Quote from: Phillip;787901As I recall, it makes no pretense of being just like the Middle Ages. It's very obviously close to Tolkien's Middle Earth, perhaps a Fourth Age. And also obviously close to the usual D&D-Land.

Didn't meant to criticize the book, have never read it but stuff like birth control herbs at mess makes it sound like the author has done their homework which makes me want to read the book, was criticizing other settings that just say "nope, no sexism here" without thinking about the reason and consequences for that.

Quote from: Ravenswing;787911If anyone actually did that, that'd be one thing.  Except, of course, they don't.

Medieval Russia had three characteristics that went hand in hand with its demographics that you don't find in published settings: low tech level, lack of wealth and consumer goods and vast distances between settlements.  If PCs don't mind getting paid by the thankful villagers in chickens, don't mind that the blacksmith's asking them for the iron before he makes them new swords (and laughs, "And where you'll find enough I've no idea!"), and has no problem with several days' travel over empty steppe to get anywhere ... but we're talking a setting that makes Harnworld look like Renaissance northern Italy.

Sounds really interesting. Makes me wish I'd learned more of that kind of nuts and bolts stuff in my college Russian history class (Kievan Rus to 19th century) but never really got a good sense of what the economic and social structure of rural Medieval Russia was like but sounds very D&D-worthy. I'd assume there would be strong river-based trade routes?

For a lot of pre-modern gender stuff it really comes down to kids in my opinion. In pre-modern societies you had only about 50% of kids making it to their third birthday. With other sources of death, you have to have pretty massive fertility rates just to keep the population steady. Then if you have some women becoming infertile or dying in childbirth (the leading cause of death for women was childbirth) the rest have to have MORE kids to make up for that.

That's a lot of kids. And because they didn't have vaccines or clean water these kids got sick all the time with lots of very serious illness or death that required a lot of nursing. If these kids didn't get breast milk it was even worse. The titanic size of the time sink this represents is something that's hard for modern people to wrap their brains around, which puts a massive barrier in the path of women.

Then if you take a demographically significant chunk of women and put them on birth control and get them killed and the whole demographic situation starts to fall apart in pre-modern societies you NEED that massive fertility rate.

Good thing we don't anymore, the idea of spending so much time on kids who die half the time sounds rather nightmarish.

Yeah, I seem to recall in some periods/areas they didn't even bother naming children until 1 or 2, because what's the point?

It's also interesting that 'average lifespan' is often wildly misleading because normal calculations include everyone, which means that infant mortality can knock off 10-30 years.
Which means people look at the number and go 'wow, people only lived until 50?'
No, lots of people didn't make it to 3. If you actually lived past THAT, your lifespan was likely to be a bit higher.

Quote from: Will;787943Yeah, I seem to recall in some periods/areas they didn't even bother naming children until 1 or 2, because what's the point?

It's also interesting that 'average lifespan' is often wildly misleading because normal calculations include everyone, which means that infant mortality can knock off 10-30 years.
Which means people look at the number and go 'wow, people only lived until 50?'
No, lots of people didn't make it to 3. If you actually lived past THAT, your lifespan was likely to be a bit higher.

Yeah and having two kids really makes me understand just how much time kids take up. I can't even imagine having six kids. And I have healthy kids.

Basically just multiply sane maternity leave times the fertility rate needed to maintain a pre-modern population and look at the holes that that leaves in female education and work experience.

Then make the kids much sicker.

Quote from: Daztur;787941For a lot of pre-modern gender stuff it really comes down to kids in my opinion. In pre-modern societies you had only about 50% of kids making it to their third birthday. With other sources of death, you have to have pretty massive fertility rates just to keep the population steady. Then if you have some women becoming infertile or dying in childbirth (the leading cause of death for women was childbirth) the rest have to have MORE kids to make up for that.

That's a lot of kids. And because they didn't have vaccines or clean water these kids got sick all the time with lots of very serious illness or death that required a lot of nursing. If these kids didn't get breast milk it was even worse. The titanic size of the time sink this represents is something that's hard for modern people to wrap their brains around, which puts a massive barrier in the path of women.

Then if you take a demographically significant chunk of women and put them on birth control and get them killed and the whole demographic situation starts to fall apart in pre-modern societies you NEED that massive fertility rate.

Good thing we don't anymore, the idea of spending so much time on kids who die half the time sounds rather nightmarish.

