For the historical gamers out there, or alt-historical and fantasy gamers.

Do anachronisms matter? I guess it depends on the level of immersion that you're after. Can it spoil enjoyment or is it all about the enjoyment and if it's fun, leave it in?

Are there any examples in games that you can think of that really jar with you?

Anarchonistic names truly bug the living shit out of me.  God I hate 'em.  And, as you can imagine, I'm not particularly good at hiding my disgust.  So of course, I always end up with at least one player who just bugs the shit out of me with goofy names.

In the Castle Greyhawk campaign I recently quit, one of the player has a character named Dr. Zaius.  The character is a Vanaran, a monkey-man.  That kind of stuff drives me crazy.

One of my players in my high-school game tried to name every single character he made for two years "Kunta Kintae," after the character from Roots.  When he suggested the name for a Tri-keen in my Dark Sun campaign I just about smacked him.

In my current campaign, I'm down to two players, having lost one to work schedules and having recently kicked the other out for finally annoying me too much.  But back when it was four players, I was blessed with four anarchonistic names of varying obnoxiousness.

There was the Wizard/Warblade who wore full plate and cast spells.  His name?  Barth Mader.  I kid you not.  The worst part?  I suggested the "Mader" part unintentionally.

The guy who just got kicked out played Zoltan.  Not such a horrible name, though it provoked a lot of references to the Hammer film Zoltan, Hound of Dracula.

Just flirting with annoying is the party is the Fighter, Golden Axe.  Yes, he is named after the video game.  This is the same guy who plays Zaius.  Other character's have been Awesum (pronounced "Awesome"), the transmuter Oxid whose familiar was named Ize, and my abosulte favorite, his Aventi (aquatic human) Cleric who worshiped oceans, Seamar.  Mar is Spanish for Sea, so he's a cleric of a Sea God named SeaSea.  really not a bad name as long as you don't think about it.

The other player was originally playing a character named Brandar the Total Elf, which is a reference to a throwaway line in That 70's Show wherin Donna gets invited to a D&D game with the line "You can play Mandar the Half Elf."  Brandar the Total Elf's character sheet was written on the inside of the front panel of a box of Total brand cereal.

After Brandar died, he was briefly replaced by Gnomish mapmaker Rand McNally.  Which just hurts.  Luckily Rand lasted only a session or two before he was replaced with slightly less annoyingly named Pharzoul.  If that's a joke, I haven't gotten it yet.

I kind of hate names that remind me that were playing a game, and anachronistic names that require one to know about the present to make sense of, or to "get the joke," are a frequent and annoying intrusion.

Yeah, that can be annoying. It's normally an indication that folks aren't taking things too seriously, either. I remember a Golden Heroes game where 2 of the heroes were called Domestos (the name of a bleach in the UK) whose tag line was "kills 99% of villains, dead" The tag-line of the bleach was "kills 99% of germs, dead." The other was Ben Nevis - Man Mountain (Ben Nevis is the highest mountain in the UK. Strangely, that player also used that name in a Dark Sun campaign).

The game didn't last long. We knew it the moment the names came out.

The most omnipresent anachronism i can think of in fantasy gaming is the projection of current day social mores onto a medieval or dark age setting. I have no problem with that, as it promotes inclusive gaming, but it's nearly always there - unspoken, at least.

Quote from: One Horse Town;264862The most omnipresent anachronism i can think of in fantasy gaming is the projection of current day social mores onto a medieval or dark age setting. I have no problem with that, as it promotes inclusive gaming, but it's nearly always there - unspoken, at least.

That kind of bugs me too.

I can understand racism (as in skin color = race racism) not developing in a fantasy world where there are actual other races.  The differences between a white guy and black guy are pretty negligible compared to the differences between any human and an ork.  Or a freaking gnoll.  

The one that really gets me though is the liberal feminism in a medieval world.  The division of labor along gender lines makes a hell of a lot more sense in the Dark Ages than it does in the modern era.

Can you even imagine what would happen to the average medieval army if it was half women?  After a few months of campaigning, half your army would come down with a serious case of pregnant.

I actually think that this, more than anything, pushed the evolution of D&D further and further away from it's medieval fantasy roots.  Because once you establish that a game world has gender equality, you suddenly start needing all of the elements that made gender equality not only possible but meaningful (the division of labor doesn't really lead to gender inequalities when you're a dirt farming serf).

Well in my Napoleonic IHW campaign there were no gender roles, so purist would call it alt history, even though besides this one anachronism, the campaign itself was grounded in historical detail.

In my IHW Aces & Angels campaign, the pcs were black pilots (all male) during WW2. The level of historical detail was pretty high.

It really depends on the level of realism you want in your campaign. Generally though if it's a fantasy campaign with fantasy races and magic, anachronisms really should not matter.

Regards,
David R

It doesn't bug me at all as it promotes inclusive gaming at the table. It wouldn't be that much fun to be playing a character that is racially or sexually discriminated against - even if in the real world that happened. I merely mentioned it because, even if it's unwritten, i think it's something that we as players take to the table.

If the game is socially accurate then you're starting to enter into misery-tourism territory.

Anyone have any other examples?

Quote from: One Horse Town;264862The most omnipresent anachronism i can think of in fantasy gaming is the projection of current day social mores onto a medieval or dark age setting. I have no problem with that, as it promotes inclusive gaming, but it's nearly always there - unspoken, at least.

It often annoys me when writers and artists refuse to take this sort of thing into account. One of the reasons I parted ways with TSR in the late 80's was their depiction of all fantasy worlds and people as vaguely (to my untrained, non-American eye) Californian, culminating with with the politically correct shucks-let's-not-risk-offending-anyone-here sanitization of devils and demons.

