It's been a while since I last posted anything to this blog - not by my own will. Moving and starting a new job has taken up a lot of my time. But every once in a while you come across something you just have to write about - and I decided it was high time to return to the Lunar Lands.
Yesterday, in reference to a statement by Chris Pine that TRPGs should be used in schools, my gaming group was discussing the educational potential of roleplaying games, with the example of a campaign based on Beowulf being used in a unit on the poem.
My first thought, as a nerd, was that that sounded awesome.
My second thought, as a DM, was that a campaign run as a lesson plan would probably have to be considerably railroaded in order to achieve the objectives of the course, and that would restrict any advantages it might have over something more conventional.
My third thought, as a nerd and a DM, was that if handled by someone who was knowledgable about Anglo-Saxon culture and history, this could be both very fun and very informative. It all boils down to how the subject would be approached.
When running a game in a historical era (or a fantasy world based on a historical era), there are two ways one can approach it. You can run the game with the expectation that the PCs will behave in ways expected of people of the era, or you can use the trappings of the past as a backdrop to tell a story that's, at its heart, a representation of modern times.
The latter of the two seems to be the one I see more often. For lack of a better term, we'll call it
Flintstonism. After all, the most recognizable example of this phenomenon is
The Flintstones. Much of the series' humor comes from the fact that, even though everybody is living in caves and using stone tools, the stories are really about a middle-class suburban American family in the 1960s. You won't see Fred and Barney hunting mastodons with spears. The technology, the social mores, and the celebrity guest stars all reflect the time in which it was produced, even if they're thinly veiled beneath stone-age aesthetics and silly puns.
An aside: Yes, I know that if we're talking about medieval fantasy here, the comparison I should be using is Dave the Barbarian. But unlike The Flintstones, I can't count on my audience to be familiar with that show - which is a travesty, but it is what it is.
The most visible forms of Flintstonism in fantasy settings come from using magic and magic items to replace technology. I'm not the biggest fan of that, but that's a story for another time, and that's something that's easy enough to tailor by restricting access to magic items as the DM wishes. What I find more interesting as a point of discussion is when medieval fantasy settings reflect the societal progress of modern times, despite outwardly looking medieval.
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Street signs? Traffic signals? Public transport?
Don't be fooled, this is modern-day New York. |
The Middle Ages was a very different time - social class was all but ironclad, religion set people apart more than origin or language, and justice was believed to be dispensed by divine right rather than codes of law. Obviously, this varied from time to time and from place to place, but for the most part, the ways a medieval peasant saw and thought about the world would be nearly unrecognizable to your average person today. But a good many settings that use medieval Europe as a basis hew closer to the mores, norms, and issues of our time.
The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age, for example, are Flintstonist settings. They take swords-and-sorcery imagery and medieval technology, but use them to deal with contemporary issues like nationalism, organized crime, institutional racism, and drug abuse - only with elves. These problems, while recognizable to us, would have made no sense to people during the Middle Ages. Even Warhammer Fantasy can be called a Flintstonist setting; although it does ground itself in a greater degree of historicism than some examples (as I previously noted as a common feature of British old-school fantasy gaming), the Empire is as much a satire of Thatcher-era Britain as it is a fantastic version of 16th century Germany.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have settings that attempt to model the prevailing concerns and philosophies of the historical eras they're based on - they might deal with interacting with different social classes, or the values of chivalry and honor, for example; things that don't tend to bother us much these days but meant the world to medieval people. HarnMaster includes much detail on feudal politics and class structures, and Lion and Dragon bills itself as a "medieval authentic RPG" with rules to model the hierarchies and customs of the time. Outside of the TRPG world, Kingdom Come: Deliverance stands out as an RPG that rewards players for thinking like a medieval person - granted, it actually is set in the Middle Ages rather than a fascimile of the same, but the point still stands.
Although I've used the Middle Ages as a frame of reference, it's possible to make a non-Flintstonist
setting that's grounded in another era - say, Victorian times or classical antiquity - or even a different world entirely. Empire of the Petal Throne was designed by a sociologist, and the setting of Tekumel is known for the vast layers of detail and complexity in how it depicts social scenarios and interactions that have very little to do with anything you or I would recognize, and this has been a source of both praise and criticism.
I don't want what I've said to be taken the wrong way. Although I do favor the non-Flintstonist approach in the games I run, Flintstonism is not a bad thing. In fact, some of the settings I've cited as Flintstonist are personal favorites of mine. It's easy to see why Flintstonism is so popular - it provides less of a barrier for entry as it doesn't expect specialized knowledge of its players, and it's easier for most people to imagine what their characters would do when they're faced with situations not unlike what they would face in their day-to-day life. We can relate more easily to characters and settings that have the same problems we do. And if you're going to use a story to comment on real-world society, it's perhaps more productive to comment on something happening today than it is to do so to something happening in ages past.
However, in the hands of a good DM, and with a group of players interested in taking on the mindsets of of another age, a non-Flintstonist setting can be a truly immersive experience that can bring the ages of history to life. If used as a teaching tool to inform players about history, a non-Flintstonist campaign can be especially enlightening. It's one thing to use primary sources to reconstruct how ancient people viewed the world - but it's a step beyond to take on the role of one of those people, and see how the world around them responds to their actions and what does and doesn't work.
Let's return to the example of a Beowulf campaign. Say a PC arrives at Hrothgar's court, refuses to bow to a foreign king, holds onto their treasure, acts humbly when asked to boast of their heroic deeds, and suggests that maybe killing Grendel isn't worth it and we should perhaps make him go somewhere else (or that we should go somewhere else). We could envision someone living in the modern era to act this way, in whole or in part, if faced with a similar situation.
In a Flintstonist campaign, the DM might allow the PC to make their case, and the NPCs might accept it and go with the plan. In a non-Flinstonist campaign, though, Hrothgar would probably treat the PC as insane - they fail to respect royalty! They give no gifts! They have no courageous acts worth speaking of! Grendel owes Hrothgar for the weregild of his men and he won't pay it! It might come to a shock to the players at first if they aren't used to such a mindset - but if the DM wants them to learn about how people behaved, and expected others to behave, in the era of the Beowulf poet, it could be a wonderful learning experience to jump into the role and to see what it was like to live in such a different time.
And a truly great DM might even allow someone who approached the ethics of 6th century Denmark with modern ideals to pull off their plans and succeed if they worked hard enough. Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but sometimes, crazy is just enough to work!
