In the end, like so many things, it comes down to play styles. To me, it’s about how obvious it happens to be. The more subtle the reference, the more palpable.

Well, anachronisms don't matter - they're not going to end the world or anything - but they sure irritate me. Likewise referential names, like Jack's hilarious examples. In-jokes and the like trouble me, as well, and not only in a roleplaying context; naming the Terminator in the new TV franchise Cameron is distracting every time I hear it. [Then I see Summer Glau, and I'm distracted for another reason entirely.]

So yeah, to me, it matters. It's not critical, but I definitely is distracting for me.

For the most part, they don't concern me.  Like droog said, Arthurian tales are full of anachronistic elements, as are the epics of Homer; and every Shakespeare play is pretty much set in Elizabethan England, only with funny (funnier?) costumes.

Where they do get annoying is, again like others have already said, when people start playing the modern pop culture reference game.  Names definitely are where this pops up most often.

Example on how they matter.

I had a player/GM who loved the idea of introducing democracy to medieval or fantasy monarchy settings. Not horrible but he would then go on to make it US government with all the trappings. Note: there was no precedent for it.

When playing in his world, you would have knights who had to read miranda rights to prisoners, prisoner rights, and things like arresting bandits. I always found the mix of what he thought "good" to conflict with the fantasy meme mainly because he desperately wanted to mash the two together without any sort of reason or background.

So, not unplayable but when you have an expectation of Aragorn in LotR smiting orcs but then need to remember to arrest them if they surrender...

Bill

I'm cool with anachronisms. I got sidetracked in too many historical games discussing some fine point of history and guess what, these discussion never actually improved the game.

As for anachronisms in fantasy settings? Forget about it. Most fantasy settings have as much in common with the Dark Ages as they do with the Wild West.

I recently rolled up a wizard character for D&D 4e set in Eberron. I started off by focusing on sonic attacks and from there I stated imagining her as the classic cartoon opera singer, massively fat, blonde pig-tails and horned helmet. I got a bit carried away with the whole Norse theme and gave her a pet otter called "Fimbulwinter". And just to round it all off I figured she was the daughter of a Valkyrie and a humble potato farmer.

And guess what the reaction from the table was? "I don't think Vikings had potatoes."


Yeah right, like the potatoes were the real problem with the background here.

Quote from: Jackalope;264874For 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.

This sums my position, more or less. And stupid names are not tolerated, period.

Quote from: Engine;264916naming the Terminator in the new TV franchise Cameron is distracting every time I hear it. [Then I see Summer Glau, and I'm distracted for another reason entirely.]

Oh my god, I feel so dumb.  I never caught the reference til you pointed it out.  And it's sooooo obvious. I've known a few Camerons, so I didn't even think about the name.  Probably because I too become quickly distracted by Summer Glau.

Quote from: Jackalope;264865The 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.

Terry Jones (yes, of Monty Python fame) wrote a couple of fantastic children's books set in medieval Europe, titled The Knight and the Squire and The Lady and the Squire (he was supposed to write a third story to wrap it all up, but to no avail ).  I was reading the books to my son a few years back, much to our mutual enjoyment.  In the second book, the eponymous squire meets a boy who turns out to girl in disguise.  They have great adventures and all sorts of gender-equal fun...until they're captured and tossed into prison.  The girl is revealed for what she truly is, the church comes down on her like a ton of bricks, and it's strongly implied that she is raped during a brutal interrogation.

Now, the reason I bring this up is that I have to give Jones props for walking the tightrope here.  On one hand, he wanted to throw in a bit of modern appeal by including an adventurous, role-shattering girl.  But on the other hand, he knew exactly how such a girl would be treated in real medieval European society, and he wanted the reader to know, too, and he didn't pull his punches much.

!i!

I don't mind it too much, anarchronism. Of course if the game has been sold to me by the publisher or GM as "historically accurate!" then it's just begging for me to pick at it. Like when the movie King Arthur had that intro about how this King Arthur movie was totally historical and real, dudes - they just set themselves up for everyone to have a go at them. If they'd just started it out like the other thousand Arthur stories, nobody would have cared - look at First Knight.

But the anachronism itself, I don't care much.

People calling their characters "Domestos" or whatever isn't anachronism, it's just stupid comedy - for example, in an ancient Greece campaign you could have a warrior called Ajax or a fast female runner called Nike. That wouldn't be anachronistic, but it would be stupid and comedic.

So really what Jackalope was complaining about, and what annoys people a lot, is when players or GMs set up the game as stupid comedy to begin with. Unless you are a real armour expert, the idea of Arthur and his knights in gothic plate won't make you laugh. I mean, who cares, really?

If you set the game or your character up as stupid comedy to begin with, it has no place to go but down. Way I see it, enough stupid comedy just comes up naturally in play, we don't need to plan for it

The anachronism doesn't bother me. As I said, people insisting that this game or campaign will be totally historically accurate, honest - well, often it's just an excuse for being a cocksmock.

For example, if the story Ian told us were in a roleplaying game, I suspect the player of the female character would not be happy. "But," says the GM, perplexed, "having your character stripped and raped in prison is historically accurate! I had to have the NPCs do that! I couldn't have anachronism!"