Nothing rips me out of my immersion quicker than a setting which presumes the differences between fantasy, myth, folklore and reality are purely cosmetic. I want my worlds to feel like the dark and dangerous places they are, not a RenFair facsimile.

Quote from: One Horse Town;264868It doesn't bug me at all as it promotes inclusive gaming at the table. It wouldn't be that much fun to be playing a character that is racially or sexually discriminated against - even if in the real world that happened. I merely mentioned it because, even if it's unwritten, i think it's something that we as players take to the table.

If the game is socially accurate then you're starting to enter into misery-tourism territory.

I don't think that's necessarily true.  There isn't any actual need to discriminate against a player character, and one certainly doesn't have to embrace misery tourism or chuck realism out the door.

For example, in my campaign world you won't meet any women soldiers.  For all intents and purposes, they simply don't exist.  Doesn't mean you can't play a female fighter, just means you won't find many NPC female fighters, and aren't likely at all to encounter one in a military.  While pregnancy isn't nearly as fatal and infant mortality is much lower (due to the presence of many low level priests), women are too valuable to society as mothers to send out into the fields of war.

Likewise, if you ride up on any farm in my world, you'll find the men out in the fields working they're asses off dusk til dawn, and the women at home working they're asses off dusk til dawn.  And as you approach, unless you've got a shining paladin type in front, the womenfolk bolt themselves inside while the men defend the yard.

It's not in your face, where every dude is raging sexist, but it does cleave to a rather old-fashioned sense of how things should be. Because, of course, the elements that made feminism possible simply don't exist.  It's still an age of kings and aristocracy, where the commoner has no conception of "human rights" and sees themselves as one with the land, and owned by the king in the same way he owns the land.

In my campaign, that the average person is mired in the thinking of medieval eras is of no real consequence to the players.  They can bring whatever beliefs they want to the table.  People will tend to react to them as adventurers first, and much like celebrities, nobody questions that adventurers act differently than the normal folk.  They're heroes, and the normal rules that bind normal folk don't apply to heroes.

Unless historical accuracy is the whole point of the game, I'm not too fussed.

I've always liked the institutionalised anachronisms in Pendragon--time accelerates and Arthur's Dark Age knights end up wearing Gothic plate.

Well, I don't normally play alt history (unless you count pulp; I don't), but I do find blatant pop culture references annoying. Character names are the #1 culprit here.

On the other side of the fence, I roll my eyes at players insisting that a D&D fantasy world should not have monks in it (why not? It's not medieval Europe, it's someplace else) or there wouldn't really be forks because those weren't invented in Europe until some year...

Quote from: One Horse Town;264868It doesn't bug me at all as it promotes inclusive gaming at the table. It wouldn't be that much fun to be playing a character that is racially or sexually discriminated against - even if in the real world that happened. I merely mentioned it because, even if it's unwritten, i think it's something that we as players take to the table.

If the game is socially accurate then you're starting to enter into misery-tourism territory.

I don't agree there, Dan. I think there's a danger of sliding into misery tourism, but there's no predestination that it will. It can just as well be a triumphal transcending of the problem, as in David's game. The difference here is that misery tourism has no hope of triumph over adversity, instead just reveling in the adversity itself.

Quote from: One Horse Town;264862The most omnipresent anachronism i can think of in fantasy gaming is the projection of current day social mores onto a medieval or dark age setting. I have no problem with that, as it promotes inclusive gaming, but it's nearly always there - unspoken, at least.

I have a problem with modern social mores in my RPGs - the implausibility of people who live in a pre-industrial world behaving like suburban Californians totally destroys my immersion in a setting. And it feels insipid and bland.

The behaviour of NPCs should be suitable to the setting. So if it's a perilous world full of monsters of demons, then the people should be hard-headed, superstitious, and distrustful. If it's a warrior culture, than the people behave they way they do in observed human warrior cultures - boastful, violent, and heirarchical.

This doesn't just go for RPGs, it goes for fiction also. The most common flaw that causes me to toss away a fantasy or historical novel is if the characters act like modern people. I have a keen interest in anthropology and history, and one of the reasons I enjoy reading stories set in other eras or worlds is to see characters with different values and beliefs interacting with their world. When I want to read about people with contemporary values, I'll read a novel set in the modern world.

Of course, my preferences make about 90 per cent of fantasy fiction and gaming material unpalatable. The ubiquity of sullen teenagers, female bartenders putting themselves through school, prosperous and liberal peasants, cute orphans, fretting parents, snobby aristocrats, and career-minded woman heading up the town guard makes most post-1986 D&D setting material pretty much useless to me.

Quote from: One Horse Town;264868If the game is socially accurate then you're starting to enter into misery-tourism territory.

Only if you believe A) human history before about 1960 was one of relentless misery, or B) that it's misery-tourism to play a game in a harsh world such as Hyboria, Lankhmar, or the Dying Earth.

Quote from: flyingmice;264894I don't agree there, Dan. I think there's a danger of sliding into misery tourism, but there's no predestination that it will. It can just as well be a triumphal transcending of the problem, as in David's game. The difference here is that misery tourism has no hope of triumph over adversity, instead just reveling in the adversity itself.

You're right, of course. Bad wording on my part.

Quote from: Haffrung;264899Only if you believe A) human history before about 1960 was one of relentless misery, or B) that it's not fun to play a game in a harsh world such as Hyperboria, Lankhmar, or the Dying Earth.

The context in which i was speaking was racial or sexual discrimination. I think i pointed that out in one post or another.