Quote from: SHARK on February 27, 2024, 10:22:08 AM
*Laughing* That scene you describe in a modern D&D module, where there is some single mommy with kids living on a farm aall alone. *Rolls eyes* How stupid and modernized BS is that? Amazing. Mind boggling to me, for sure.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

   A similar encounter can be found in an adventure from 34 years ago--RA1 Feast of Goblyns--but with two key differences:

  1. The woman's only been widowed for two weeks;
  2. The family at least has a blunderbuss.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on February 27, 2024, 05:40:06 PM

Quote from: SHARK on February 27, 2024, 10:22:08 AM
*Laughing* That scene you describe in a modern D&D module, where there is some single mommy with kids living on a farm aall alone. *Rolls eyes* How stupid and modernized BS is that? Amazing. Mind boggling to me, for sure.

   A similar encounter can be found in an adventure from 34 years ago--RA1 Feast of Goblyns--but with two key differences:

  1. The woman's only been widowed for two weeks;
  2. The family at least has a blunderbuss.

In 1940s and 1950s westerns, the scrappy widow who keeps working the ranch by herself is a very common trope. And she would often have been keeping the ranch for years, not just two weeks. It shows her pluck and determination.

Now, I agree it's not authentically medieval - but D&D has always been more about Old West tropes than accurately medieval, like having stocked general stores, 1800s-style taverns, and professional army garrisons. Railing at 1940s westerns for being too woke seems like looking to be offended.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 27, 2024, 05:26:46 PM

Quote from: zircher on February 27, 2024, 12:51:41 PM
I think a woman working on the farm without a protector is fine, as long as you realize she's probably a werewolf.  :-)

You may bring it up half-seriously, but this was generally my solution for handling female example PCs for my game. They all had something supernatural about them that let them be a viable adventurer; a human blessed with powerful elemental magic, an elven archer, an exiled psychopomp, a female-shaped robot, mystics of demonic ancestry, and a couple of mutants.

By contrast for men you had a dwarven inventor, a human roguish captain, a human knight, three types of beastman (a priest, an inventor, and a warrior), a winged elven knight, a gnomish trickster, an ice dragon, a fire giant, two male-shaped robots, a male warrior of demonic ancestry and a mutant warrior.

Given the range of these characters, it seems like Red Sonja as a character would fit in fine. It's not realistic, but most fantasy games break further from realism all the time. I don't think a woman warrior like Red Sonja or Atalanta is particularly woke.

Quote from: jhkim on February 27, 2024, 06:17:05 PMIn 1940s and 1950s westerns, the scrappy widow who keeps working the ranch by herself is a very common trope. And she would often have been keeping the ranch for years, not just two weeks. It shows her pluck and determination.

Now, I agree it's not authentically medieval - but D&D has always been more about Old West tropes than accurately medieval, like having stocked general stores, 1800s-style taverns, and professional army garrisons. Railing at 1940s westerns for being too woke seems like looking to be offended.

And she's either somewhere so remote that she hasn't been endangered till the cattle/rail baron came to steal her land, or is recently widowed and struggling. And in every case she needs a dangerous good man to wander by, take pity on her situation, and make the area safe for her again.

So don't be disingenuous.

Quote from: jhkim on February 27, 2024, 06:17:05 PM
In 1940s and 1950s westerns, the scrappy widow who keeps working the ranch by herself is a very common trope. And she would often have been keeping the ranch for years, not just two weeks. It shows her pluck and determination.

I had this exact same thought. The historicity of it is doubtful, but the character is so common in cowboy fiction as to be a stereotype. In reality, it seems to be the case that a land-owning widow would be under a lot of pressure to remarry and the majority of them probably did.

However, between wars, bandits, feuds, Indians, and extremely dangerous jobs, you have to assume there would have been a lot of widows on the American frontier. Add to that the fact that adultery and prostitution were much more common than they are now, and there were probably a lot of fatherless children, too. The reason the fiction is inaccurate isn't that these people didn't exist, so much as that the outcomes for them were probably a lot worse than the stories want to show.

Quote from: Chris24601 on February 27, 2024, 05:26:46 PM

Quote from: zircher on February 27, 2024, 12:51:41 PM
I think a woman working on the farm without a protector is fine, as long as you realize she's probably a werewolf.  :-)

You may bring it up half-seriously, but this was generally my solution for handling female example PCs for my game. They all had something supernatural about them that let them be a viable adventurer; a human blessed with powerful elemental magic, an elven archer, an exiled psychopomp, a female-shaped robot, mystics of demonic ancestry, and a couple of mutants.

