, even to people with power over him. One story starts off with him kidnapping the princess. If Conan were a PC, his DM would have strangled him Homer Simpson style (and accuse the player of cheating for somehow rolling all 20s before stat adjustments).Also, there's a whole class of fiction where there the hero, someone from "our" world, crosses over into another world and "fixes" it. John Carter, the hero of A Princess of Mars and Gods of Mars (and a bunch of others) is such a hero. So, it's not unsurprising that players may want to play out such a story.Have you thought about posting the settings/worlds online? I'm assuming that you get something out of DMing other than just building the world, but if world building is a big source of you're enjoyment it might be worth exploring communities where that's the main thrust.I mean, that have communities for people who make-up languages. No one seems to expect anyone to learn them. (Except for Esperanto.)</blockquote>

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