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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4514723" data-attributes="member: 42582">A general observation: purist-for-system/Gygaxian/Pulsipherian 1st ed AD&D-style play leads to the sort of game that Hong derides as "Advance Squad Leader" - an emphasis on preparation, small unit tactics, exploration as the locus of play rather than encounters, etc.For those who like it this can be fun, but it differs a great deal from actual pre-modern types, who tended (on the whole) to have different attitudes to death (their own as well as that of others) and whose processes for everything, including warfare and exploration, tended to be less rationalised (see eg Weber's discussion of the rationalisation of colonial merchant enterprises in his introduction to The Protestant Ethic; or Foucault's discussion of these "normalising" processes in Discipline and Punish).So modern players, playing a 1st-ed style game, won't produce an outcome that actually resembles the behaviour of medievals. We'll get modern soldiers in medieval dress.An interesting feature of REH's Conan and Kull characters is that they are in a certain fashion pre-modern in their behaviour - they act rather than think, unlike the effetec "civilised" people who surround them. (In other respects, however, particularly in their attitudes to religion and other traditions, they are quintessentially modern.)Death-flag play is not the only way to produce RPGing that more closely emulates the pre-modern. Nor is it by any means guaranteed to produce such roleplaying. But implemented in the right sort of way it might be one way to do it.</blockquote>

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