D&D is Anti-Medieval

One might as well refer to my garage toolbox as "anti-Cabinets" for containing no hinges.

And these anti-Medieval fixtures from the text aren't even necessarily central to the experience. Hiring retainers is a hand-wave, a way to get back to the meat of the game: prying gems from the eyes of enchanted statues.

I guess my point is that the most accurate possible exegesis of the Gygaxian canon misses, almost entirely, the heart of the game, which exists overwhelmingly at the table, and not in the book.

[1]: https://acoup.blog/2024/07/12/fireside-friday-july-12-2024/

The original D&D books (before the Advanced series) did not describe a combat system. Instead, the rules of the wargame "Chainmail" were recommended (as was the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival for adventuring between dungeons).

Which is to say, the context of Gygax's remarks was gone by the time D&D books showed up at the Waldenbooks in every local mall. D&D was literally a different game in the 1970's.

For recent examples, Dragon Age, Warcraft, and D&D itself are pushing further and further in this direction lately.

Expecting "realism" and coherency from a fantasy world destroys the fantasy. But somehow projecting realism onto fantasy is a popular activity for fans.

Magic spells as ambient nanotech that's poorly understood and difficult to invoke -- hence the "Vancian" system which comes from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" series.

Magic items as remnant tech.

Different "races" as the vast gulf of time has led to speciation.

Gods as posthuman or artificially intelligent entities that have transcended the world but still keep an eye on it from time to time.

And so forth. There's literally nothing medieval about it, but it could be 1,000,000 AD. Just think of their medical technologies in light of our era's!

(All assuming, of course, that it's "baseline reality" and not a sandbox, as it was in Neal Stephenson's The Fall.)

I clearly remember how such "D&D PC-ism" influenced the relative flopping of the early Star Trek RPG [FASA, 1982 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Role_Playing_Ga...]. The main reason? No one wanted to be ordered around by a Captain PC, or by other PC officers that outranked them. Players wanted to be "equals." (While Star Trek TTRPG did have fans and survived for a long while, it never really took off as many hoped it would.)

Another reason, though, is that it did not satisfy the bloodlust of the typical "hack and slash" D&D fans (what are now called "murder hobos" — wandering bands of characters with no allegiances, no lords, no loyalties). These types of players couldn't just use the Enterprise's phasers to hold planets hostage and take all their loot. They couldn't just be space pirates. They thought the universe of Star Trek was "boring." In GDW's Traveller, by contrast, you could definitely (in due time) get a ship capable of hurling nukes at planets. You could be space pirates! Now that was "fun!"

It is often difficult to get many D&D players outside of their modernisms and into a medieval mindset, or into any sort of realistic strictly hierarchical society (as shown, even in Science Fiction).

I've run Pendragon for decades. It can misfire spectacularly if players refuse to put aside their modern mindsets and adopt the concepts of chivalry, feudalism, courtly love and faith (Christian or otherwise) that are central to its themes and historical source materials.

I had a whole session in this past year where I went through the ancient Brehon marriage laws under late pagan/early Christian Ireland. (btw: It's a far cry from "Say Yes to the Dress.")

D&D is more like a typical Renn Faire. A motley assortment of anything from ancient to nearly modern dress. A cross-time saloon of attitudes, weaponry, cultures and so on. What passes for society is made up from kit-bashed models. It rarely makes cohesive sense.

I think that the the game culture have changed into something where the DM (dungeon master) is just a enforcer of rules/npc builder. Most of the arguments in the text should be discretionary to the DM. If a DM chooses to enforce a "medieval" setting, the campaign will be medieval. "Knights mentioned", "any time select a land", well, I guess the DM can mention knights and not treat land as something that can be bought as long as you have money. It was very different playing a campaign in Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance or Greyhawk, or having a custom world built by a DM.

Some of the sourcebooks were extremely accurate in describing the Middle Ages. Others didn’t even try.

I do like the articles core criticism: the goal of D&D is social advancement.

D&D always was a Western at heart. A group of desperadoes going town to town taking up jobs and fighting the baddies.

The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages. I'm not sure Americans even understand the difference between a village and countryside.

When D&D has people living in the countryside it's often American-style single-family farms in the middle of nowhere. That wasn't a thing.

For actual medieval theme every small town should be surrounded by dozens of small villages with lots of people living in close proximity farming lots of small fields, and where one village ends - another starts.

Most places shouldn't have enough people to sustain full-time inns and shops. Weekly or monthly markets were done instead so that the same traders could be reused between many places.

The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.

People let grow a lot of misconceptions about history based on media/cinema/games representation of antiquity, medieval or even renaissance time. But that is normal. I guess reality can be boring in comparison.

