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The vast differences between today's egalitarian America and medieval Europe is hard to convey to gamers.
For the most part, I simply made the societies in my fantasy settings almost as egalitarian as the one we're living in.
I learned about how feudal societies worked, but the players would always vapor lock when I tried to apply it.
Later on, when reading about Europe in the run-up to The Great War, the vestiges of feudal society were still running on. It's fascinating reading about rich commoners and dead broke barons.
I noticed that Downton Abby is on Prime, and It's fascinating seeing the social divisions in Georgian England.
I've long toyed with getting a fantasy game set about the same frame.
Adventurers are almost universally commoners because being noble costs valuable points.
The very role of an adventurer creates a strange niche in such a society.
As disruptive as the mercantile classes getting wealthier than the nobility as far back as Elizabeth I.
Goes back farther than Elizabethan times. One of the most common reasons to persecute Jews in post-Rome eras in Europe was to cancel any debt owed to them by the elite. What a way to run a country, overspend and then kick the bankers out.
ReplyDeleteMerchants were always running a fine line between not being nobles and making too much money. And excess moneys or properties were subject to seizure or excessive taxation.
And, yes, most modern people and almost all gamers have no friggin clue as to how completely different a medieval, hell, even an Italian Renaissance period world actually functioned. Born a serf, always a serf. Born a peasant, always a peasant. Born a noble, always a noble. Which means serfs and their spawn are tied to the land, same with peasants. And then there were things nobles weren't allowed to do, like becoming... merchants.
Toss in inheritance laws, like if you're not the first-born son, you're screwed, and that just adds to all the strangeness and otherworldlyness of pre modern society. Which really only came about thanks to the Industrial Age, and even then, really finally differentiated in the post-WWII world that modern medicines have given us (freedom from dying of TB and other diseases, freedom of sexual congress (to a point, but HIV and other STD drugs have come a long way.)