Way back in the twentieth century, in one of the first campaigns I ran after circulating a prospectus, one of the five players in my RuneQuest II campaign asked me, “You allow people to play the other sex?” I looked at him a little blankly and said, “Allow?” It had never occurred to me to prevent it. But he seems to have decided it was okay, as his own later campaigns had cross-gender play. In fact there was the one complex case where C and I were in his Caribbean pirates campaign, and she was playing the ship’s surgeon, who was a woman disguised as a man . . .
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It’s amusing to me that, despite being a very diverse group regarding gender, the campaign I’m currently running has ended up with 5 male characters and 1 female (and one player has recently rejoined the group and is now playing a non-binary fairy, but was previously a male lizardfolk).
Hmmm. I think I would have to say that my approach is not “I’m running D&D” but “I’m running a campaign set in the historical Middle Ages with magic.” Or whatever other historical era it is; I’ve run campaigns set in Gaul in the Roman Empire (mid-third century), the Near East during the First Crusade, England under Edward I, France under the Regency, Alta California in the 1810s, London in 1905, San Francisco in the 1920s, New Orleans in the 1930s, and Hong Kong in the 1990s. And my approach is largely to follow the laws, customs, and cultures of the era, so far as I know or can find out about them, partly because I enjoy cognitive estrangement and seek to offer it to my players (and at least in San Diego, a fair number of them chose it when they had other options). That’s not to say I would say “You can’t play X” (unless it were, say, an aboriginal Australian in Norway in 900 AD or something); but I would ask, “How does your character deal with the cultural assumptions of the era about the option you’ve chosen?”
One of my current San Diego players (the lesbian, as it happens) has told me more than once about a campaign she was in where another player insisted on playing an out gay man in a medieval setting. (The other player is a woman, by the way, and presumably straight or bi, as she’s in a long-term relationship with a man.) It seemed incongruous to both of us: not that the character was gay but that he wasn’t keeping it secret in an era when, as I understand the history, sodomy carried the death penalty.
This is not to say that your taste in entertainment is “wrong.” But it’s not at the center of gravity of what I enjoy. And seemingly my circle of players in San Diego included people who enjoyed imagining themselves living in other cultures with different customs.
Sure, your approach seems fine - it does what it says on the tin.
The ones I have a problem with is where it is, say, a D&D campaign where it is a horrible mash up of medieval Christian, ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Japanese manga and Native American sources, with monster of the week, then someone (sort of) retroactively decides that the Victorians’ view of how Medieval England works is going to be the Way Things Are. Usually so they can squash another player’s chance to play their character in a way that makes them happy. They don’t leap up and down with outrage if someone mentions they are eating potatoes and kiwi fruit in a Roman Empire setting, for instance. It is always social freedoms they try to squash. And they never point out historic curtailing of their own social freedom: “And of course as a man of the peasant class, I’d need my liege lord’s permission to leave the village to go on this adventure…”
It is not always the GM who does this. It is quite common for it to be a player doing it. It is a sort of “historical expert” version of rules lawyering. Except that often they are no expert! 
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I think there’s more to it than a binary choice of “you can’t be gay because it was banned” versus “you can be as modern about sexuality as you like”. (Most obviously, “is gay and has found a way of keeping it concealed”; in GURPS for example that’s a Secret (Possible Death) and a lever for interesting roleplaying.)
I think the historicity argument is a weak one if one’s including any level of fantasy. I mean, most reasonably comprehensive magic systems include some sort of pro/contraceptive effect, and the societal change that that alone would make for the people who had access to it is huge.
(ETA: healing and disease curing too!)
On the other hand if a GM wanted to say “in this mostly-historical campaign nobody cares about your sexual preference as long as you provide an heir” that really wouldn’t break very much at all.
(And I’ve certainly met people who say “you can’t play a black character because there weren’t any in mediaeval Europe”, which (a) is provably false and (b) seems a really weird bit of historicity to choose to defend when you’re adding orcs and dragons. Which loops back to Dr Bob’s point.)
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I have my doubts about that, because contraception is not purely a technological question.
Some time ago, I encountered a book on the Latin sexual vocabulary. It had seperate verbs for taking a penis into the mouth; inserting the penis into a mouth; taking the penis into a vagina or anus; inserting the penis into an anus; licking; and rubbing. All of those include, and most of them are, nonprocreative options. And given the recurrent theme of Roman legislation seeking to encourage more births, it appears that the Romans were using them. But when Christianity came into power, one of the things it did was to declare nonprocreative acts to be sins, and many of them to be crimes (as I understand it, that’s when sodomy acquired the death penalty). That was not a change in technology or in possible forms of sexual activity; it was a change in culture and law. And a culture that had knowledge of contraceptive spells, but disapproved of nonprocreative sex, could just as well ban them, and even put people to death for using them.
Then there was silphium, which was claimed to be an exceptionally safe emmenagogue, contraceptive, and abortifacient, but which was in such demand that it reportedly was harvested to extinction.
But this also raises the question of how we are to portray fantasy cultures. The great majority of them are envisioned as cultures of the past, likely because the past had widespread belief in the supernatural and you can have the actual supernatural present without having to change the belief system. But if they actually had magic that worked, likely enough it would have transformed them into what GURPS calls a high Tech Level; they might even look like the Order of Reason in the World of Darkness, calling their magic “mechanical men” and “pharmaceuticals” and “rays” and such. And yet most people don’t want to work out a society so novel.