But the geek habit is to stay inside the frame and obsess over how the premise should have been more explicit, the details more accurate, the rules more consistent. How does the tricorder work? What’s inside a Dalek?? Can you really clone a dinosaur using a chicken egg??? Let’s write a wiki page about our theories and then argue about it!

Maybe it doesn't represent feudalism, but this was the inspiration, not the USA. And macro economy isn't a focus in the game. If you want to make it fit, you could say the adventurers are not adhering to the system, rather they're rebels, nomads, or pirates.

The bigger issue is the magic system and description, especially combined with the very active divine system. D&D without it could be a zero-sum ignorant world like medieval times. The magic and divine systems transform it into an almost scientific world with magic replacing science. We can't easily 'fix' this like the setting stuff.

To get a more static result, designers then need to introduce powerful enemies, limit magic to a few people so the results of research can make little social difference, and since that's not enough (the PCs must have access to magic and work against the enemies), introduce almost regular cataclysms. That's still not enough, since the attitude is still a modern one ('we can fix it with tech^W magic').

But of course everyone's perspective on this is very different, which is a good thing imho. It only has very deep lore if it matters to you.

the monster manual seemed to be a mash up of monster from all over the place, including Greek myths.

Some of the weaponry was midevil but it didn’t seem like it was at all realistic. Like many fantasy books. Not like some of the war games of the time that where more historical (axis and allies and diplomacy)

Honestly if it was midevil, would it be fun? Who wants to play a game where you’re just farming. That would be such a grind and never be popular.

Which is why I massively prefer Eberron, as the original setting makes no sense at all.

Not that Eberron is without its faults but at least it's coherent and embraces what it is.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/279-welcome-to-eberron-an-in...

There's very little in modern society that is pro-medieval. Even the Ren fairs that so many people are into have almost nothing to do with recreating actual medieval life.

Being pro-something does not always mean being anti-something else. Sometimes it means that a certain group just isn't interested.

And in the context of modern TRPGs, medieval is a marketing term, not an actual descriptive term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthright_(campaign_setting)

Really the essence of the game is right in the name: dungeon crawl, fantasy creatures. Everything else is a bolt on.

Personally I apply a rule that there is no way to "mass produce" magic effects. Each spell invocation is unique based on local conditions/environment, and enchantment of magical items is unique to the item, even if quantities, materials, shapes, etc is precisely identical.

Otherwise magic is essentially more powerful than modern technology and medicine: infinite power generation, cure anything, raise dead, invulnerability, produce almost anything from thin air, know anything, teleport anywhere, and it would be inevitable that machines would be made to do so

It is kind of like the navigators in dune, although that has a prohibition on computers, I believe that computers pre jihad couldn't compete with spice enabled navigator prescience.

What was always funny to me as a teenager was the price tables for castles like barbicans, crenellations, etc: I had no idea what these were before the Internet. I knew towers, walls keeps.

Castles themselves seem much useless in the age of dragons, flying carpets, disintegrate spells, and flying mounts. There's a reason the US military doesn't have castles for defense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_plate_armour

It's literally the first search result.

Looking at the "Basic" D&D rules (red books), they don't cover characters up to the levels where they would be landowners etc. They only cover up to 3rd level.

The "Expert" D&D rulebook (blue books) covers characters up to 14th level, and includes sections on strongholds and land ownership. Once characters are 9th level, they can gain land but the narrative is definitely rooted in feudal concepts (fighters get land from a higher lord, and their realm is a barony etc)

"... empty of government ... live the American dream"

That is the real fantasy: to believe that the USA is "empty of government".

Or maybe the author considers the american dream is dead, because of too much government?

It's depopulated because of the black plague.

In reality our ancestors have always dealt with a silent god. Something that even in medieval society did not go unnoticed.

Gygax's own campaign was decidedly medieval and the rules were written before his milieu was published, so he left it as an exercise of the imagination for rule-book consumers to produce their own milieus until such a time as his could be published. The rules include descriptions of the possible selection of governmental structures. Technologically represented in the rules (aka weapon types) were decidedly medieval, as the author concedes.

That it was left to the DM to implement bureaucracy does not mean that it was anti-medieval.

I don't blame you for that. I don't want to run one either. Which may point us to why D&D is ahistorical: a realistic medieval game would be of limited interest to most people.

At various points (the original Dungeon Master's Guide, for example, page 88), he also has said it's expressly not a European Feudal game, and goes at length to qualify that, saying that it is only one of many sources of inspiration, and describes a number of political systems possible in a campaign and explains ways a variety of societies could be woven into it.

