"The Past is a Foreign Country, They Do Things Differently There"

[Max_Killjoy]

https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collec...itan-nobility/

"Second, Bertran is useful because his outlook – so directly stated – is so contrary to the modern viewpoint that it can serve nicely to shock us out of our complacency that people in the past thought about things exactly as we do now. In the words of L.P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” It is not enough to merely read histories of events and imagine people with our worldviews inhabiting them. While people in the past were not stupid, they did have different values and outlooks, shaped – as Bertran’s are – by their different life circumstances. Everyone’s worldview looks reasonable from the ground they stand on, but the valley dweller sees something rather different from the mountain man."

How much effort do you, or gamers you know, put into capturing the different values or attitudes of characters in a past or future or alternate setting, without the assumption that "people in the past were stupid"?

[Tvtyrant]

Most of my settings use the "invented morality along the way" trope. Slavery and mortal sacrifice was common with all races in the past, as well as free real estate style conquest. Different races and nations phase those practices out over time until those that still do are pariahs (Giants use mass slavery and eating sentients for instance.)

[prabe]

I think it varies. Some game settings need more such adjustment than others; some GMs call for more than others. I think the characters will have different attitudes in any fiction than they would in reality, but that's not quite the question you're asking.

As a GM, there are things in my setting/s that are ... different than the here-and-now, in not-nice ways, and some of them are intentionally set up as very difficult for PCs to change, unless they want to shape an entire campaign around doing so (mainly because I'm lazy and I don't want to re-write my setting materials). I've put in some work to indicate why the people in those places don't try to fix those things themselves. Maybe that's closer to the answer you're looking for--I put in a lot of thought about such things as a GM, less as a player (though some of that is because as a player I'm either running through published adventures or bad homebrew, neither of which is likely to hold up under that kind of scrutiny).

[Quertus]

How much effort do you, or gamers you know, put into capturing the different values or attitudes of characters in a past or future or alternate setting, without the assumption that "people in the past were stupid"?

Longer post deleted, but… meh. Ultimately, I find Bertran's "foreign" perspective familiar, and almost trivial to roleplay compared with the intricacies of human psychology.

Also, "*people* are stupid" seems more apt for my starting position - it's just a matter of degrees, of more, less, or equally stupid.

[Zarrgon]

How much effort do you, or gamers you know, put into capturing the different values or attitudes of characters in a past or future or alternate setting, without the assumption that "people in the past were stupid"?

A lot of effort. I like my game worlds to feel 100% alien. I very much put an effort into not making anything just like 21st century America(or even 20th century or 19th century). I very much go beyond the only Europe, and even more so the RPG whitewash of Europe that makes it just like home.

[Max_Killjoy]

Longer post deleted, but… meh. Ultimately, I find Bertran's "foreign" perspective familiar, and almost trivial to roleplay compared with the intricacies of human psychology.

Also, "*people* are stupid" seems more apt for my starting position - it's just a matter of degrees, of more, less, or equally stupid.

The point isn't one particular mindset, that was just one example to prompt thoughts.

Setting aside any debate about whether "everyone is stupid", do you find that gamers tend to just play fully modern mindsets in their far past or far future characters?

[Zarrgon]

Setting aside any debate about whether "everyone is stupid", do you find that gamers tend to just play fully modern mindsets in their far past or far future characters?

Yes. Very few players even try to play anything but a modern viewpoint: it's a bit of a sub part of so many players just play themselves as the character.

[prabe]

Yes. Very few players even try to play anything but a modern viewpoint: it's a bit of a sub part of so many players just play themselves as the character.

I think there are probably a lot of players who can't get out of their own heads and into their characters'. I think there are probably some players who don't even try. I know people who set out to play characters as different from themselves as possible, in the belief that'll make it easier to manage that separation. I know people who set out to play characters as close to themselves as possible, in the belief that'll make it easier to see things the character's way. Those who can't are different form those who choose not to.