There’s a spectrum of ways to do this, from just handwaving it to thinking of reasons that mages don’t change technology or society all that much—rare magical talent, laws against magic, only having the less powerful spells. In Worminghall, my working assumption was that the systematic, rational investigation of magic had only just gotten started and was only starting the transform the world. It’s been a while, but I believe I discussed this at some length in GURPS Fantasy.
Yup.
Some of the cultural things have huge effects on what people can do; some don’t. Insofar as I have a point here, it’s that saying “that combination wouldn’t happen” is rarely if ever useful.
So if a player wants to play an out gay man and the GM is happy to change their otherwise-mediaeval setting to accommodate that as a possibility - sure, why not? Cui malo?
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Which is where you get all sorts of interesting divergence from anything resembling ‘authentic’ medieval culture, as all the unintended consequences crash into each other.
Christianity bans contraceptive spells.
But it doesn’t ban healing spells.
So when you have 12 kids all of them survive instead of 8 of them dying.
So you can’t feed all 12 kids (peasant class) and/or their inheritance will be tiny and not worth having (land-owning class).
So people use the contraception anyway, because doing right by your kids trumps what some celibate bishop thinks.
And if the contraceptive spells are cheap everyone uses them, but if they are expensive only the wealthy merchants and aristocracy uses them.
Which provides another source of friction between the religious and secular powers of the day.
etc etc
I now want to read a fantasy novel with that logic at its core!
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Do you ever write fiction?
Yes but science fiction is more my thing than fantasy.
Well, in the particular case of Worminghall, I modeled the society as one where magic worked the way medieval people thought it worked, and was studied in universities that worked like those in the Middle Ages, embedded in a society like that of the Middle Ages. I didn’t want to rebuild the entire society from first principles. Discovering how the society would change as magic became common and reliable, from seeing what the PCs did, was fine. But I was offering my players the experience of being students at a medieval university.
And I had five people who signed up for that campaign. With two of them, it was their top choice, and it was tied for top choice with a third. If I didn’t present them with the experience of an actual Medieval setting (to the best of my ability) then I would have been injuring them by not delivering the campaign I promised.
What my prospectus said was In 1300 A.D., students from all over Europe come to western England to study magic. A group of such students will encounter the magical arts, town and gown conflicts, and each other. Play will emphasize student life and its rivalries, and the growth of magical knowledge, but will also include real dangers and mysteries. The setting will be authentically medieval, with medieval conflicts over nationality, faith, and social roles—but expressed through fantasy themes. We’ll probably try the experiment of an initial prologue where the characters are newly arrived students, followed by a fast forward to several years on. The default character will be young, male, and Catholic, but there will be room for exceptional people to overstep their normal social roles.
You may enjoy this campaign if you want some actual history in your historical fantasy; you love schools of magic as settings; you’re interested in your character’s personality and the social texture of their life; you’re willing to start small and build up your character.
I think the promises there are definite enough so that just throwing out actual Medieval beliefs would have been dubious.
On one hand, stipulated. But if I may play Muse’s advocate for a moment, a story set in a low-tech world can have science fictional aspects (for example, The Lord of the Rings can be read as science fiction based on comparative philology). And the premise you offer seems fairly clearly a science-fictional one; it’s kind of akin to the Jerry Pournelle story where some people on a low-tech world introduce low-tech ideas like the horse collar, and are then shocked to be charged with violating their world’s analog of the Prime Directive—because the horse collar was advanced tech!
(But I’m not seriously trying to get you to do it. Person must not do what person cannot.)
I often find this disjunction occurs when the GM wants the players to start isolated or injured or captured. If I recall the game correctly that is what the GM wanted. What I have learnt as a GM is to handle this narratively rather than through actual play, this signals to the players that they aren’t losing if they get captured, injured etc they are just being set up for a good adventure/ story. I allow the players to suggest some ideas of how they would cope with, for example being captured, and then resolve how successful they are with a few rolls. So the sneaky character may get to retain an item or two, the smart character may learn something useful, the persuasive character may gain some sympathy and the strong character some respect etc. Savage Worlds suggests this with their Quick Combat rules.
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Yeah, I’d do the same thing - start with the waking up in captivity, then maybe flash back to “a million zillion ninjas pop up and blowpipe-dart you into unconsciousness” once the players have internalised the situation.
I mostly don’t do this, but I have done something like it a couple of times:
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When I started off Under the Shadow, my campaign set in an alternate Middle-Earth where Sauron got the Ring back from Frodo, I told the players at the start of the first session that we were going to begin with them whereever they were at the catastrophe, and end when they were all together; that nothing that happened would kill them or make them unable to join the resistance; and that they would end up with whatever traits were on their initial character sheets.
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When I was co-running DC Realtime, set in a world where the DC superheroes began their careers in the years when they were first published and aged realistically after that, I set up a scenario about “superheroes as amnesic circus freaks.” This began with (the current) Batman and (the current) Green Lantern discovering (the current) Justice Society headquarters empty and having to reconstruct what had happen, after which they infiltrated the Midnight Circus and encountered the other PCs. I let the players decide how each PC was reacting to their role in the circus.
Both approaches seemed to work for somewhat different purposes. But I don’t think I’d use either habitually; this kind of thing seems more believable if it’s exceptional.
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