I'm happy enough to handwave female PCs in any setting on the grounds that adventurers are by definition exceptional people. As long as the setting acknowledges them as unusual I don't think it interferes with verisimilitude. In general, I think you have to step up the competence level of the average person to make D&D make sense at all. D&D world is much more dangerous than the real one, and I prefer not to have a 3rd level character already be in the top 1% of personal power in the world.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on February 27, 2024, 05:40:06 PM

Quote from: SHARK on February 27, 2024, 10:22:08 AM
*Laughing* That scene you describe in a modern D&D module, where there is some single mommy with kids living on a farm aall alone. *Rolls eyes* How stupid and modernized BS is that? Amazing. Mind boggling to me, for sure.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

   A similar encounter can be found in an adventure from 34 years ago--RA1 Feast of Goblyns--but with two key differences:

  1. The woman's only been widowed for two weeks;
  2. The family at least has a blunderbuss.

Feast of Goblyns is one of the best adventures for the Ravenloft line. Just a minor correction. It is a little darker than her being a widow. She wasn't widowed. Her husband was just inured and recovering. But her son was killed by a wolfwere and every night the wolf were and his wolves, who wants to take over their farm, torments them. The present situation is she has to protect the homestead herself while her husband heals. So it is meant as an encounter that seems like a safe harbor but actually turns into a pretty cool situation each night. Also the wolf were is named Jacque, which always amused me for some reason

One of the cool things about this part of the adventure is it is just kind of thrown in there as a possible encounter on the road. It is one of those modules that is brimming with content

The other cool thing about this adventure is the wolfewere had wolf pups at his homestead, so the players can get some wolf pups out of the encounter. And the homestead maps are pretty cool too

And the blunderbuss was always kind of a cool detail I thought (I feel like Ravenloft slowly crept up in terms of tech and time period as the line went on----until they started clarifying individual tech levels of each domain).

On this topic, I don't have any issue with not being overly historical in a fantasy setting. Even in a historical setting, there is plenty of genre precedent for not having all the social norms in place. I also think it is fine to have a setting that reflects the real social norms of the time. I think what irks me a bit about some of the stuff people do these days is it is simply too modern in character. That can work for certain things (it is an odd example but I recall Hercules and the show Xena having very modern ways of speaking, which initially irritated me, but I realized it worked for what they were doing; A Knights Tale would be another example, and Wuxia films set in historical periods where martial heroes are exceptions to the historical norms around them). But if a writer or designer can't imagine a world outside the one they live in for a moment that is when I have more of an issue (where the setting has to reflect all of their beliefs, all of their values and all of their cultural assumptions).

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on February 28, 2024, 08:15:08 AM

Feast of Goblyns is one of the best adventures for the Ravenloft line. Just a minor correction. It is a little darker than her being a widow. She wasn't widowed. Her husband was just inured and recovering.

  Thanks; I'd reviewed the text, but missed that her husband survived the initial attack.

Quote from: ForgottenF on February 25, 2024, 10:23:42 PM
It's funny. It seems I just as often come up against people running too far in the opposite direction. "It's the dark ages, so everyone is literally covered in shit and the world exists in a constant state of rape and pillage." "It's the 20s, so everyone is racist and women can't have jobs." "It's ancient times, so every NPC will try to enslave you."

I've seen this both from right-leaning people overcorrecting and from lefties terrified of playing in historical settings because they assume it's going to be like that. One of the things I always try and bring across in any setting I GM is that no matter what the tech level or social structure is, people are still people. Even a medieval peasant is likely to be a reasonably intelligent person who knows his trade, takes pride in his appearance, loves his wife, and would prefer not to find himself in a fight to the death.

I think this is more a symptom of a vast ignorance.  Sometimes a vast, willful ignorance.  There are more and more people that have never even been outside an urban setting in any meaningful way, so that their concepts of what it is like to live in one even today are already heavily skewed, let alone an earlier period.  They've also never studied what pre-industrial or even pre-modern means, where everyone was concerned about famine, protection, shelter, etc.  (Including many that think they have, when they haven't.)  So it's simply too great a leap of imagination for them to extrapolate that, yes, when you live in a pre-industrial society, pretty much everyone works, and when they don't, they probably starve.  Yep, most of the people in such a society aren't idiots, and know that, so they set up their society with customs and rules that encourage people to "do the right thing" by their lights. 

What I try to do is strike a balance between fantasy (often with fairy tale and/or mythic influences) to make things strikingly different in one way, but also include enough of the grounded dark ages to make it impossible to completely ignore.  That includes farmers, fishermen, etc. being a big part of the population and the powers that be taking a dim view of interfering with their activities.  Of course, you can get a big boost with a more limited selection, too.  Sometimes I'll have food be relatively secure and available (due to subtle magic) but have clothes still be something that people struggle to maintain.  Everything being hand-crafted puts a limit on growth, that really emphasizes the pre-industrial mindset. 

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on February 28, 2024, 10:18:23 AM
On this topic, I don't have any issue with not being overly historical in a fantasy setting. Even in a historical setting, there is plenty of genre precedent for not having all the social norms in place. I also think it is fine to have a setting that reflects the real social norms of the time. I think what irks me a bit about some of the stuff people do these days is it is simply too modern in character. That can work for certain things (it is an odd example but I recall Hercules and the show Xena having very modern ways of speaking, which initially irritated me, but I realized it worked for what they were doing; A Knights Tale would be another example, and Wuxia films set in historical periods where martial heroes are exceptions to the historical norms around them). But if a writer or designer can't imagine a world outside the one they live in for a moment that is when I have more of an issue (where the setting has to reflect all of their beliefs, all of their values and all of their cultural assumptions).