I tend to think of my characters as coming from a part of myself, so it's not a surprise that they reflect me--and my extension, share my modern viewpoint. That doesn't mean I'm never surprised by my characters' actions--sometimes I am--but I have no idea whether such surprise reflects a radically different viewpoint, or just some subconscious personality thing (often aided and abetted by the GM).

[Telonius]

My gaming groups have generally been pretty diverse (in race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation). Actually RPing out past attitudes would result in either A) severely negative amounts of fun or B) the PCs committing even more mass murder than they already do.

[Yora]

When my players found out that the sailors they had just captured where pirates, and that the setting does not have prisons as punishment for criminals, they quickly agreed to go find a chopping block.
There later was a moment of consideration if they could just assassinate a pirate captain to get in favor with the local people in power, but didn't take long to conclude that the answer was yes.

The motivation for all of this was not simply that they could or that they would benefit from it, but their reasoning was that this seems to be the way public order is achieved in this world they inhabit.

Some years ago I spend quite a lot of time trying to figure out the logic behind vengeance and feuds, and why often people insisted that they absolutely had to go and kill some relatives of their enemies, even though the idea seemed horrifying and they expected consequences. And when you look deeper into this, the logic is actually pretty simple and perfectly sound.
I don't think my current campaign has much potential to go into that, being mostly about exploring the wilderness. But I have long wanted to get players tied up in such a situation and see how they would be navigating these things. I think one of the best ways to set it up would be to have close friends of the allies of the PCs get into a feud and trying to get the players to help them get vengeance against their new enemies. Who aren't any more evil and just normal people, but also avenging their clan in the same way.

[Satinavian]

In most of my groups we always try to capture an appropriate mindset to what the PCs should have considering their culture etc. Roleplaying is not about playing oneself to us, it is about immersing oneself into some fictional setting. The effort people put into that does vary, but it has not exactly been unherad of to research real life counterparts of fictional societies and going deep enough to use academic papers in places.

Of course some ideas are so uncomfortable or unpalatable that players don't want to have characters following them. (That is more often the case with pure fictional societies though, which tend to be far more exxagerated than anything that ever existed in reality.) In this case we just don't play in those settings or characters from those societies.


I can't remeber PCs ever wanting to change their culture to be more like our modern culture. I can think of many instances of PCs trying to change other cultures in the setting to be more like the culture the PC came from (and which they naturally thought of as superior). I can also remember plenty of instances where the PCs wanted to change their own cultures in ways subsets of the population would naturally agree with. (You can always be against corruption or incompetence of current rulers. You can always have stances on how power should be distributed differently between existing factions, you can always have certain things where your characters have a minority opinion of ). But bringing modern thinking and values ? No.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I have a big advantage as a DM in making the setting feel different from a modern one because I make campaign wikis for all of my games, complete with lots of flavor pages on cultures and religions and such, so I can write those pages with a subtle in-setting "voice" to reinforce the setting assumptions. Then once that stuff is all established I can have NPCs talk about certain things like they're obviously true and the players have enough context to play along.

For instance, in a previous campaign the setting was "900s CE Earth, but Norse mythology is factually true in all respects." The pages on Norse religions were full of clear and definitive language, and the descriptions of gods used flowery and respectful language; foreign religion pages had a slightly condescending tone with lots of scare quotes and "Believers claim..." and so forth, and the descriptions of their gods had an air of confusion with lots of illustrative comparisons to Norse gods. Various Norse cultures got different cultural writeups with varying background benefits by social class; other cultures got short writeups and singular background benefits at an "all dwarves have beards, drink ale all the time, and carry axes" level of detail. And so on.

So when the party ran into non-Norse people for the first time, they started laughing off the foreign priests as deluded heathens without any prompting (when the players' normal inclinations would have been to treat foreign priests just the same as their own in the usual D&D "every pantheon is equally powerful and valid" kind of way) and we got some fun roleplaying out of all that.

