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. :)
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 :D
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 (http://www.enworld.org/forum/talking-talk/113233-wing-sword-d20-modern-military-campaign-metagame.html), 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 (http://www.enworld.org/forum/gamers-seeking-gamers/237770-top-secret-long-beach-ca-operation-askari.html) 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 (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=389897) 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.
Quote from: Jackalope;264861Anarchonistic 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.
If all four of them had names like this, why is this a story about them refusing to play properly, and not a story about you refusing to play properly?
Quote from: Kyle Aaron;265089Maybe 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.
Yeah, it never seems to be the other way. Like you never hear "OK, you're fighter aces, but in social situations you're pathetically dependent on your wives - historical accuracy!", or "OK, you're all swaggering gauchos, but you're terrified of displeasing your mothers - historical accuracy!"
Quote from: Age of Fable;265205If all four of them had names like this, why is this a story about them refusing to play properly, and not a story about you refusing to play properly?
No one said anything about playing properly. I just said it bugged the shit out of me. But clearly not enough for me to tell my players how to play the game.
QuoteThat must be why Israel's lost all of its wars.
If you're talking about the modern Israeli Defense Force, then...what the hell does that have to do with anything? Medieval armies are NOTHING like modern armies. Are you talking about ancient Israel? Because I'm pretty sure the ancient Israeli's didn't use women soldiers.
Also, the primary reason women can serve in the field with men in the modern era is
birth control. Because seriously, if you think you can put men and women into close quarters and stressful situations and nobody is gonna have sex, then you really don't know much about people.
Anachronisms are great as long as historical accuracy isn't a big deal in the game to begin with.
As for naming conventions... well, when the PCs take on hirelings, I always give them names like "Mick and Keith," "John, Paul, George, and Ringo," things like that. Sure, it takes away from the "this is a serious setting with serious things happening," but hell, I'm going to ambush them with orcs in five minutes, and at least the people at the table remember their hirelings' names instead of just calling them, "Those guys."
I often use "normal" names for everyday people in the setting... and then use generic fantasy names ("I am... Mithralia!") for NPC adventurer types.
Nobody remembers "serious" names anyway.
Quote from: Jackalope;265211If you're talking about the modern Israeli Defense Force, then...what the hell does that have to do with anything? Medieval armies are NOTHING like modern armies. Are you talking about ancient Israel? Because I'm pretty sure the ancient Israeli's didn't use women soldiers.
Actually there is one precedent: the Hussite armies of the early 15th Century (from what is now the Czech Republic). They included sizeable numbers of women and still managed to win. However there are reasons:
1. They were ultra-religious fanatics. Getting someone pregnant would mean serious trouble.
2. The rigid application of a set of Regulations (that amongst other things banned prostitutes).
3. Many of the women were already married and would essentially serve as camp followers (washing/cleaning/cooking) before joining the battle line.
4. They sure as hell didn't make up 50% of the army.
An medieval style army with female soldiers is acceptable to me, provided there is reason and thought behind it. And not just chainmail-bikinis-FTW.
Anachronisms depend on the game played. I've no worries about it in Pulp or pulp style historical games (Pendragon is a good example). On the other hand if someone is trying to sell me on a historical game I expect certain amounts of accuracy.
Quote from: Age of Fable;265201That must be why Israel's lost all of its wars.
Women in combat roles in Isreal is a relativly new thing and is rather limited. Nothing like the 50% Jack mentioned.
In any case,
"During Operation Desert Storm, for example, enlisted women in the Navy were unavailable for overseas deployment nearly four times more often than men. At any given time, between 8 and 10 percent of women in the Navy are pregnant;10 for the Army, the figure is 10 to 15 percent." [1 (http://www.heritage.org/Research/GovernmentReform/bu230.cfm)]"On one support ship during Operation Desert Storm, 36 of the 360 women on board-ten percent-became pregnant. In a Roper survey conducted during the Gulf War, 64 percent of military personnel surveyed reported that sexual activity had taken place in their unit."[1 (http://www.heritage.org/Research/GovernmentReform/bu230.cfm)]"For example, it is a common misperception that Israel allows women in combat units. In fact, women have been barred from combat in Israel since 1950, when a review of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War showed how harmful their presence could be. The study revealed that men tried to protect and assist women rather than continue their attack. As a result, they not only put their own lives in greater danger, but also jeopardized the survival of the entire unit. The study further revealed that unit morale was dam- aged when men saw women killed and maimed on the battlefield."[1 (http://www.heritage.org/Research/GovernmentReform/bu230.cfm)]
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.
What amuses me about games is how selective this often is. I've played with groups which will spend hours arguing about details of military history or period specific weaponry in Pendragon or Ars Magica only to prove themselves totally ignorant of the actual social mores or realities of medieval or dark age society.
I remember playing with a group the spent two hours arguing about the price of slaves in 12th century constantinople at the end of two sessions of travelling through Russian and Hungarian peasant villages staying in sixteenth century (generic fantasy) tudor inns the whole time.
