Here's something to get back on topic: How should aristo PCs interact with and respond to PCs of lower station but equal or greater personal prowess? What nets better results?

Most of us have probably had a player who antagonized the others by lording over their low-born characters, either subtly or blatantly. This can often lead to amusing roleplay, but also to bruised real-life egos and table tension. On the other end of the spectrum you've got people who (in many settings) are supposed to believe they are higher beings yet pal around with common ruffians as if it weren't the case. If a GM wanted to coach a player to avoid either extreme, how would she go about it?

Hmm, I don't do usually do much coaching. But I do offer a bit of advice if it's necessary. What I would do is to simply, briefly inform the players of how the social rules normally work in the setting. Give some examples in play, with NPCs. Then I'd run NPC reactions to PC actions as usual. If the PCs insist on acting against social norms, that choice could have results they might not like.
A nobleman PC who acts with no regard for his own dignity or authority might end up a butt of jokes among other nobles. He might be seen as weak. Or a traitor to his kind, the sort of lord who throws in with the rabble during a tax revolt,just to save his own skin. No honor. And even peasants might lose respect for him, because he isn't acting as they would expect a gentleman to act.
A commoner PC putting on airs because the noble PC treats him " like an equal" may find himself on the bad end of things if he tries such nonsense with others of the better classes.

Obviously, it's tough to answer a question like this in the abstract. Different settings, different players...

Example from actual play:

In my latest online game(second edition AD&D), one PC comes from the petty and impoverished segment of the aristocracy. He's a scholar and a magician. Most of the others are rascals of the lower orders: several thieves and a fighting-gnome.
Most of the party has 10 CHR, give or take a point. But social status makes a difference. The wizard PC is treated as the leader by NPCs.


I assigned Unearthed Arcana style social status ratings to all PCs early on, so that the players could take this into account in role playing. They enjoy it and use it.

I've gamed with most of these guys for years. Knowing your players, and people generally being friends or at least friendly, helps.


Additional note:

In this setting my assumption is that many adventurers come from aristocratic or semi-aristocratic origins: younger sons, black sheep, bastards, etc.

The big exception is that thieves are usually lower class types.

And classes and levels aren't just for "adventurers." A noble lord who has led numerous war parties and slain numerous brigands and monsters may be a relatively high level fighter.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;900396Most of us have probably had a player who antagonized the others by lording over their low-born characters, either subtly or blatantly. This can often lead to amusing roleplay, but also to bruised real-life egos and table tension. On the other end of the spectrum you've got people who (in many settings) are supposed to believe they are higher beings yet pal around with common ruffians as if it weren't the case. If a GM wanted to coach a player to avoid either extreme, how would she go about it?

"The game is about EVERYBODY having fun.  Don't be a fucknugget."

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;900453"The game is about EVERYBODY having fun.  Don't be a fucknugget."

LOL, straight and to the point!

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;900396Here's something to get back on topic: How should aristo PCs interact with and respond to PCs of lower station but equal or greater personal prowess? What nets better results?

Most of us have probably had a player who antagonized the others by lording over their low-born characters, either subtly or blatantly. This can often lead to amusing roleplay, but also to bruised real-life egos and table tension. On the other end of the spectrum you've got people who (in many settings) are supposed to believe they are higher beings yet pal around with common ruffians as if it weren't the case. If a GM wanted to coach a player to avoid either extreme, how would she go about it?

Well ... generally speaking, it's ROUTINE for aristos to interact with (and boss around) people of lower station but greater physical prowess.  Of course the coachman, or the gardener, or the armorer could probably break that poncy baronet over his knee.  Why doesn't he?  Because, on form, he'll be executed brutally, his family will be playthings for the lord's guards, his home will be torched, and his aged grandparents thrown into the gutter to starve, pour encourages les autres.

But I presume you're looking for something more substantial than Gronan's one-liner, especially if you're playing a milieu akin to a Harn.  The answer is to look at some fictional examples.  Take LotR, where Frodo is gentry and Sam's his lower-class employee.  There's a pattern of noblesse oblige and deference -- Frodo's expected to make the decisions and Sam's expected to do the scut work -- but they're good comrades nonetheless.  Take a Game of Thrones, where Tyrion Lannister is a scion of one of the greatest houses in the realm, and Bronn is a sellsword from the gutter.  There's a jocular relationship there, but there are lines neither cross, and doubtless Bronn knows well enough to keep his wit to himself in front of the Queen or Lord Tywin.

