>“Can I kill the baby kobolds?”When people are asked to name a historical point that D&D most closely represents, they’ll usually say something like “The Middle Ages”, or perhaps a date between 1000 AD and 1500 in Europe. Truth be told, to find a historical period which has a social setup anything like D&D, you’re going to have to go back. Way back. D&D represents a period in history that is most closely identifiable with the Iron Age: the landscape is dotted with tribes and aspiring empires, the wilderness is largely unexplored, and powerful individuals and small groups can take over an area without having a big geopolitical hubbub about it. The source material for the social setting of D&D is not Hans Christian Andersen, it’s Homer’s The Iliad and Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. In the backdrop of early historical empire building, crimes that modern humans shake their heads at the barbarity of are common place – even among the heroes. D&D at its core is about breaking into other peoples’ homes, possibly killing the residents, and taking their stuff home with you in a sack. And in the context of the period, that is acceptable behavior for a hero.
>Living With Yourself After a RaidThe goblins have gone and conducted a raid on your village in full force. They rode in, took a bunch of the sheep, killed some of the people, set fire to some of the cottages, and rode away again with Santa Sacks filled with this year’s crop. And they laughed because they thought it was funny. And now that your elder brother has been slain you want to dedicate yourself to the eradication of the Goblin Menace and begin the training necessary to become a Ranger so that you can empty the goblin village from the other side of the valley once and for all.Par for the course D&D, right? Wrong! Killing all the goblins isn’t just an Evil act, it’s unthinkable to most D&D inhabitants. This is the Classical Era, and actually sowing the fields of Carthage with salt is an atrocity of such magnitude that people will speak of it for thousands of years. In the D&D world, goblins raid human settlements with raiding parties, humans raid goblin settlements with “adventuring parties”, and like the cattle raiding culture of Scotland, it’s simply accepted by all participants as a fact of life. When your city is raided by other groups of humanoids, it’s a bad thing for your city. Orcs may kidnap some of your relatives and use them as slaves (or food), and many of your fellow villagers may lose their lives defending lives and property important to them. But that’s part of life in the age, and people just sort of expect that sort of thing.
>Razing Hell: When Genocide is the AnswerSometimes in history there would come a great villain who just didn’t get with the program. The Classical example is the Assyrians. Those bastards went around from city to city stacking heads in piles and levying 100% taxation and such to conquered foes. They became. . . unpopular, and eventually were destroyed as a people. That’s the law of the jungle as far back as there are any records: if a group pushes things too far the rules of mercy and raiding simply stop applying. Goblins, orcs, sahuagin. . . these guys generally aren’t going to cross that line. But if they do, it’s OK for the gloves to come off. In fact, if some group of orcs decides to kill everyone in your village while you’re out hunting so that you come home to find that you are the last survivor, other humanoids (even other Evil humanoids like gnolls) will sign up to exterminate the tribe that has crossed the line.Cultural relativism goes pretty far in D&D. Acceptable cultural practices include some pretty over-the-top practices such as slavery, cannibalism, and human sacrifice. But genocide is still right out. That being said, some creatures simply haven’t gotten with the program, and they are kill-on-sight anywhere in the civilized world or in the tribes of savage humanoids. Mindflayers, Kuo-Toans, and [Monster] simply do not play the same game that everyone else is playing, mostly because their culture simply does not understand other races as having value. And that means that even other Evil races want to exterminate those peoples as a public service. Like the Assyrians, they’ve simply pushed their luck too far, and the local hobgoblin king will let you marry his daughter if you help wipe them out of an area.
Solitary intelligent monsters often get into the same boat as the Kuo-Toans. Since the Roper really has no society (and possibly the most obscure language in Core D&D), it’s very difficult for it to understand the possible ramifications of offending pan-humanoid society. So now they’ve done it, and they really haven’t noticed the fallout they are receiving from that decision. Ropers pretty much attack anything they see, and now everyone that sees a roper attacks them. In the D&D worlds, ropers are on the brink of extinction and it probably never even occurs to them that their heavy tendrilled dealings with the other races have pushed them to this state.
