I encountered this (rather defeatist?) attitude in many reactions to my own preference for games based in cultures other than our own. 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). You are never going to escape your own basic ontological beliefs. 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. I don't see how any of that helps at all really, either for history for role-playing games. 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.īut 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? So maybe you need to include things like POW (in RuneQuest terms) to fix that. Yet if the rules reflect that, the players will think like 21st century characters, not like Greeks of the 5th century BC. The cosmos didn’t care whether this or that Greek hero lived or died. The Greek gods don’t exist now and they didn’t then. Clearly that was a world governed by the same physical laws as ours. 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. If you want to read the whole thing, I'll wait. That's from Claire Hall's article "The Day A God Rode In" in The London Review of Books. Shackled to our own ways of understanding, we can only ever write what amounts to a shadowy prehistory of ourselves.” 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. That we tend to see 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. “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. I’m not coming with any answers this time, just a question.
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