Why Have Gender Roles in Medieval-Authentic Play? Because it Makes it BETTER!

I ran my original Dark Albion with a number of women players. If I'd run it utterly straight to the Medieval gender norms, it could have been difficult for them to enjoy play.  On the other hand, if I'd run it as though the medieval society had gender-equality in the 21st century North American sense, the whole thing would have been somewhat pointless.

So I went with the same guidelines I point out in Lion & Dragon in the section on gender. The same ones I outlined in yesterday's blog. There's no class restrictions for women characters, but some classes provide a more egalitarian opportunity than others.

Now, the rebuttal to this has been voiced, and not only by vicious ill-motivated swine on rpgnet. That is, "you can have a setting with magic that really works and with monsters, but somehow having gender equality would be a bridge too far"!

That sounds like a credible argument at first glance, but it totally falls apart upon consideration. The reason for magic to really work, and for there to be monsters that are real, in the Lion & Dragon setting is that it fits the medieval paradigm. I didn't use the vancian magic system, the monsters aren't inventions drawn out of the Monster Manual circa 1978. It's magic the way that people in the middle ages actually believed magic to work; it's monsters built on medieval folklore about how people really thought monsters were like.

Is it 'unfair' that women have some challenges in a medieval setting that might sometimes come up in play (modified to the extent that the GM would want them to)?  Why should it be? Why shouldn't it be a part of the emulation, an experience that produces immersion in the character? Why would you remove something like this, which is full of potential for character development?

Let's look at another aspect of Lion & Dragon, one that is quite a bit more relevant to the situation than monsters:  Social Class.

In mainstream D&D, contrary to the shrieking of certain Left-wing nonsense-peddlers, there has never really been an issue with female characters. Sure, individual gaming groups might have problems with it, but the game itself?  There was no world in the history of D&D where women characters experienced challenges based on prejudice: not in Greyhawk, not in Forgotten Realms, not even in Dark Sun (to say nothing of a setting like Eberron)! They've all had female adventurers, female NPCs of great power, and societies that were utterly egalitarian.  And there's nothing wrong with that, because that's just how those settings are.

Likewise, there was never, in any of those settings, any real concept of Social Class distinctions.  Sure, Greyhawk or the FR might have peasants, and lords, but it doesn't really mean anything.  NPCs who were peasant-born become great and mighty heroes or lords or run cities or whatever.  All that "peasant" means in those settings (in what is no doubt a tribute to the American paradigm of thinking) is people who are poor and work on farms; and Lords are just dudes with money or "sir" or "lady" before their names or fancier clothes.  But there's no special challenge to being a peasant on Faerun or Krynn, your peasant PC can get to hobnob with the King and tell him off just the same as if your character was an Earl.

In Lion & Dragon, it doesn't work that way. There are very strongly-defined social class distinctions. There's weapons and armor you don't get to go around in if you're not a Knight. Peasants can be literally imprisoned and sentenced to lashings for telling off a Lord. Social Class distinction should, if you're playing the game straight, be something that very strongly defines every Player Character in a Lion & Dragon campaign (or in any campaign set in Dark Albion).

You could make the same complaints, though I guess from a Marxist rather than Feminist angle, about this as you could about gender.  Why should peasants not get to feel equal to the sons of Earls in the setting?!

The answer is the same: why the fuck wouldn't you want that? It's a huge feature of the world. It's therefore a huge opportunity for you, as the player, to work with that in developing your character. It provides specific elements of your character's background, and of how they have to navigate through the world in play, that makes the game more immersive and interesting for you. It's a feature, not a bug.

Because of course, you could just have a game where peasants were treated just the same as and could just pal around with (or lecture) the high-born as if they were the same. Ignore for a second that in that case, you might as well just be playing in the Forgotten Realms, and that strips away a great deal of what makes this game unique. Besides that, it makes things a lot more BORING.  You've probably done that already in your fantasy RPG experiences, many, many times.

But having a party where some PCs have to be deferential to others, where some characters can talk in court and others  can't, while some can get honest answers out of peasants or the local poor in a town that their supposed 'betters' never could, where player characters will walk in different worlds, and sometimes have to overcome some of the social norms of the greater reality of the setting, makes for some kick-ass roleplaying.

Yes, it would suck if someone who was a BAD GM just let people have characters that they would then put into impossibly limiting situations that just ruined all their fun. But that's a BAD GMing problem, and not a problem of the concept itself.  And to me, it would be equally bad if you were sold on the idea of playing a "Medieval-Authentic" game that sells itself with the motto "you only THOUGHT you'd played Medieval Fantasy... until now", only to find that their social class OR gender have no significant effect on the game because everyone in the world is running around all hip like it was 2017 Seattle and not 15th century England.

If you're playing a female character, and her story is "I had no challenges at all by being a woman, no one had any issue with it, and now I'm x", that seems a lot less interesting than creating a character in this world where you (with some help from the GM) have to craft a tale of how a peasant-background girl grew up to become a skilled warrior, or sorceress, or what it means for her to be a gypsy Cymri both within her own people as well as among the normies who lack the same respect her people have for women with The Gift. To explain what that background meant in terms of family, in terms of class, in terms of society, and in terms of their own personal motivations.

This is in no way different than how any male character has to explain themselves, in the context of being an adventurer in a Medieval-Authentic world. How a thief from the snickleway-slums of York would have to explain how they ended up working for the Clerical Order as an inquistor, or how a son of a knightly family would have to explain what it meant that he didn't follow in the footsteps of his family as a soldier and instead studied the occult arts in a Collegium, or how a Scotsman would have to tell the story of what he's doing away from his clan and people living in Albion.

The reason why you want to have Medieval-Authentic social roles (including gender roles) when playing in Lion & Dragon is precisely because these things matter in play. And if approached the right way they make your character and your campaign much MORE interesting for everyone, rather than less.

Now, you'll have to excuse me, in a little bit I'm about to start my new Lion & Dragon campaign.

RPGPundit

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