So, yeah I suppose if you've only read a little about D&D you could be forgiven for thinking this, but there is a large body of in-game and supplementary official and fan-created rules and settings which should give no one the impression that at any point were game authors and players as a whole were going for feudal european verisimilitude (or opposing it, for that matter)

Blog post is interesting but the title and initial setup is kind of a strawman

As near as I can tell, patrons, village leaders, barons, and kings were very intentionally a part of the schema of a typical original D&D campaign. They used 1:1 time, players had multiple PCs, and you often led mercenaries into battle (cf. Chainmail rules being incorporated for this purpose)

What's weird is the author appears to be au fait with some of original D&D (they mention Chainmail), but then they make claims like:

>While you can create a barony, there is no way to level up and become a duke or King

I mean, you definitely could, but it's a question of what the scope of the campaign is meant to be. That's between the DM and the players. Just because Gary Gygax didn't address every possibility explicitly doesn't mean it was considered and assumed to happen in some campaigns.

>There’s no evidence for (or against) the idea that OD&D takes place in a dark age after a fallen Roman Empire analogue or during the death throes of a feudal kingdom.

The magic system of D&D is largely based on Jack Vance's Dying Earth series which is a post-apocalyptic and exhausted Earth set in the far future. Between that and the _sheer number of ruins littered all over the landscape_, I would tend to think that there's plenty of room for a DM to weave a background history of a fallen empire into their setting.

The author seems to expect Gary Gygax to have played the role of someone like Tolkien rather than what Gary Gygax actually was: a systems builder who was interested in designing systems for interactive games humans play together.

>The monster descriptions of “men”, “elves”, and “dwarves” don’t suggest that the game is set in a European culture.

What? Just because there are corsairs doesn't mean there isn't a strong Old World flavor to the elements of D&D's cast of cultures. Barbary pirates were a relevant force in European history.

>OD&D is meant to be setting-free. The game’s referee is to create his or her own campaign, ranging in milieu from the “prehistoric to the imagined future” (with emphasis on the medieval, especially for beginners).

This is an accurate statement.

What the author's saying here fits better for AD&D than it does OD&D. There's some insight and reasonable points about D&D not being Feudalism Simulator 2024 (play Dark Albion if you want that) but they take the idea further than the facts on the ground can bear.

In these style of games, though, there's generally exponential power growth. One level 20 warrior can take on an absurd number of level 1 warriors. With modern games being so much larger and more complicated it's not impossible to find builds where a level 20 (or 40, or 60, or 100...) warrior can defeat arbitrary numbers of level 1 warriors. Moreover, the leveling mechanics are such that the things you do to attain levels are only loosely correlated to the skills you obtain from those levels, e.g., why would killing a bunch of kobolds suddenly allow you to cast two fireballs instead of one?

This breaks fuedalism in ways both subtle and gross. If the King is level 20 (or whatever), he has little to no utility for your Level 3 warrior's oath of fealty and the several dozen Level 1 warriors following him. In the real world every oath of fealty is some incremental boost in power and you may need everything you can get, but this oath of fealty is just a waste of your military's food.

So what would it look like? Well, you may note I time-bound my claim above that soldiers were somewhat range-bound in capability. Clearly modern militaries are wildly disproportional in effectiveness per soldier. It's been that way ever since the gun became a practical military weapon and has generally gotten worse over time. And what do we see today? Broadly speaking, the people with militaries have power and offer nothing like feudalistic loyalty in return. Loyalty is a one-way street where the plebs are beholden to the militaries, but the only loyalty the militaries have back to them is mostly based around the fact the plebs are still the supply line, so you can't actually kill them all, but you sure can kill a lot of them if you need to in order to maintain power. If you feel this is an inaccurate summary of the modern West, look beyond the modern West; there's a lot more to history than just the modern West in the past ~300-400 years. And it is, of course, a single paragraph merely sketching a hint of a broad shape, not a PhD thesis; I'm well aware that this is a very fuzzy picture. But the point I'm trying to make is not a positive one about the details of the sketch I'm making here; it suffices simply to point out that A: we actually have much less balanced "power per person" in the real world (though not driven by "leveling mechanics") right now and B: the resulting social structures that have been semi-stable now for centuries look nothing like feudalism at all.

Even if such a game started players off in positions of enviable social status, the things they'd be required to do to maintain order would be so distasteful that only seriously screwed up people would want to continue playing. The obstacles set up by society in the way of going on any sort of adventure outside of a few strict avenues (e.g. a pilgrimage or crusade) would be so infuriating that even sociopaths would be hard-pressed.

Medieval society is seriously alien. We can look back on their art, literature, architecture, etc. and see their humanity shining down through the ages, but we've carefully tended and cared for only the portions of medieval culture that still hold appeal. From top to bottom and in almost all respects, medieval society would shock and horrify us today.