Heck, I've been in that position as a player myself.  My explicit rule of thumb was this: the ladies and lord call the shots otherwise, but I call the shots on the battlefield.  Savvy?

If you prefer not to go with the standard egalitarian model most RPG circles do, and you've got players both interested in doing so and mature enough to handle it, that's an approach you can take.

Is this aristocracy the active elite and organizing part of the realm's fighting forces? Is it a rentier class? Courtiers who are required to spend a lot of time at the royal palaces, attending the monarch? Highly literate with delicate manners? Somewhat barbaric, fond of wild hunting expeditions and bloody tourneys? A class that includes a lot of men risen from humbler origins through the civil service, carrying letters of patent?
Inbred? Mixed with the burghers?

I'm just throwing out questions and ideas drawn from historical examples.

Quote from: Gormenghast;900389Soviet Canuckistan, eh?

S,right, b'y.

QuoteLet's say I announced that I was going to run a Harn campaign here. You signed up. Harn is " low fantasy" medieval stuff, with a sort of late Seventies stab at " feudalism."

Oh, I think I'd like that a lot; Harn goes to great lengths to be historically accurate without passing much of a moral judgement on things.  Now, if your campaign seems to spend rather a lot of time gleefully obsessing over how manorial lords use their serfs as living footstools, I'm probably going to bow out.  It's a bit like the Outlander series; some nice frothy Jacobite rebellion history and then bam gay rape all over the place[1].  Yeah, I get that probably happened a fair bit, but when the author/GM chooses to focus on it a bit too much one starts to wonder.

Quoteyour Blue Rose campaign

I'd sooner gargle ground glass.  I've read most of the books Blue Rose was based on, and somehow that game manages to be even more insulting to the intelligence.

[1] Spoiler.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;899159In the Richard Lester/Michael York/Richard Chamberlain/et cetera "The Four Musketeers," there is an absolutely LOVELY scene.  Rochfort says something that pisses off Richeleau, and Chuckie Heston glares and says "On your knees, little man, before your master!"  Christopher Lee turns three shades of green and drops to his knees, because he realizes that Richeleau could call the guards, say "take the Comte de Rochfort to the Bastille and behead him," write it on a piece of paper, sign it, and give it to the guards...

... and Rochfort would be killed, and there was not a DAMN thing he could do about it.  He had absolutely no recourse.

Richard Lester is among a tiny number of directors who could get the Chucker to act without hamming it up Shatner Style (toupee and all). Anthony Mann, William Wyler and Sam Peckinpah being the others.

Quote from: 5 Stone Games;899356Wat Tyler tried that and was killed for his trouble,

He was also kind of an idiot.


Look, I think that the central thing that people misunderstand about aristocracy is that their big deal is "duty". This doesn't mean that there aren't tons of self-serving, arrogant, power-mad, cruel, etc. aristocrats throughout history. But every single aristocrat has it drilled in their head from childhood that they are not just one person, they represent a lineage, often one going back hundreds of years, and that they have a series of duties they owe to that name they carry.  This manifests itself differently with each individual person, but it is a big deal to all but the most utterly despicable variety of aristocrat.

D&D generally does social class horribly.  In Dark Albion, I tried to rectify that, and a properly-run game set in Albion is one where the PC's social class is a stat at least as important, if not much more important, than any of their ability scores, and where it affects everything about the PC's place in the world.  Just about every play-focused section of Dark Albion deals with that in some way.

And as an example of what I was saying above, almost everything significant that happens in the War of the Roses (or to use Albion's term for it, the Rose War) is because of that sense of 'duty'. It's intricately bound to the conflict between Lancaster and York, to the vows taken by Clifford, Percy and Somerset, to the mess Edward of York makes of things when he marries Elizabeth Woodville, and to countless other smaller stories within the bigger picture of the war.