If you're going to be pedantic, then at least be consistent about it. :)
Quote from: Vulgarian;265279What amuses me about games is how selective this often is. I've played with groups which will spend hours arguing about details of military history or period specific weaponry in Pendragon or Ars Magica only to prove themselves totally ignorant of the actual social mores or realities of medieval or dark age society.
Ah, but did they bring the IDF into it? ;)
It only matters when you have a mixing of extreme RP styles. The "Serious Role-Player" STOP FUCKING AROUND AND LETS HAVE FUN and the "Wacky Fun Role-Player" Wooo I'm going to get drunk, hit on the Queen and start a fight in the royal court.
The Serious role-player will play Sir Brisbane Caviler of the Rose, while the wacky fun guy will play Thog the wenching fur thong wearing barbarian. I have found that the two rarely mix well together.
Quote from: RockViper;265299It only matters when you have a mixing of extreme RP styles. The "Serious Role-Player" STOP FUCKING AROUND AND LETS HAVE FUN and the "Wacky Fun Role-Player" Wooo I'm going to get drunk, hit on the Queen and start a fight in the royal court.
The Serious role-player will play Sir Brisbane Caviler of the Rose, while the wacky fun guy will play Thog the wenching fur thong wearing barbarian. I have found that the two rarely mix well together.
True. I can see how sir Brisbane's antics might totally disrupt Thog's suspension of disbelief there. :)
Anachroisms are okay, ONLY IF THEY DON'T DETRACT FROM THE GAME
I relented in the Nippon! game, and we have Sushi, True Noh, and a few other late period Japanese inventions, in a game that is clearly in the early part of the feudal period.
The same with Ninjas. The players expected it.They were constantly looking for them. They were planning for them. They were mentioning them. The players really wanted them. To their mind, you couldn't have a Japanese fantasy game without them. So late in the campaign cycle, we had ninjas *sigh* ninjas in black pajamas (which they never wore in the real world, and if they did not until 1600).
Players sometimes do things that are a bit out of time. A little modern sensability seems to creep into their characters. As long as they don't take things too far, it seems to work. (You own slaves. You have a plantation based on them. You will be ruined if you free them all now and send them north. ... Did you look at your greedy disads?... Oh, I thought so. Maybe set it up in your will to free them all after. )
Aside: The game we play, my game design, has experience based on five areas. There is an optional sixth - Genre Compliance. Your eps fluxed some if you were "in the zone" or just gaming along without a clue. No, you are a samurai... you are not haggling with the merchant.. it is benieth you. You want to do it anyways.. okay... lose some status and some eps). The system also uses player points. These are awards for "good play". These little pavlovian treats help teach my players appropriate actions as they strove for those little tokens (so they could reroll things or convert them to eps). Players that were anachronistic or not in genre would find themselves at a disadvatange. So even the slowest of them finally caught on that "acting rightly" was a good thing.
These anachronisms did not destory the campaign. Nor did take away from the game. (TO be honest, the Ninjas helped me clean up plot issue that neatly came together..). I met players expectations. I did not destroy anyone's level of belief. People sometimes needed a little shepherding, but it was all fine. So they can be okay.
So, stupid names? Never would of gotten past character generation for me. My players know I am pretty serious about character creation. We have pushed off an entire campaign for three sessions because the players wouldn't buckled down and build characters that matched the world and campaign being played. That was three sessions we would of been playing that we spent in character creation. (One was planned, to be fair). They whined. They huffed. They realized either "fit the world pack, with its setting information", have MoonHunter make up another campaign (which is what Moon started doing at the begining of session 3. I turned on a movie that we could watch, just so they would have something to do. They caught the hint), or "never play again". After they decided they would like to play the game, they build characters.
Stupid character histories, illogical elements, things out of place (and sometimes the mechanics related to them - the winner was berserk at the sight of all blood for a doctor/ surgeon), are all things that needed to be sorted out at character creation.
Moon is one who lives by tip 3 "If you have any doubts and let it into your game, you will have to deal with the inevitable consequences."
If you have any questions or doubts about a character (or other game element), don't let it in. It will only lead to heart ache later. (See Moon's
Top tips, these are from 2005 http://www.strolen.com/content.php?node=1269 ) So most people restrict this to the mechanics. They should not. They should continue on and take it to the story/ backstory elements of the characters and campaign (See tip 5 in that same set).
Quote from: One Horse Town;264850Are there any examples in games that you can think of that really jar with you?
One that I'm wrestling with as I prepare for a possible
Flashing Blades campaign is disease.
I considered placing an adventure in a town suffering through an outbreak of the plague and another with the characters exploring in Africa. In both instances the characters should be exposed to potentially deadly diseases; for example, the rate of death among Europeans from malaria and trypanosomiasis was staggering, and to represent this accurately would likely result in several character deaths. However, many gamers would consider this a total buzz-kill in a swashbuckling game.
I haven't reached any conclusions on how to handle this yet.