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Ken Hite has a series on the KARTAS podcast focused on how to fit them into pop-culture tropes and make them gameable. So episode 431 had Michael Scott, episode 288 covered self-proclaimed Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, appointed Latin Patriarch of Constantinople, meddler in the Western Schism, false monk Palaiologos Tagaris, another the very post-medieval and very neurodivergent Kaiser Rudolph II.
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That is really a lot of money too … if florins were still pure, that is 90,000 good old pre-debasement English pounds or enough to support 30,000 workers in comfort for a year.
IIRC, the 1e AD&D rules gave the enemy a certain number of free attacks at a bonus on anyone trying to leave combat. The flavour text and scenarios of early D&D definitely encouraged players to pick their battles and run away if outmatched (and creating new characters was quick, so if Eadmund the Fighter was consumed by the sphere of annihilation, you could roll up Rodrick the Thief during pizza break). And the incompetence of starting characters before 3e also encouraged a “misadventures” style of adventure more than a “competence porn” style.
Also by the way, mentioning that any particular version of DnD is similar to a video game is forbidden talk on gaming forums right now. I’m about to get banned from one for even hinting about it.
Its not an issue on the two gaming forums I still check or post on.
The good thing about tabletop gaming today is that its so diverse. Where 20 years ago you had 2e D&D, World of Darkness, CoC, and “everything else” and in practice you were playing with your friend circle, today there are all kinds of sub-communities and publishers and you can find them online or on social media. Some people want to pretend that their little sub-group and its customs are the only one, but that is people I guess
That said I don’t think there is anything remotely bad about your character being in a guild or having feudal obligations, I think that sort of thing makes the game more interesting. It’s pretty much what this whole website is all about – bringing the history into the role playing (and as context into HEMA).
Again, I am just observing that many players want to be free from daily obligations and complications when they sit down at the table. Empire of the Petal Throne exists, so does Bubblegumshoe and Worminghall and Aces and Eights, so
#notAllPlayers. I think many people would be interested in a campaign about journeymen on their Wanderjahr in the same city, or settlers in a new free town, especially if you add some SF / fantasy element behind the scenes. Give the players who want to misbehave opportunities to misbehave while giving the ones who like engaging with the world problems and opportunities with guild memberships and lovers and relatives and disputes over land rights.How could ‘running away’ not be a viable option in the rules? That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. Anyway, I make the rules for the books we sell here. Running away is “A+OK”.
Check out the rules for exiting combat in 1e AD&D.
I think one of the problems of 3.5e and 4e were that they tried to turn tabletop gaming into a copy of a MMORPG, rather than taking advantage of the things that are possible face to face but hard or impossible to code. Its easier to code an endless stream of random fights to the death than political intrigue over who will become the next mayor or negotiations with the gnolls to beat up the bugbears together.
Opponents with mind-control magic are rare in most games! The way many players object to lack of agency is something observed, not a theory. In our games the party got captured and enslaved pretty often to avoid a TPK (or just locked up for sundry felonies) but that requires trust.
And there were a lot of player-character deaths (so many deaths!) I think I ran one campaign where players reached about 5th level in D&D.
Sometime I would like to see someone like Jessica Finley or Pamela Muir write up for academics that the 15th and 16th century martial arts which Sydney Anglo thought were so brutal often give choices like “now that you are safe, throw them to the ground like this or break their elbow like that” whereas the 18th and 19th century fencing which Sydney Anglo thought was so refined and friendly focuses on stabbing people through the head and torso. They are happy to give that rant to fencers but I don’t know who else they are reaching.
Roleplaying games often neglect these less lethal options which is why Doug Cole came out with different versions of improved grappling rules. But if players are used to attack attack attack, getting them to use less lethal options is tough.
One issue which people often bring up is that most players are allergic to loss of agency, and captivity is a loss of agency. People thinking about games inspired by pulp fiction and silly action films like James Bond have thoughts on how to work around this, but trust between players and GM is the most important. Its also good to make sure that in the rules, running away is a viable option.
In many forms of D&D, fighting is the core activity, so people writing scenarios need to keep providing it and it can’t be too risky or repetitive. A way around that is to make the campaign about something else, like solving a mystery, driving out the hated ruler or terrible invaders, or freeing the Old Gods from their chains (and again, picking a rules set which make things other than fighting fun).
The social / asocial violence model is also useful. Many games are about asocial violence, but they also want to be about fair fights (unless its adventurers vs. Tucker’s Kobolds). That is a hard circle to square, because muggers or highwaymen rarely pick the group of 4-6 ablebodied people bristling with weapons. And many players want to be wandering heroes not enmeshed in a network of family relationships, guild memberships, childhood rivalries, and all the other things which affected many of these fights in 15th and 16th century Europe. A wolf taking a deer (asocial violence) does not behave like a wolf showing a strange wolf that he is bigger and stronger (social violence). I don’t have such good answers to this.
I also agree that most English-speaking people’s picture of early modern Europe does not have much on the Germanies and Poland-Lithuania in the 15th and 16th century. And that a lot of modern pictures of the period are mangled to support modern ideas about nationalism or imperialism (Victor Davis Hanson’s world history skips from Cicero to the siege of Tenochitlan, and that is not an accident … neither is all the research trying to prove that Europe [they mean some Catholic parts of Europe] became richer and more innovative than everywhere else in Eurasia at earlier and earlier dates). These cities which were getting rich and connected but not trying to conquer foreigners or build a nation-state were not useful to the old nationalists or the new Rise of the West ™ / Great Divergence narrative.