This description bears some resemblance to the situation in pre-modern sub-Saharan Africa, where disease and crop-devouring megafauna often did require all hands to the fertility plough. But in most of the world the threat was overpopulation, not underpopulation. Adaptive measures to avoid starvation through overpopulation included late marriage and nunneries - at times in medieval Europe very large numbers of women became nuns. A nonexistent need to breed has nothing to do with the lack of women warriors, at least not outside Africa.

Quote from: Daztur;787941For a lot of pre-modern gender stuff it really comes down to kids in my opinion. In pre-modern societies you had only about 50% of kids making it to their third birthday. With other sources of death, you have to have pretty massive fertility rates just to keep the population steady. Then if you have some women becoming infertile or dying in childbirth (the leading cause of death for women was childbirth) the rest have to have MORE kids to make up for that.

Don't even have to go back that far. I wrote a paper on population statistics in the 1990's for my U.N. political science class and recall regions of Africa with 7+ children per woman with negative population growth. I don't recall which nation it was, but one of them had an average of 9 childbirths per woman and still had a negative population growth.

Reminds me of the National Geographic article that had a biologist term Africa "the living Pliocene." So many living things there grew alongside with mankind and its meteoric rise that they had a longer chance to adapt and survive. The rest of life on the other continents fared far less well in resisting humanity. Basically the article noted life's evolutionary response to humans in Africa was hyper-aggression to keep humans away. It apparently worked.

Makes for great gaming fodder: a continent that is the origins of a human(oid) race, leaving evolutionary legacy flora and fauna.

Quote from: estar;784675That your critical element in figuring out how it is currently laid out.

One possible path.

1) There was people living in the area prior to the nomads moving in. How did they live and were organized?

2) Horse nomads suggest a steppe culture with semi-permanent settlements centred around herding.

3) Horse nomads moving in will likely mean they retain their nomadic culture at first. Likely using the pre-existing as source of luxury items. For ease of control and to clear land for pasture, the nomad will likely drive the native population onto concentrated estates. Each estate will overseen by a nomad clan. Powerful clans will control multiple estates.

The original nobility will be made into subordinates. If they prove too rebellious, the original nobles will be destroyed and collaborators will be elevated to subordinate positions. Likely much of the original rural population will be enslaved or more likely made into serfs with their freedom of movement restricted.

The region's urban centers will suffer as disruption in trade patterns spread through the region. However they will be viewed as THE major source of luxury goods by the nobles so will be more tolerated compared to the rural population. They will also be the nucleus from which nomad culture begins to integrate into the regional culture. The exact mix of the fusion culture will depend on how many nomads there are to how many natives.

If you choose to set the realm in the middle of this then the traditionalist will likely view the new fused culture as a corrupted form of what should be. While the progressives view the traditionalists as stick in the muds who are unable to appreciate the new finer things of life.

Understand that this has nothing to do with morality. It may be that the traditional nomad culture is a bunch of brutes and the fused culture is taking on aspect of the high art and ideals of the native. Or it could be vice versa, the nomadic culture is mostly egalitarian with a strong code of right and wrong while the fused culture is a degeneration into a dog eat dog world. Most cases are in between.

One constant among the variation is that the nomadic is likely to be the less sophisticated. Contact with the original centralized culture with urban center will leave the nomad scrambling for answers to various questions particular those related to ruling a large mass of people with a variety of trades. This is why the likely result will be a fused culture rather than nomads totally supplanting the original culture.

I can give detailed advice if I have more specifics.

I live right next to a town that was started as a trading post where Comanches used to come to buy and sell goods @150 years ago. Depending on certain conditions, there could be no Comanches at all and then suddenly  hundreds -maybe a thousand or more- coming to town to carry out business and just as suddenly they'd go home.

I bring this up because many world builders, when using one of the random placement charts or computer programs, will panic when the results are a large group of creatures turning up out in the middle of nowhere. Usually, they'll ignore the results because a tribe of a thousand nomadic horsemen here, a war party of 500 orcs there, etc seems seriously out of whack.

One way to handwave this is to assume that when monsters turn up in large numbers in this fashion, they are recent arrivals (an invasion) or that this is a regular seasonal migration: "The horsemen of the Dry Heath follow the spring rains with their herd and usually depart by late summer". Or it could be a hallowed site for pilgrims or whatever.

Quote from: Haffrung;784429It's safe to say most published fantasy settings are dramatically underpopulated by historical terms. Regional maps routinely show 30-50 miles between villages and towns, with several days of punishing forced marches between settlements of all kinds. So if you want a setting with plausible demographics, you would do well to ignore the examples presented in published RPG material.

Quote from: Daztur;785173Don't think that's a bad thing, there's so many things that eat people in D&D-land that it makes sense for population densities to be low.

