“To understand the Athenians properly, we must recognise that it isn’t just that they perceived the world differently, but that the world itself was different. […] That we tend to see [objective reality] as a ‘natural’ feature of the world and not as our own construct is inherently bound up with the development of colonial modernity in the West. On these grounds, histories of pre-modern cultures that make use of modern Western ontologies fail to capture something essential about the world as it was. Shackled to our own ways of understanding, we can only ever write what amounts to a shadowy prehistory of ourselves.”
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That's from Claire Hall's article "The Day A God Rode In" in The London Review of Books. If you want to read the whole thing, I'll wait.
So should a historical Spartan RPG include divine favour? I'm not talking about a fantasy setting here, but one where you’re trying to recreate Classical Greece as it really was. Clearly that was a world governed by the same physical laws as ours. The Greek gods don’t exist now and they didn’t then. The cosmos didn’t care whether this or that Greek hero lived or died.
Yet if the rules reflect that, the players will think like 21st century characters, not like Greeks of the 5th century BC. So maybe you need to include things like POW (in RuneQuest terms) to fix that. I'm thinking about it because at some point I mean to finish my Sparta roleplaying sourcebook Λ and Basic Roleplaying seems like a good set of rules to use for that.
But what do you think? Can we ever achieve objective reality in a historical setting? Or must we make game rules that fit the worldview of the people who lived there?
I think that anything we create has passed through the filters of our own perception, and that's unavoidable. But it's neither good nor bad. Is there such a thing as a Platonic "reality" that exists all on its own? That's the realm of philosophy, not science or history. Can we ever know a historical "reality?" Doubt it. Do we need to? Certainly not for a game, or a story.
ReplyDeleteClaire Hall would probably argue that she is making a historical point, that the world of the Ancient Greeks was not one of objective reality. Of course, what she's technically saying there is that the objective truth is that there is no objective truth, which is more a philosophical point than a historical one. My only interest is in what rules will encourage player-characters to make the same kind of choices that Ancient Greeks did.
DeleteI don't see how any of that helps at all really, either for history for role-playing games. The players and designers are not going to think like 5th century BC Greeks, no matter what you do; readers and authors are not going to think like late C17 NE Americans on the subject of witches, no matter what you do. You are never going to escape your own basic ontological beliefs. I think the trick in game terms is to try and make mechanics that reward 'historical behaviour' without requiring too much in the way of 'historical belief'; so calibrating the rewards for that behaviour so that they don't visibly impact on the game-world in unbelievable ways but do make it sub-optimal to not do them: small negative modifiers for not reading the entrails of the sacred geese before battle or what-not; being vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft by doing certain things, some immunity to such charges by doing other things (attending church, quoting relevant scripture in gameplay, whatever).
ReplyDeleteI find that if the rules reflect a certain kind of world, it's easy for me to rebuild my mindset within that. In real life I'm not religious, for example, but when playing in Legend (a version of the medieval European imaginary) I'm usually very devout. Of course, there it is just about small negative modifiers. The situation in The Iliad is very different -- there the gods trump any amount of courage or skill. It's getting players to commit to a worldview that's thoroughly steeped in religious belief that I need to do in Λ (admittedly set 700 years after The Iliad).
DeleteI encountered this (rather defeatist?) attitude in many reactions to my own preference for games based in cultures other than our own. The problem is that while 'the players and designers are not going to think like X' is true in totality (ie, they are never going to be fully authentic to the source culture), it's so absolutist that you might as well just give up on role-playing altogether. After all, you can never really think 100% like somebody other than yourself, so why bother?
DeleteMy take was to say, no, you can't think 100% like X, but you can TRY, and you can therefore think like X to some extent, and that's an interesting experience.
But obviously this is not easy, and therefore Dave is right to suggest that some assistance is needed. If the rules conjure up an 'objective reality' that feels at odds with the reality the diegetic characters believe in, then you're going to have cognitive dissonance. And so the rules need to feel supportive of what the characters believe in. The problem being that those Greeks believed in the gods even though they had no hard evidence for them. So baking the gods unequivocally into the rules -- making them unambiguously real and active -- is also a misrepresentation. So the ideal is a situation in which the players will feel that it is absolutely right to believe in the gods, and you'd be foolish not to... but without direct evidence in the rules. Back in Ancient Greek times (well, in the late 70s and early 80s) this idea was discussed in the Alarums & Excursions APA as the 'Dual System', but the fruit of the discussion was that it is phenomenally difficult to achieve in rules and really depends on the ref using particular appropriate mechanics with sufficient ambiguity. And I don't mean Zeus appearing in the sky and one of the players being able to explain it away as a bunch of aliens (thank you, that episode of Doctor Who).