But I’m trying to put readers in mind of the general amount of durable goods which most working people had, because today I see fantasy fans whose olden times have prisons with cells closed by walls of 8′ high iron bars and mattresses with steel springs, and don’t grok why one of the first things robbers took was their victim’s clothes. I am trying to give a ‘good enough for gaming purposes’ view.
Yes agreed, the question is how representative is he vis-a-vis the middle? And how much property did a middling artisan or bottom tier ‘full citizen’ have in various regions. Certainly day laborers are indeed poorer than artisans.
In my experience so far, that is an above-average working class inventory from the later middle ages. Someone could read through a few hundred of these and form their own opinion, but that would be a book not a forum post 🙁
I know that in some towns, artisans of specific crafts were well enough off that they were expected to provide not only weapons and armor, but also horse(s) for the militia. For example in Wismar in 1483 the butchers made up the bulk of the cavalry in their militia. I also know that wealthier craft artisans often owned more than one house or building. Some of them were involved in business complexes and / or were at the top of networks of subcontractors, whereas others (often but not always younger) were effectively the employees of these types.
That is a surprise, because in the societies I study cavalry are very much a leisure-class occupation (or they get paid to maintain that horse and harness, and sell them or turn bandit when the pay goes away). Was there a lot of land near Wismar in the 15th century that was only good for pasture but not grain?
I think that goldsmiths aren’t a good example because they had so much capital and so many opportunities to take a percentage on the silver and gold passing through their shop. I have read a Babylonian version of the story of the goldsmith who took in more gold than was in the object they delivered, its older than Archimedes or Kipling’s story about the two jars of barleycorns (heavy ones to use when buying precious things, and light ones to use when selling them). Most late medieval and early modern townsfolk were things like weavers and dyers and shearers and shoemakers and tailors and bladesmiths and silkwomen, the kinds of trade that ended up in the Mendel’sche Zwolfbrüderstiftung if they had some bad luck.
For what it’s worth, the reconstructed houses at Bärnau – Tachow and the medieval house plots in old Glurns / Glorenza are the same general order of size as the rural English houses in Christopher Dyer’s book. At Bärnau they have to keep the three villages a size which they can maintain, but they care about getting things right.
And yes, there are differences between societies, but I think its important to get the general order of magnitude in mind first. Rimini in 1461 was not the kind of place where people burned down old wooden buildings to salvage the iron in the nails, but I don’t think it was the kind of place where a typical kitchen had a set of six big knives which got used once or twice a year either.
From my point of view, Andrea di Clemente was in no way poor. He had a trade and a wife and a stock of goods and a cash reserve (including gold ducats of Venice!) He had several outfits of dyed clothing, including some broadcloth. I am sure he ate meat regularly and was not terribly cold in winter. A really poor working man would be someone like a day labourer helping to pack and move goods or dig ditches and hoping to be chosen out of the crowd of other desperate people.
Some of the clothing is marked “of his lady” so her stuff is not all excluded.
My understanding is that most late medieval people who were not servants lived in small buildings like all those one, two and three-bay structures in England (and the servants were fitting their lives around their masters’).
I have a whole book of inventories from Dijon 1390-1408 by Guilhelm Ferrand but I have not gone all the way through it, my French is poor.
Because the materials in a gown or an iron pot were so valuable, late medieval and early modern cities had all kinds of trades which specialized in repairing used goods, and all kinds of people who bought and resold things people did not need right now like pawn shops today. If a king wanted to equip an army, one of his household made some inquiries and a merchant would buy up all the used kit available and sell it to the king (Francesco di Marco Datini was in this business, and in Poland they still call pawn shops Lombards). Cobblers repaired shoes, fripperers remade clothing, and tinkers did small metalwork. There was a trendy term for this in the Silicon Valley crowd a few years ago, but its a very old practice.
For story purposes, these trades give good opportunities for characters to meet or see traces of each other; they also served as fences, in 16th century Seville the fripperers had to display purchases near the door of their shop for a certain period before they could re-dye, re-line, or otherwise alter it so that anyone who was burgled would have a fair chance to recognize their clothing.
They might be the people to ask for any special modifications to common objects which monster-hunters or world-walkers need.
One of the fundamental design decisions of GURPS 4e is that game rules need to be based around adventuring situations, because those are what actually matter for the story and because its too much cognitive load to require the GM to remember to apply a lot of different modifiers in the middle of an action scene. GURPS Tactical Shooting has a really good section by gun geeks (Hans-Christian Vortisch and S.A. Fisher) adapting those rules to less stressful situations, based on the current US consensus on performance of combat shooters. That design decision makes sense to me.
In 16th century England, there was massive resistance by the citizens to modernizing Queen Mary’s militia law from 1558 because of the expense of buying new equipment and firearms. The weapons men carried to show their status and gender and hunt or keep order were not the same weapons they carried to defend against a landing or march into Scotland … this explicitly came up late in the 16th century, there were protests about disarming politically suspect groups and the compromise was that they could keep their bows and bills but not pikes and firearms because the former were enough to keep order and defend themselves. I have read a series of complaints against the expense of English militia laws going back into the 13th or early 14th century.
Bert S. Hall’s “Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics” and the Bow vs. Musket blog are also good. I’m not sure if Bow vs. Musket groks that recruits could be expected to learn the bow or crossbow on their own time before they were conscripted, but someone had to pay for the powder and shot to learn musketry. So when early modern people talk about training, they are not talking about starting from scratch like a modern infantry school, they are talking about how much the paymaster has to spend to get an effective soldier.
All kinds of ranged weapons are much less accurate in combat than in practice, for a long list of reasons. So you can’t really use target shooting to work out combat accuracy, just to rank different weapons in your rules.