Maybe so. But sometimes, being historically accurate is not fun, and is just an excuse for the GM to fuck with you, or parade his little pet issues before you. I mean, if the party with a wizard in it is on its way to slay a dragon, and as they pass the peasants the GM makes a big deal about how everyone in the fields are male and everyone inside the houses are female and in the village square the town militia practicing drill are all male, then I would not admire the GM for his "historical accuracy", but instead say, "sounds like a personal problem. You should see the chaplain."

It's a game.

Early D&D city plans are either completely fanciful or medieval European cities with broad avenues and mansions with lawns thrown in for good measure. No carports, though. But hey, D&D is wild & woolly. Elves in Harnmaster, OTOH...

To put a point on Kyle's comment, Byron Hall used "historical accuracy" as his justification for the rape-fetishistic travesty F.A.T.A.L.. Nuff said.

Yes, except it wasn't historically accurate, not even a little bit.

For the record, I think overt anachronisms are a problem, but ONLY in historical campaigns. Its silly to worry about "anachronism" in fantasy; though you can certainly worry about something like credible emulation.

And my players will testify that I don't even have a problem with "covert anachronism", that is, taking something that isn't literally out of period, and using it to make a subtle reference to something totally out of period.

RPGPundit

Historical roleplaying is my sweetspot as a gamer. I've really reached a point where there is very little else that I like to play.

I tend to be a bit all over the map when it comes to anachronisms. My Boot Hill campaign from many years ago was nominally set in 1870s New Mexico, but it was also very self-consciously humorous in the style of Larry McMurtry's Anything for Billy and Pete Dexter's Deadwood. For example, the game included such NPCs as "Peyote Pete" the hallucinogen-dabbling, Castaneda-influenced cowboy, and the Red Rock rustler gang led by the twins Jasper and Ruby Garnet and their associates Sandy and Clay Lomes.

A few years ago I ran a d20 Modern 1950s Algeria counter-insurgency play-by-post campaign, for which I prepared a glossary and a bibliography (!) of historical sources I used to capture the feel of the period and the place. Immersion was important to me in that game, so I dug deep into the history to get the details right as much as I could.

I did a fair amount of research for a Top Secret campaign that unfortunately never got off the ground. Having lived through the period in which the game was set, to the point of including a terrorist bombing which I experienced (very peripherally, thank goodness), my prep focused on presenting geographical and cultural details that would help the players feel the sense of place and time. I was never quite sure how whimsical the game might be - I definitely tried to mirror some of the more light-hearted elements of the game while making the missions serious.

Now I'm working on a Flashing Blades campaign for which I hope to find players in a couple of months. I'm once again doing a lot of reading: in keeping with the literary swashbuckling motif of enmeshing the main characters in the historical events of the day, I'm working out ways to have the adventurers be party to historical events and interact with a number of historical figures, both famous and not-so-famous, as well as some fictional characters.

With respect to the latter, while many of the writers of swashbuckling historical fiction wind their characters in and around historical events and personages but do not attempt to change history, a roleplaying game should, in my opinion, give the adventurers the latitude to change the course of events. This is especially important in Flashing Blades, since the characters can advance to very powerful positions with tremendous influence, right up to first minister to the King himself. With this in mind, while I'm working in the historical events, I'm also prepared to let the campaign find its own way should the characters change the course of history.

Like Top Secret, there's definitely an undercurrent of whimsy in some of the Flashing Blades published adventures, and so as with TS, I'm including some subtle (I hope) humor through character names and situations.

One more quick note on Flashing Blades: while Mark Petigrew did a fantastic job in creating a very playable set of rules, his model of the French bureaucracy and military fails to take into account the many changes that took place under Henri IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV, as well as the regencies of Marie de Medicis and Anne of Austria. I'm not really making any attempt to change the rules as written however, because they do such a good job of capturing the feel while remaining very playable. In this case playability is more important to me than historical accuracy.

Well I don't have a problem with things that are anachronistic, just things that Don't Make Any Fucking Sense, such as:

1. A mercenary company that only lets new members in if they kill an old member in single combat.
2. Big cities in the middle of the desert with no source of water.
3. Inns that are just like roadside motels in a society where hardly anyone except the PCs ever leaves their home village.
4. Magic everywhere but a society that doesn't take the existence of magic into account at all, even at the most basic level.
5. Gladiatorial arenas in which there are constantly games, everyone fights to the death and in which there are many famous and experienced gladiators.
6. Having the armies be 50% female without any attempt to explain how the difficulties of having such an army have been dealt with.
7. Large standing armies without any organized taxation or administrative system to support them.
8. A world in which there are lots of farmers in the countryside who own their own farms and rich nobles in the cities who don't seem to have any source of income whatsoever.
9. A world in which large stretches of fertile land are uninhabited for very sparsely habited by humans and not even trying to explain why this is the case.
10. Bizarrely-bloated time lines in which the back story would make a hell of a lot more sense if you lopped a 0 off of the end of every historical date.

Quote from: Jackalope;264865Can 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.

That must be why Israel's lost all of its wars.