It's even worse IMHO when they have tp preach to you about whatever IN SETTING while ignoring that such setting has always had heroines (Pulp for example). But they feel the need to inject reality into it:

"Don't you know the people of the 30s were a bunch of Istophobes and in reality beiong gay/transvestite was seen as normal!?"

For an example of people who hold such contradictory beliefs just peruse this thread.

I don't want realism in my RPGs thank you, I aim for verisimilitude.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on February 28, 2024, 10:34:17 AM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on February 28, 2024, 08:15:08 AM

Feast of Goblyns is one of the best adventures for the Ravenloft line. Just a minor correction. It is a little darker than her being a widow. She wasn't widowed. Her husband was just inured and recovering.

  Thanks; I'd reviewed the text, but missed that her husband survived the initial attack.

No problem. It is probably my favorite adventure module so I remember running that encounter quite a bit. It is also one of the encounters in the book that always stood out in my memory

Okay... this whole, "Women were never left alone or they'd be immediately enslaved and raped" thing is kind of a complete and total lie.

The Norseman who went Viking left their wives and children behind... alone... all the time.

Sailors during the age of exploration did the exact same thing.

Beyond the fact lower class men throughout all of history have a habit of being drafted in ridiculous numbers and being forced to go off to war. Some families came with these men, but lots of them stayed behind to tend the farms and live stock. History didn't suddenly become safe for a woman to be alone in 1800.

So it's not out of place to have a single woman running a farm with the kids. It was kind of very common depending on what was going on at the time in history there.

That is not how farms worked in the periods you are discussing.  Even when the "husband" was home, it wasn't a single family.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 28, 2024, 02:26:56 PM
That is not how farms worked in the periods you are discussing.  Even when the "husband" was home, it wasn't a single family.

Yes, Serf based farming involved multiple people...

But they didn't live in the same House. It was one family dwelling in a house, and a Nuclear family at that. The Nuclear family was the dominant form going back to the Thirteenth century in England alone. And not every single Farming Villages weas set up with Houses in neat little arrangements right next to one another surrounded by a wall. Walls were only in places where there was a danger of attack, typically on the borders and coastline. Interior Villages didn't have them.

And even then, the period after the Black Death saw the number of Free Peasants outnumber the amount of Serfs due to Labor demands...So again, stop with this nonsense that women could never be alone before 1800 without being attacked or enslaved. This is the same type of thinking that says everyone was covered in shit and there were no bright colors anywhere. Women would take journeys to marketplaces on their own. They would go on pilgrmages on their own.

Europe isn't the Middle East...Women weren't just chattel property.

Quote from: Orphan81 on February 28, 2024, 02:47:26 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on February 28, 2024, 02:26:56 PM
That is not how farms worked in the periods you are discussing.  Even when the "husband" was home, it wasn't a single family.

Yes, Serf based farming involved multiple people...

But they didn't live in the same House. It was one family dwelling in a house, and a Nuclear family at that. The Nuclear family was the dominant form going back to the Thirteenth century in England alone. And not every single Farming Villages weas set up with Houses in neat little arrangements right next to one another surrounded by a wall. Walls were only in places where there was a danger of attack, typically on the borders and coastline. Interior Villages didn't have them.

And even then, the period after the Black Death saw the number of Free Peasants outnumber the amount of Serfs due to Labor demands...So again, stop with this nonsense that women could never be alone before 1800 without being attacked or enslaved. This is the same type of thinking that says everyone was covered in shit and there were no bright colors anywhere. Women would take journeys to marketplaces on their own. They would go on pilgrmages on their own.

Europe isn't the Middle East...Women weren't just chattel property.

Both of your last two post are accurate.

That doesn't mean female warriors were EVER common, and where they were those cultures found out why it's a bad idea.

Other proffesions were also closed to women, some due to either plain prejudice or religious ideas, but mainly because of physical differences and the fact that nobody would hire a woman in her fertile years to do even the jobs they could, because they would get pregnant.

Once factory labor stoped being so dangerous only men and little children could do it women were allowed in... It tells you something about how we evolved that women are more precious to us as a species than children.

Oh, not at all suggesting female warriors. Not trying to say they had the same rights as men either.

But some of the previous posts here literally had a guy saying an untended woman would be raped or enslaved in 5 minutes...

That's not how life in medevil Europe was. Some areas were more dangerous than others but plenty of women were left alone for long stretches of time and didn't end up raped and enslaved.

Hell most people still believe you only lived to 33 because of life expectancy.. But that's taking all the child deaths into account. If you made it to 21 you could expect to live until your 60s at least.