[Fiery Diamond]

I've never seen the point. I mean, everything I do that isn't tied to interpersonal relationships or earning money to live/doing life upkeep (such as cleaning apartment or eating/sleeping/etc.) is done solely for escapism purposes. Like, literally everything. I have a modern mindset. Other than alterations for fantasy-fulfilling purposes, what possible reason would I have for my stories or games to make any effort whatsoever for the viewpoint characters/cultures to not have a modern mindset?

I realize that other people have different priorities - and more power to them - but anyone touting it as somehow objectively good to try to get into a different mindset leaves me scratching my head. Historical veracity in a fantasy setting has always struck me as a bizarre thing to claim is essential. Personally, I find someone insisting that their pseudo-Roman fantasy culture needs to have slavery seen as a normal thing by its viewpoint characters just as bizarre as that one person who argued that pseudo-midieval-European fantasy settings MUST NOT HAVE POTATOES because in real life those came from the Americas. And yes, that was a real, very emphatic argument I encountered years ago - on these very forums, I believe.

[VoxRationis]

Personally, I find someone insisting that their pseudo-Roman fantasy culture needs to have slavery seen as a normal thing by its viewpoint characters just as bizarre as that one person who argued that pseudo-midieval-European fantasy settings MUST NOT HAVE POTATOES because in real life those came from the Americas. And yes, that was a real, very emphatic argument I encountered years ago - on these very forums, I believe.

I'd argue that a culture without slavery would not plausibly come across as (classical) Roman, no matter how many names end in -us, since you'd encounter problems of "what are you doing with all the prisoners of war" and "who's building all these monuments and mining all this gold?"

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I realize that other people have different priorities - and more power to them - but anyone touting it as somehow objectively good to try to get into a different mindset leaves me scratching my head. Historical veracity in a fantasy setting has always struck me as a bizarre thing to claim is essential. Personally, I find someone insisting that their pseudo-Roman fantasy culture needs to have slavery seen as a normal thing by its viewpoint characters just as bizarre as that one person who argued that pseudo-midieval-European fantasy settings MUST NOT HAVE POTATOES because in real life those came from the Americas. And yes, that was a real, very emphatic argument I encountered years ago - on these very forums, I believe.

There's definitely a gradient between "things modern players find abhorrent" and "things modern players completely agree with" on which various setting aspects can fall, and plenty of thing fall on a relatively-unobjectionable point somewhere in the middle that people accept for the sake of tropes or convention or whatever.

Monarchism, for instance: pretty much no one today seriously argues that any nation should have an absolute monarchy supported by the divine right of kings, yet not only are monarchies common in settings (since, y'know, pseudo-Medieval Europe, gotta have kings and queens) but plotlines like "find the one true heir to the throne and restore them to their rightful place" or "save the good Heironius-appointed king from the evil scheming Hextor-worshiping vizier who's trying to overthrow him" are fairly common and players don't automatically go "Monarchies are bad, !vive la democratic revolutión¡" when those plot hooks come up.

[Satinavian]

I realize that other people have different priorities - and more power to them - but anyone touting it as somehow objectively good to try to get into a different mindset leaves me scratching my head. Historical veracity in a fantasy setting has always struck me as a bizarre thing to claim is essential. Personally, I find someone insisting that their pseudo-Roman fantasy culture needs to have slavery seen as a normal thing by its viewpoint characters just as bizarre as that one person who argued that pseudo-midieval-European fantasy settings MUST NOT HAVE POTATOES because in real life those came from the Americas. And yes, that was a real, very emphatic argument I encountered years ago - on these very forums, I believe.

I found both ideas very reasonable. (Wich the caveat that pseudo- of course leaves a lot of wiggleroom and losely inspired settings may differ in many ways).

In fact I have been on several LARPs centered on medieval societies where people took a lot of effort to get rid of potatoes, sugar, tomatos and other unfitting ingrediants and used only historical dishes and recipies.

Monarchism, for instance: pretty much no one today seriously argues that any nation should have an absolute monarchy supported by the divine right of kings.

