Musings on my fascinations of War in RPGs
War came, creatures
As I’ve been converting my old gloopy articles onto blot.im I’ve realised a lot of them focus on the mechanics of warfare, but also mechanisms of culture that lead to warfare (political tension generator).
I think my fascination (obsession?) with warfare and also RPG rules that lead to and for conducting warfare, is a blend of D&D’s wargaming roots and real ancient history, which as far as I’m aware (I was born after 2000) was pretty much continuously at war for all of time ever.
I hate history and I love history. I did shit in History classes in school. I could never get into rome and the world wars and stuff like that.
Really what I love is understanding different ways of thinking, and how societies and cultures creature those ways of thinking across different historical eras. This is something I really want to get across in my own RPG (article about that coming soon).
One thing that really draws me to the OSR is a world that feels so distinctly different from my own. This world is not medieval, but a werid bastardized version of medieval born out of Wisconsin in the 1970s (I do love genuine medieval settings too). A world where communucation is slow and a 6 mile hex is a large area.
We live in such a strange time compared to all of history. As recently as the 1990s was just a completely different world, alien and unreachable to me.
Patterns of thinking and worlds, cultures and societies that lead to vastly different ways of thinking is a theme I want to explore in RPG work. I think RPGs as a medium are uniquely suited to this kind of exploration.
My tastes have changed recently. My sunday game takes place in the intensely feudal kingdom of Korianis. Playing this game has given me insight into feudalism, and though I will never get over the aesthetic of knights in plate armor, I don’t revere the society as a golden past time. There’s a little more context to it now.
How this idea interacts with the rest of the OSR, and whether the OSR is the best medium in which to explore ideas like this, is something I’m still thinking about. I know I like OSR games, is there something about them that helps me get into this mindset? A lack of mechanics to get in the way? Maybe they’re completely seperate and I just happen to engage in patterns of thinking and OSR games at the same time.
Funny that this idea of sociocultural patterns of should surface itself in D&D and war, since I don’t like wargaming at all :P