Quote from: Daztur;899370For modern old money types, a lot of people don't really get them since they really move in their own circles. They often imagine rich people the know just more so, when real old money is quite different like you say. Most rich people are really focused on acquiring status while old money often just doesn't give a shit since they were born with it. They're generally much less uptight than people imagine since they take their status too much for granted to be touchy about it.

This is extremely true and it was true in the past as well, as the difference between the aristocracy and the (often richer) gentry (the latter of whom were obsessed about appearances), and between the old-family aristocrats and the social-climbing newly-entitled.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;899380Kinda wish there was some way to figure out the actual percentage of benevolent VS tyrannical lords in history. I've seen this debate play out before, with the individual's position on the matter usually hinging on whether they perceive the feudal world as a pragmatic system harshly misrepresented by modern sources or an avoidable nightmare we should have emerged from sooner.

Most aristocrats you've never heard of? Benevolent.  The bad guys were remarkable enough that they made waves.

Remember too that most aristocrats in the middle ages had relatively very little liquid assets. Their wealth was all tied up in the land and the people who lived on that land. The less true that became, the less reason aristocrats had for behaving properly or giving a damn about the welfare of the peasantry.

Of course, when I say 'benevolent' I mean by the standards of the time, not by our own 21st century moral compass.

Quote from: 5 Stone Games;899408Medieval diets were not that badly balanced though light in protein and vitamin c. The  only ones we are certain about though were monastic and are probably different than standard diets . That said migration era people were generally healthier than medieval ones and medieval ones were far more healthy than early industrial era ones.

We actually know or can very reasonably estimate quite a lot about late medieval and renaissance diets.  And outside of times of famine they were generally quite good.  But it should be noted that the nature of these diets were very different across social classes.  The urban poor had the worst diets.  Both peasants and aristocrats had decent diets but of very different nature, which is why gout was a constant problem for the upper classes while flatulence was a big problem for the lower classes.

Quote from: Gormenghast;900059IME, the problem is not so much how to play aristocrats.

It is more likely to come from a player with what somebody (Pundit?) called " mall fantasy" expectations running into a setting run with social ranks and rules that actually matter.

I might have used that term, I don't recall. I usually say something like "medieval American"; that is, fantasy worlds whose social conventions are all either contemporary American or the fantastic notions that Americans imagine from really inaccurate movies or the like.

Anyways, when I have a player that has this attitude of "I'm going to speak my mind to the Duke" or whatever (or for that matter, open your fucking mouth unbidden at all, if you're any rank below Knight), I try to take a gentle path first, because I realize that the player is probably spoiled by having played Forgotten Realms campaigns where that sort of thing is totally normal and expected, maybe even rewarded.  But in a setting like Albion, you just can't do that! Thing is, his character, being from that world, would KNOW you just can't do that, so I usually try to deal with this by reminding the player of what his character would know.

Now, if the player is dumb enough not to believe me, he gets what's coming to him, which is, if he's extremely lucky, AT MINIMUM a really vicious tongue-lashing.

Quote from: RPGPundit;902929I might have used that term, I don't recall. I usually say something like "medieval American"; that is, fantasy worlds whose social conventions are all either contemporary American or the fantastic notions that Americans imagine from really inaccurate movies or the like.

Anyways, when I have a player that has this attitude of "I'm going to speak my mind to the Duke" or whatever (or for that matter, open your fucking mouth unbidden at all, if you're any rank below Knight), I try to take a gentle path first, because I realize that the player is probably spoiled by having played Forgotten Realms campaigns where that sort of thing is totally normal and expected, maybe even rewarded.  But in a setting like Albion, you just can't do that! Thing is, his character, being from that world, would KNOW you just can't do that, so I usually try to deal with this by reminding the player of what his character would know.

Now, if the player is dumb enough not to believe me, he gets what's coming to him, which is, if he's extremely lucky, AT MINIMUM a really vicious tongue-lashing.

At the same time, you need to give players some leeway, otherwise, they're just back at their soul crushing job, with their idiot boss, and they can't do anything but do what he or she says, if they want to get paid.  Or in the case of an RPG, not get killed and have to roll up a new character.

It's also why I try to avoid politics and noblemen in my games, because of situations like these.