For medieval settings i don't want absolute monarchies either. It is nearly always the wrong kind of monarchy to achieve historical accuracy. I have far less problems with omitting slavery when the historical referrence had it than with having all those pseudo-medieval-european-feudal realms and then using absolute monarchs.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, absolute monarchy is far more an "early modern" phenomenon. Most of the medieval period had various forms of distributed elite power, with complex relationships mixing tradition and fluidity.

[Tanarii]

I realize that other people have different priorities - and more power to them - but anyone touting it as somehow objectively good to try to get into a different mindset leaves me scratching my head. Historical veracity in a fantasy setting has always struck me as a bizarre thing to claim is essential. Personally, I find someone insisting that their pseudo-Roman fantasy culture needs to have slavery seen as a normal thing by its viewpoint characters just as bizarre as that one person who argued that pseudo-midieval-European fantasy settings MUST NOT HAVE POTATOES because in real life those came from the Americas. And yes, that was a real, very emphatic argument I encountered years ago - on these very forums, I believe.

Must they have swords? Ride horses? There's different places folks are going to want to draw the line to have things 'make sense' to them.

For an extreme example of it's all about perception, lots of people don't want steampunk or magitech or psionics in their pseudo-historical-era fantasy, because it makes things feel too anachronistic for them. They associate those things as 'modern' even though they don't actually exist.

[False God]

Outside of playing dramatically ancient (savage lands) or incredibly futuristic settings, I tend to not worry too much about the past of the fantasy land I created needing to match up socially/politically with IRL history. There are too many variables that the average fantasy world contains to attempt to reconcile with IRL history. (notably, magic and other species).

I am busy enough developing fantasy cultures that aren't "elves like trees" to worry about whether they are "historical enough".

Different countries are different countries, and that's good enough.

[Vahnavoi]

For an extreme example of it's all about perception, lots of people don't want steampunk or magitech or psionics in their pseudo-historical-era fantasy, because it makes things feel too anachronistic for them. They associate those things as 'modern' even though they don't actually exist.

Uh, there's a pretty obvious reason for that: those fictional tropes are built on industrial and post-industrial concepts which didn't exist, and thus are largely absent from, pre-industrial times, myth and folklore. If you're trying to make a fantasy world based on preindustrial times, myths, folklore and concepts, those things will feel extremely out-of-place.

[Max_Killjoy]

Outside of playing dramatically ancient (savage lands) or incredibly futuristic settings, I tend to not worry too much about the past of the fantasy land I created needing to match up socially/politically with IRL history. There are too many variables that the average fantasy world contains to attempt to reconcile with IRL history. (notably, magic and other species).

I am busy enough developing fantasy cultures that aren't "elves like trees" to worry about whether they are "historical enough".

Different countries are different countries, and that's good enough.

Historical or based-on-history settings are just one example of what I was trying to get at. .

The point was more broad, about foreign mindsets, and whether gamers try to play their characters as coming from those mindsets, or just insert their own present-day usually western mindset into those places.

[Satinavian]

Historical or based-on-history settings are just one example of what I was trying to get at. .

The point was more broad, about foreign mindsets, and whether gamers try to play their characters as coming from those mindsets, or just insert their own present-day usually western mindset into those places.

Doesn't change my answer. Of course we also try to immerse ourself into purely fictional cultures. Unfortunately many do lack depth.

[Willie the Duck]

How much effort do you, or gamers you know, put into capturing the different values or attitudes of characters in a past or future or alternate setting, without the assumption that "people in the past were stupid"?