Think that settlements should look like what you get historically in areas of constant low-level warfare (like the English/Scotland border historically) but even more so, with every last farmhouse being fortified except in very secure locations.

Correct answer. But to add to it, monsters (including human ones) can cause damage far greater than just killing people outright. That ogre wasn't just content to eat the shepherd, but killed all the sheep, ransacked the shepherd's home, raped his daughter, then set fire to everything else in the village that would burn (including the crops) -all for shits and giggles. Needless to say, the surviving villagers will be looking to get out of Dodge as soon as possible unless they can find a band of plucky heroes to kill that ogre...

But if they can't, those fields won't be tilled, those meadows won't be grazed, and so on. There won't be any surplus of food or other goods to support the towns and cities because there won't be any produce at all. Look up Chevauchée for more.

Quote from: jadrax;785182Its not just that that so many things eat people, a lot of them are people.

Every orc, kobold, gnoll, goblin, etc. should all be counting towards your population total if you are looking at being anything close to realistic.

That's how I do it. I use the simple formula of X number of people that could be supported in a given square mile (sometimes by random roll). Every HD of monsters in a hex supplants at minimum a like number of human HD. Especially evil/destructive/chaotic monsters will remove a much greater number of human HD, for the reasons above.

Quote from: Haffrung;785196In contrast to the map above, here's a map at approximately the same scale. You'll note that it encompasses the fucking entirely of Yorkshire, including dozens of town, villages, and castles.

So yeah, most fantasy settings are just that - fantastically implausible in almost every respect, from demographic to geographic to political.

You think maybe that's why it's called fantasy?

Quote from: Haffrung;785253There's also the fact that fewer and fewer fantasy gamers have knowledge or an interest in real-world history and geography.

Who gives a shit? Real-world history and geography are irrelevant to fantasy. They can add a nice touch here and there, but they don't really matter all that much.

Quote from: Ravenswing;785984I'd say that very few settings -- and certainly fewer published settings -- have thought this through.

If you have wandering monsters and orc raids routinely rampaging through the countryside -- deep within the notional borders of nations, and powerful enough to require PCs to kill -- then the nations' ability to produce the food and luxury goods that the players rely on having in affordable abundance is seriously compromised.

If, by contrast, you have a countryside militarized enough to handle or cordon off such threats, a lot of PC plotlines go away ... and, incidentally, the PCs' ability to push around or intimidate schmuck villagers should be sharply reduced.

Oh noes! The DM will have to come up with something new!

Quote from: S'mon;786063Good point - something like Quail Valley in VolK looks VERY like a Western movie setting. I think this is pretty much the default for American RPG fantasy.
It occurs to me though that the main reason IRL that Western settlements were not fortified was that the inhabitants had rifles, a more powerful deterrent than any palisade. Without some equivalent advantage over likely threats (whether Red Indians or Orcs), Western-type townships seem very unlikely to me.

Depends on what you mean by "fortified". Most had timber or adobe palisades, with the exception of Fort Worth in Texas which was built on a cliff overlooking the river (i.e. a natural fortification):

Quote from: S'mon;786489Death. Compare the Viking Sagas like Njall's Saga - one bunch of Vikings could go attack out a smaller bunch of vikings, set fire to their steading and usually wipe them out without losses. In the Old West Clanton/McCoy family feuds involved bushwhacking more than frontal assaults, because the weaponry created high mutual vulnerability.

Getting back to the lack of fortification in the Old West - the danger level generally just wasn't that high. The Apaches, if still around, might hit an isolated farmhouse, but they weren't likely to raid the town and suffer the losses that would involve. Bandits might rob the bank, but probably wouldn't try to level the town. Whereas in a Quail Valley type setting the local orcs could well raid town & aim to burn it down, with good prospect of success.  The fantasy village should really look more like an Iron Age settlement, not 1880s Arizona or 1930s rural England.

One notable exception would be Quantrill's raid on Lawrence, Kansas. I agree with your overall point which why, as far as I can remember, is why almost every village or town in hostile lands would either be fortified or have some other means of defense. Of course one defense is fear -fear of swift and bloody retribution. Which is why many strongholds, from the Norman motte and bailey forts to the palisade forts used by the U.S. cavalry 800 years later, were built in the first place: To give mounted troops a safe place to stay when they're not riding around smiting those scurvy Saxons/dirty Injuns.

Quote from: Daztur;787723Yeah you can justify pretty much any set of demographics with a bit of thought and magic. What I don't like is when they just have a set of strange demographics without any thought as to why they're that way.