My own attempt to achieve this sort of thing used an intermediary mechanic, bad joss. Rather than this being referee bribery/punishment points -- ie saying that the gods exist because the referee is behaving like one -- it was mainly a player-driven mechanic where players could choose to get some benefit at a cost of bad joss. So there was system-based justification for superstition, but on the other hand not believing in spirits wasn't necessarily irrational.
Jim Desborough suggests that the balance can be achieved by invoking a placebo-style explanation, so the player with the mindset of "colonial modernity" can explain it as avoiding the -1% to -5% penalty to confidence due to not sacrificing to the gods, whereas the player adopting the viewpoint of their (also colonial, but 5th century BC) characters can say it's down to the disfavour of the gods.
DeleteIt's curious that anyone would argue mechanics don't affect how PCs behave. You don't have to be the kind of obsessive "method roleplayer" than I am to notice that if there are rules that award XPs for overcoming opponents (say) then the way those are divided (all awarded to the decisive blow, split between the fighters, etc) will influence how the PCs behave. It's not a roleplaying point, that, it's just that human beings will game systems.
Oh, I remember that discussion from my university days, the continental vs the analytical tradition. Too bad the article is behind a paywall (I don't read LRB enough to defend a subscription) as it would be nice to reactivate that part of my brain. Your Spartan sourcebook is published but not finished? Also, I think Mythras would work even better than Chaosium's BRP, even though I'm curious why you think the latter will work?
ReplyDeleteAs always, an interesting topic!
The big difference is that BRP is under an open licence whereas I'd need permission to use Mythras. Also I'd have to spell it Mithras :-)
DeleteAchieving our own version of objective reality in a historical RPG is somewhat trivial if you define it as natural laws, and impossible if you try to state what actually happened and how people thought (as both modern and ancient sources will disagree). Evoking the feel of the setting (in the rules & game structure & background information presented) is the whole point of historical gaming, at least in my opinion. The trick is doing it succinctly, so that the non-specialist is still excited to play. Legend does a good job of this with evocative writing. Ars Magica did it well with a more matter-of-fact tone. I think the rules necessarily need to fit the generally held beliefs of the people in the setting, historical game or not. Otherwise you might as well be writing a gazetteer for basic D&D.
ReplyDeleteSagas of the Icelanders (which I praise with perhaps wearying regularity here) is a paragon of how to create mechanical rules that naturally guide the players to behave just like the characters in the source material. My players didn't need to read the classic sagas to see how to behave; it flowed naturally from the rules.
DeleteHi Dave! I agree the area around fantasy / history / gaming is a fascinating space to explore. As mentioned on the bird app, I wrote a bit about how fantasy may be a way help us understand the internal lives of historical peoples Warhound and the Worlds Pain. Of course as an academic, historical, exercise then it is fraught with (interesting) problems - even Plato doubts the veracity of Greek Myths that fall outside his own philosophy - so in creating a 'historical imaginary' (or 'ontological turn'?) of the ancient Greek - how literally should we take Greek Myths and embed them in the rules so they drive play? Or would it be better to map the different stances we have evidence for? Nontheless, if I were approaching a 16th C. fantasy, and used D&Ds mid-century statistics rather than building a system based on the Natural Philosophy of the period (Astrology / Alchemical and the 4 Humours as ways of describing being in the world) would seem a wasted opportunity to make the period come alive. Perhaps there are similar models in Spartan thought?
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of some of the attempts that I (https://www.tekumel.com/eoasw5_04.html) and Patrick Brady (https://www.tekumel.com/eoasw4_13.html) made to build a Tekumel roleplaying system around the actual metaphysics the Tsolyani themselves believe in. There was not a lot of demand for that -- few enough Tekumel players, and those there are mostly see it through the lens of 1950s science fantasy pulps -- but maybe I should be trying to do that with Jewelspider (nominally set in the early medieval imaginary).
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