Historical or based-on-history settings are just one example of what I was trying to get at.
The point was more broad, about foreign mindsets,

It is going to depend a lot on the goals of the campaign. I personally really like trying to get into the mindset of someone raised before... well stuff like electricity and stuff is the obvious stuff, but frankly before modern convenience -- where a clay pot is a time consuming product to construct so lots of food is out in the open (so you have to figure out how to keep mice off it) and where you build wooden structures with elaborate joins because your time is worth less than nails cost and so on and so forth, but this is the same low fantasy where (I'm sure I've used this example before) getting a merchant's wagon across a stream without getting the grain or cloth they are taking to market wet can be an interesting challenge. A lot of my game-paying compatriots are more interested in playing Xena-esque medieval superhero level of play, and so there is a tonal disconnect with that (and in general we either bend to accommodate the other or take turns so that everyone has fun).

In general I consider it important for the characters in my game to mentally come from a world where stuff takes time, distance is a big challenge, distance + time can be effectively a physical barrier ('you can't get an army across that forest in any reasonable time, so they will instead go...'), winter (or summer) can be very harsh, and communication (and thus organization) is a big challenge. That kind of stuff, to me, seems more interesting-when-explored-through-a-TTRPG-lens that other stuff people have mentioned like slavery or race/religion/sex/orientation, etc.

Setting aside any debate about whether "everyone is stupid", do you find that gamers tend to just play fully modern mindsets in their far past or far future characters?

and whether gamers try to play their characters as coming from those mindsets, or just insert their own present-day usually western mindset into those places.

People making gross characterizations of other gamers tend to become caricatures, so I'll stick with the 'or gamers you know' framing with which you started. People I know, when not playing medieval superheroes or epic dragon-slayers (or character as board game token), tend to modify their character mindset to a non-self mindset. To what it is accurate will depend on the individual.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

For medieval settings i don't want absolute monarchies either. It is nearly always the wrong kind of monarchy to achieve historical accuracy. I have far less problems with omitting slavery when the historical referrence had it than with having all those pseudo-medieval-european-feudal realms and then using absolute monarchs.

Yeah, absolute monarchy is far more an "early modern" phenomenon. Most of the medieval period had various forms of distributed elite power, with complex relationships mixing tradition and fluidity.

I wasn't just talking about Medieval-ish settings that try to be historically accurate; you can see the same setting element in everything from "Iron Age in a coat of Medieval Europe paint" settings where you have Sorcerer-Kings and Kingpriests and Lich Queens and other monarchs who rule absolutely due to innate power and/or being literally chosen directly by a god, to "future fantasy with Medieval Europe trappings" settings like Warhammer 40K where the tyrannical Emperor of Mankind is portrayed as an inarguable good guy.

In all of those scenarios, you can run scenarios where the PCs totally buy into the idea that monarchy = good and right and support it even though the players don't share the same idea at all and everyone knows you're not promoting monarchism in real life, so the point is that you can totally have that kind of values-dissonance-for-the-sake-of-tropes setup in a setting and encourage RPing a different mindset without involving any setting elements that would actually make anyone uncomfortable.

[Zarrgon]

Historical or based-on-history settings are just one example of what I was trying to get at. .

The point was more broad, about foreign mindsets, and whether gamers try to play their characters as coming from those mindsets, or just insert their own present-day usually western mindset into those places.

Well, real based on history settings are very problematic. This is very much a Game 0 sort of thing where everyone gives input on how much "real" history to use, and what not to use.

Once you get into fictional fantasy, most players are fine: The Demon Lords enslave the Elves...no problem.


Of course, not many players have a mind set other then the present day. And the single way that most people get just about any information about the past is Movies. And the vast majority of movies are not even close to accurate, and most have a modern day mindset.

As a fan of native America, I have often tried to run such a game set in 1000 AD or so. Most fall apart quickly as players don't grasp the ideas of things like there are no horses and there is no concept of (western) money.

[False God]

Historical or based-on-history settings are just one example of what I was trying to get at. .

The point was more broad, about foreign mindsets, and whether gamers try to play their characters as coming from those mindsets, or just insert their own present-day usually western mindset into those places.

Depends on how much information you give them. Typically I find gamers only have so much room in their heads for other cultural information (IRL or fantasy) unless they are already particularly inclined to care about foreign cultures.