It's kind of like Medieval settings without any sexism. No problem at all with setting having that but I'd like a little bit of thought as to the reasons why patriarchy was so common in the real world and the logic as to why those reasons don't apply to the setting (magic reducing maternal mortality, birth control herbs, etc. etc.).

I worry about that as much as I worry that so many other things in a typical FRPG setting are anachronistic. In AD&D the average human male is assumed to be six feet tall. That seems out of whack but in a world where humans do all kinds of things no one can do in real life, it's nothing to fuss over.

Quote from: jibbajibba;787912But he sexual dimorphism in humans isn't just about size. Women have lower muscle mass and muscle density than men. That is just a thing its not dependent on any setting or background its just a thing.
Now the D&D rules in particular only differentiate up to the top 0.5% of the population so is it possible that the top 0.01 or one in 10,000 women is physically stronger than the top 0.5% of men well if you look at numbers ..
The 75KG female snatch WR is 131 KG  the men's 75KG male snatch is 175 KG the lightest male category is 56 KG and the record there is 137KG.
So big strong women are roughly as strong as small (56 KG s tiny...) strong men.
Now I have no issues with female warriors, I prefer them to use technique over brute strength and the ability to use finesse in 5e might enable that. I just want to make sure that strong female warriors look more like Brienne than Brittany.

How many real-life people fight dragons or orcs?

Maybe FRPG people are just different.

Quote from: Elfdart;788082How many real-life people fight dragons or orcs?

Maybe FRPG people are just different.

I tend to run it that the adventurers are different, but that there is still a baseline of normal humanity where (eg) men are stronger than women, and society somewhat resembles the real world. Trying to  extrapolate the implications of actual significant changes to human nature creates a more science-fictional feel.

Quote from: Daztur;787941Sounds really interesting. Makes me wish I'd learned more of that kind of nuts and bolts stuff in my college Russian history class (Kievan Rus to 19th century) but never really got a good sense of what the economic and social structure of rural Medieval Russia was like but sounds very D&D-worthy. I'd assume there would be strong river-based trade routes?

Mmmm ... yes and no.  Russia is blessed by a lot of rivers.  Most of those rivers flow in inconvenient directions for trade (the Arctic Ocean being less than helpful in this regard), although almost all of Russia's meaningful cities in the medieval period were situated in the Volga, Don and Dnieper watersheds.

Quote from: Elfdart;788080But if they can't, those fields won't be tilled, those meadows won't be grazed, and so on. There won't be any surplus of food or other goods to support the towns and cities because there won't be any produce at all.

Beyond that, the damage raiders can do -- and often did -- goes farther than that.  Chop down the orchards of a fruit-growing town, and it won't recover for a generation.  Wreck the irrigation canals, and it might be the work of years to rebuild -- presuming the surviving peasantry possess engineering skills.

Quote from: Elfdart;788080Who gives a shit? Real-world history and geography are irrelevant to the kind of fantasy I like to play.

There, fixed that for you.  I'm sure you weren't out to suggest that the style of fantasy you prefer is the only one conceivable, and that you're well aware of the many folks out there who prefer verisimilitude to I-don't-give-a-shit.

Quote from: Bren;785222FYI: Gutenberg doesn't like your link.

Much as I love the words of JRR Tolkien, I blame him for the tendency for Fantasy maps, in contrast to real world maps, to have a large scale and scope with vast areas of nothing.

I have never assumed a game or setting map shows everything that is there. I assumed this to be the case with Middle Earth as well (though I am not someone who has gotten deep into Tolkien beyond reading LotR and the Hobbit). When I run a published setting I am always adding settlements and other features to the map, and just take those that are visible as note able for some reason or another. Just like if I have a typical map of the Roman Empire in a history book, it it will show a handful of important cities or those relevant to the topic. A map of the empire with every city gets cluttered very quickly.

Quote from: Elfdart;788080You think maybe that's why it's called fantasy?


Who gives a shit? Real-world history and geography are irrelevant to fantasy. They can add a nice touch here and there, but they don't really matter all that much.

Then why not throw in cell phones, motorcycles, and predator drones to fantasy worlds? I mean, anything goes in fantasy, right?

Fact is, people have varying degrees of interest in verisimilitude in their fantasy RPGs (and in fantasy fiction). Some want medieval Europe with a dash of magic throw in. Some want Eberron. Hand-waving away all concerns about demographics, technology, and social models is just a lazy way to discount legitimate preferences.  

