History vs. Fantasy: The Plight of the Gaming Medievalist

Readers, there is something that has been weighing heavily on my conscience for a long while now, and I think it's time I finally came clean:

*ahem*

Chainmail is just called mail!  Studded leather armor doesn't exist!  Longswords and greatswords are the same thing; what you call a longsword is actually an arming sword!

Whew, glad to get that off my chest.  Now let me explain...

As an avid tabletop fantasy RPG player and a bona fide medievalist, I often find myself torn between two worlds.  On the one hand, I know that the magical and imaginative world(s) of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are not - and should never be - accurate simulations of the medieval world that they imitate, if only for the fact that magic and dragons and orcs never existed.  On the other hand, I know that the key to good worldbuilding is to ground your world to some extent in reality, and for me the best way to do that is to use what I know of medieval history as a foundation to build upon.  Since I literally know more about medieval history than 99% of the population (even if I am toward the bottom of that 1%), I sometimes come across pieces of the game - be they rules, items, lore, or what-have-you - that strike me as, for lack of a better term, innacurate.  I sometimes find it difficult to take off my historian hat and put on my fantasy hat.  Can't I just mash them together into some sort of awesome new hat?

by DucttapeNinja at Instructables

This baby would have really helped me study for my Latin final

History is not fantasy, and fantasy is not history.  But that doesn't mean that the two are mutually exclusive.*  No one thinks the events of Game of Thrones are actual historical events (at least I hope they don't), yet it frequently becomes a point on which medievalists and the general public engage with each other about actual medieval history.  No spoilers, but toward the end of Season 5 of the show, an event happened which ignited much debate across the internet, including much discussion about whether the event in question was historically accurate.  This - again - despite the fact that Game of Thrones is a fictional story set in a fantasy world that no one believes is real.  Why?  Because actual medieval history informs Game of Thrones and - to a much greater extent - A Song of Ice and Fire, and that worldbuilding foundation makes George "Reading Rainbow" Martin's fictional world so much more compelling than, say, Generic Fantasy World 27B1X.  A Song of Ice and Fire is, at some level, a meditation on the nature of power, so it makes sense to set it in a world of feudal obligation where a ruler's ability to garner support is dependent on his personal relationships and his attempts to please his barons.  This sort of 'realistic' fantasy, set in a world that owes more to the Middle Ages than to Middle Earth, has really struck a chord with people, and as a fan of both fantasy and medieval history, I couldn't be happier.

Not so Black and White: In Defense of the Alignment System

"Always consider alignment as a tool, not a straitjacket that restricts the character.  Although alignment defines general attitudes, it certainly doesn't prevent a character from changing his beliefs, acting irrationally, or behaving out of character." 

- 2nd Edition AD&D Player's Handbook

"Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies,

so two lawful good characters can still be quite different from each other." 

- D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook

via Know Your Meme

What is your GM's alignment?

There is a current of thought in the RPG-playing community that D&D's classic nine-part, Good-Evil/Law-Chaos alignment system is outdated, overly simplistic, restrictive of roleplaying, or just plain bad.  This is not a new complaint - it has been around since the first time a GM who had just learned about moral relativism in his Philosophy 101 class looked at his group's paladin and said, "Well in this country it's illegal to not kill babies.  What are you going to do?"  To this day, there are GMs out there who pull out all the stops to make every paladin fall just because they think Lawful Good is an unattainable alignment.

When you are told, "Here are the nine things you can think.  Have fun roleplaying!", then yes, that seems overly restrictive.  But that view of the alignment system is overly simplistic (Ironic that accusations of being overly simplistic themselves come from an overly simplistic view.  And doubly ironic that I am presenting such a view in an overly simplistic manner.  But let's continue, before I am buried under a pile of my own straw-men).  Alignment is really a two-axis spectrum broken down into nine parts for ease of use.  Different viewpoints are possible within any given alignment, not just between two adjacent alignments.  And it is possible for a Lawful Good character and a Chaotic Good character to see eye-to-eye on a situation, just as it is possible for two Lawful Neutral characters to have completely different takes on the same situation.

It is important to think of the alignment system as descriptive, not proscriptive.  That is, the thoughts and actions of your character define your alignment, your alignment doesn't define the thoughts and actions of your character.  The alignment written on your character sheet is a measure of your character's actions to this point, or perhaps represents the goal that your character strives for.  Furthermore, a character's position on the alignment spectrum is fluid, not fixed.  It is constantly shifting about as he or she makes new decisions, is confronted with new choices, and has moments of introspection.  A Lawful Evil character may slip up with a few Chaotic (or even Good) acts before steering back to LE.  Some of the best roleplaying moments can come from a character's journey through a change in alignment.  After all, what is drama without character development?