>Temporal Authority in D&D“Kill the dragon, marry the princess, rule the kingdom.”D&D is set in an essentially Iron Age setting. If your group (or even you personally) are known to be hardcore enough, you actually do rule the lands extending as far as you can reach. This doesn’t mean that you don’t need a bureaucracy, because there’s still relatively little that you can do on your own. That administrative staff is necessary, it’s there to tell people what you want them to do, and to tell you when they aren’t doing it. In fairy tales, as well as D&D, the guy (or girl) who saves the kingdom by slaying the big monster marries the child of the local king. This is usually because the current king is himself a powerful dude with a PC class himself. His children may be aristocrats, and by marrying them off to a powerful adventurer who may well be able to take his kingdom by force, he’s preserved his own position and kept his family from being set on fire. Nominally in this situation the crown is still in the previous king’s family and moving to the next generation normally. You may even get a title like “Prince Consort” or something – but everyone knows that you are running the show because you can slay dragons. No one is going to say it, but the princess’ only real job in this scenario is to. . . keep you happy. And she’s not even the only one that has that job. Surprisingly, the previous king is actually fine with that, because if his daughter has Aristocrat levels, that really is the best he can expect for her.
Sumer never ends here, huh?
There is no single D&D setting and a game can be set in any time period.
>>96483091This is assuming D&Default of Greyhawk, as it was written in 3.5
>>96482968LMAO
>>96482840In aesthetics, D&D is medieval, its tech base is actually closer to the height of pre-industrial technology (less guns), and its geopolitics are closer to the Dark Ages or even earlier.
>>96483107>This is assuming D&Default of Greyhawk, as it was written in 3.5OSRtards are so annoying. Nobody cares, boomer.
>>96483091There is a lot of text in the rules that say things about the setting, and most of what OP has posted applies from AD&D 1e to 4e with only mild variance in intensity of any given point.>>96483107I prefer to describe it as the implicit setting of pseudo-Greyhawk; many books introduce setting material wholly unmoored from it nor ever well reconciled, though attempting to do so could go interesting places.>>96483190While we're well past the point 3e is as old as the TSR editions were when OSR took off, they remain separate forks of the D&D community.
>>96483258>While we're well past the point 3e is as old as the TSR editions were when OSR took offWhen they made 3.5 they didn't even know what roleplaying actually is, and thought the game should just be like their boomer wargames. Your generation almost ruined RPGs by trying to keep them the same forever and can't let go of your nostalgia. Nobody even played 3.5 like that anyway. Go back to /osrg/.
>>96483190>>96483294really bad bait
>>96482840Pretty sure Gallic Wars era Roman is out of the iron age
>>96482968This joke is too good for this board please leave
>>96482840Your knowledge of history is even worse than your knowledge of D&D. consider suicide.
>>96483294>When they made 3.5 they didn't even know what roleplaying actually is, and thought the game should just be like their boomer wargames....Do tell what "boomer wargame" has anything like the object destruction and terrain damage rules.>Your generation almost ruined RPGs by trying to keep them the same forever and can't let go of your nostalgia."My generation" is Essentials and first-wave 5e players, with me sent down a rabbit-hole to 3.5 by a webcomic my dad was reading in 2013.>Nobody even played 3.5 like that anyway.If by "like that" you mean the hexcrawl-into-kingdom-building/conquering that ACKS integrates better than BECMI, that's... Why I call them separate forks. But such remains signaled by the designers in supplements like Stronghold Builder's Guidebook or Powers of Faerun.
>>96482848Theres a lot wrong with everything you said but the assyrian part is especially bad. The second achemenid empire under cyrus and darius did great, and it was even well loved by its subjects under xerxes for its liberal policies for client peoples. It collapsed because of a succession crisis where like nine heirs decided to have an asassination free-for-all.
>>96483484He's saying the Assyrians were particularly bad and thus collapsed the moment their subjects saw a chance. The fact that Cyrus was good and thus did not see his empire collapse the moment his subjects saw a chance doesn't disprove that.
>>96483509He had a huge empire with regional government delegated to satrapies. Its a good system and his subjects were loyal enough to hang around for 200 years AND to send like 500k dudes to greece for them. The satraps bailed when the monarchs went retarded because thats obviously what you do in that situation, but the same thing happened to macedon when alexander died. Its not some virtuous uprising and they were actually kinder to conquered peoples than their contempories. Its purely that if you have your own army and the backstabbing retard doesnt then you just tell him hes not your boss anymore
>>96483622... what? Do you think assyria was in india or something?
>no one responding to OP's chatGPT thesiskek
dandwiki<dot>com/wiki/Dungeonomicon_(3.5e_Sourcebook)is the source
>>96483720Ain't chatgpt, it's something I read in an old PDF that I copied down.
>>96483755it's so poorly written wtf