I've thrown down fantasy fiction is contempt when it showed too modern of an outlook (or rather, when the worlds that were dramatically different from our own were full of people with modern outlooks). To me, behavior flows from setting. In historical fiction, fantasy games - all imaginary worlds. I can no more overlook blatant inconsistencies than I could shrug off Legolas calling Gimli a douchebag and playing Angry Birds on his iPhone during a lull in the battle of Helm's Deep. It spoils any sense of immersion in a plausible world.

Quote from: Haffrung;788153Fact is, people have varying degrees of interest in verisimilitude in their fantasy RPGs (and in fantasy fiction). Some want medieval Europe with a dash of magic throw in. Some want Eberron. Hand-waving away all concerns about demographics, technology, and social models is just a lazy way to discount legitimate preferences.

Heh, I even have a sticky response, which given that there's some moron every day on some gaming forum somewhere who pulls the riff is only sensible:

QuoteI think the real question here is, "why do you consider the mechanics nonsense"? We're talking an imaginary dwarf, with 100 imaginary hit points, falling off an imaginary cliff, taking damage that is, also, imaginary.  If the designer finds it desirable that a character could fall off a cliff and survive, it will be so. If not, for whatever reason, it will not be. (The first mention of "but it's not REALISTIC!" gets you kicked. This is all *imaginary*, remember?)

If I had a dime for every time I've heard this over the last couple decades, I could pay all the bills this month.

Well, yes, it's all imaginary.  So why use cliffs, or indeed any recognizable terrain at all?  Why not adventure in big fluffy masses of amorphia?  Or just teleport to anywhere we want to go, and imagine it to be anything convenient to us?

Why should we use perfectly recognizable medieval weaponry?  It's imaginary, isn't it?  Don't limit yourself, hit the enemy with your kerfluffmezoz or your wheezimithuzit!

And since it doesn't have to make sense, we don't need to have these pesky movement rules, besides which we all want to be Matrixy and John Woo-esque, don't we?  Tell your DM that you're running through the air and phasing right through every intervening tree and foe to hit the Big Bad with your wheezimithuzit, and better yet you're doing it before he cut down your friend, because since it's all imaginary we don't have to use linear time either.

No, I don't care that I rolled a "miss."  Skill progression is one of those boring realism constructs, and I don't believe in it.  Let's just imagine that I hit the Big Bad whenever I need to, and for twenty-five hundred d8 of damage, too.  Encumbrance is boringly realistic too, so I’m ignoring it, and I’d rather imagine that my snazzy quilted vest protected me like the glacis armor on a T-72, please.

Alright, show of hands.  Why don’t we play our RPGs that way?

It’s called suspension of disbelief. We put our games into recognizable settings that mimic real life.  We use swords in fantasy games because we have the expectation that such milieus use swords, and those swords do the relative damage of a sword instead of the damage of a 155mm mortar shell because that is our expectation too.  Our fantasy characters wear tunics and cloaks, live in walled cities or sacred groves, and scale ramparts where the force of gravity pulls us downward, not pushes us up.  We have an expectation of how fast we can walk, how far we can ride, and how long we can sail.  All these expectations are founded in reality.

To the degree we ignore these things, just because, we lose touch with suspension of disbelief.  If the ten-foot-tall Big Bad hits a peon with his greatsword, we expect the peon to be in a world of hurt; we don't expect the sword to bounce off.  If the party wizard shoots a fireball at the orcs' wooden stockade, we expect that it might catch fire; we don’t expect the wall to grow flowers instead.  

And if an armored dwarf takes a gainer off of a hundred foot sheer drop, we expect to find a soggy mass at the base of the cliff.  We sure as hell don't expect a dwarf boinging around like a rubber ball, happily warbling, "Bumbles bounce!"

That there are a great many gamers who want their rule systems to reflect reality, rather than ignore it -- so that we find ourselves constantly sidetracked as to issues of WHY suchandsuch doesn't make sense, or because the GM has to explain how come the dwarf isn't a soggy mass -- ought be a surprise to no one.  Why is it such a one to you?[/COLOR]

Hear hear, Ravenswing!!!!

TOTALLY amen amen amen.

I've had similar comments regarding parallel discussions in MMOs, too.

'Realistic' is the improper term to worry about.
The term to work with in pairing Mechanics and Verisimilitude and the ability to suspend belief is 'Logical'.

As in, 'internal logic', conscious and unconscious.
"Cognitive psychology virtually depends on the brain's unconsious and autonomic attempt to create systems of logic and expectation.", from this discussion a few years ago.


In trying to create a world for the character's to grow and exist in, we more easily feel and sense through the character if said world is logical to us.