A Good Sense of Humour Versus 'Kriegspiel'
Or: Why medieval TTRPG worlds are almost unique in being able to marry system and setting.
In the previous post, I talked about how the concept of the Middle Ages that bled into TTRPGs via Tolkein was a product of Victorian and Edwardian academic and artistic interest in certain forms of medieval European cultural expression. The suggestion was that the great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rendered any examination of medieval notions of the operation of the world otiose, with the consequence that ‘medievalism’ as it passed into TTRPGs was romanticized and sanitized. The literature and art of the period was revived or recreated by often ingenious methods of excellent scholarship, but it was devoid of any foundation that anchored its production to a view of how the world actually worked in the minds of medieval people. This is the first reason why medieval TTRPG settings feel somewhat two-dimensional.
The second reason is that the world’s first TTRPG famously emerged from wargaming. This is not the time to proffer a long and exhaustive history of wargames (though you can find an introduction to the topic here). Nor am I hugely interested in the process of decision-making that Gygax, Arneson and others of their circle went through to arrive at the well-known six statistic system and the use of polyhedral dice for task resolution. My point is not the details of the mechanics but the fact that they grew out of a tradition of simulating organised conflict in which numerical abstraction was employed to generate results that could be interpeted in light of the stated goal. In this sense, any attribute of a unit on the board boiled down to a number, and it mattered not one whit what particular label was attached to it as long as it described a quality that the rules wanted to measure. One could identify a unit of model English longbowmen with a certain level of ‘Morale’ or ‘Confidence’ or a company of Boer sharpshooters with the quality of ‘Accuracy’ or ‘Precision’. In all cases, the identifying word was just a label. In principle, one could do away with these labels altogether and replace them with letters or numbers and the consequence would be to change the feel or tone of the mechanics, but not their underpinning substance and use.
Turning to TTRPGs one can see the continuing outworkings of this heritage. Dungeons & Dragons and its myriad clones and adaptations employ the familiar attributes of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma assigned a randomly generated numerical value (usually) between 3 and 18 and from which are derived modifiers that, together with class and level bonuses and other adjustments, produce the results that determine the probability of success when attempting a task and requiring a high roll (usually… sometimes…) on 1d20. Now compare this to the rather more niche game Symbaroum. In this the attributes are Accurate, Cunning, Discreet, Persuasive, Quick, Resolute, Strong and Vigilant with values distributed between 5 and 15 that is the basic number needed or lower (usually) on 1d20 to succeed after the factoring in of abilities, skills and the nature and quality of the circumstances or opposing agent. Casting the net more widely, one could include the multiple iterations of the Year Zero Engine with its setting-specific attributes combining with skills to arrive at a number of d6s to be rolled to acquire successes.
What should be noticeable about this list (which could be expanded to include just about any reasonably popular and available TTRPG rules’ set) is that, like wargames, the qualities that the rules are concerned to measure are generic and can be replaced with different labels without changing much, if anything, about the statistical outcomes. This was the moment of genius that the earliest TTRPG designers had; they grasped that numerical abstraction could be applied to individual characters as much as to units. The great advantage of this abstraction, of course, is adaptability. The generic D&D engine can be (and has been) wrenched and pulled into rules for games that simulate the tropes of low fantasy, hard science fiction, World War II, horror, super heroes or space opera. The model is highly plastic and so can stand being squeezed into these wildly different genres. And this is not confined to Dungeons & Dragons; almost any system can, with a little tweaking, be made to run under the hood of any game setting. The logical progression of this was, of course, GURPS, The Cypher System and The Genesys Engine that were expressly designed to feature generic core mechanics.
Does this lack of correlation or integration between system and setting matter? No. Not really. As long as a system does not actively fight against the setting or genre it is attempting to emulate I, personally, can usually let a system wash over me even if I might have a personal prejudice against some particular mechanical choice made by authors and designers. But it is striking to observe that, in the context of quasi-medieval fantasy worlds, the satisfaction with generic systems continues. This despite the fact that the people of the Middle Ages possessed a view of the world that lends itself to the creation of a TTRPG system that mirrors the setting with, I would argue, unequalled elegance and verisimilitude.
The literate medieval mind was preoccupied by the need to interrogate and understand the world and to explain, classify, measure and place objects and events in a great and harmonious scheme. The impetus for this activity - expressed by Aquinas and other theologians and philosophers - was to apply the God-given faculty of human reason to explore creation which, being divine, was the product of a supreme intelligence and was, therefore, susceptible to rational enquiry, even if man’s fallen intellect imperfectly understood the results. So engrained was this desire to interrogate the world systematically that the very format of intellectual discourse - the question and answer structure of scholastic teaching and writing - reflected this drive for the precise arrangement and organization of concepts and things.
If one were able to ask almost any high medieval person ‘what are the fundamental qualities of all humans?’ they would give you the same answer: the humours. Four substances - blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm - regulated the four qualities of being sanguinary, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Each quality determined a person’s grace, charm, energy, patience and intellect. What are these but attributes roughly equivalent to Charisma/Dexterity, Strength/Constitution, Wisdom and Intelligence? However, unlike the generic abstractions of most TTRPGs, the humours and their resultant qualities are absolutely bound up with the setting. Moreover, they existed within a wider context of the understanding of health, illness, disease and medicine - all aspects that, in many games, are tacitly assumed to be subject to the rules of our modern biological knowledge. I find a TTRPG world in which fever can be explained as an imbalance of the hot and wet humour of blood more evocative and interesting than one where it is caused (or lazily assumed to be caused) by a virus or bacteriological infection.
The humours were themselves situated in a broader scheme by which the physical world was made up of four elements - air, fire, water and earth. The elements between them possessed and expressed the primary qualities of hot and cold, dry and wet. Every physical object in creation was made of combinations of those four elements and their associated qualities. Divine provenance further ordered the world so that men found expressions of these facts in many other spheres of investigation. The four elements and their qualities are reflected in the four seasons - spring, summer, autumn and winter - the four points of the globe - north, south, east and west - the four ages of man - infancy, adulthood, maturity and old age - the four tastes - sweet, sour, bitter, salt - the hours of the day and night - ordered into four phases each of three hours. Medieval scholars conceived of the world as being reducible - in principle - to a series of interlocking lists, tables and diagrams. Sound familiar? Game designers - to a greater or lesser degree - already think like medieval men and women in that they seek to impose regularity and order.
Medieval cosmology accounted not just for physical phenomena but also for the supernatural workings of astrology, miracles, witchcraft, spells and charms. Another consequence of the way in which literature and wargames influenced the development of TTRPGs is that, absent any notion of ‘why’, they flounder when it comes to the ‘how’ of these things. Or, perhaps more accurately, the ‘how’ becomes the sole focus. Without a satisfactory or at least coherent explanation of why magic works, quasi-medieval TTRPG worlds are vague, lacking any true sense of conceptuual integrity and internal consistency. This is, I think, what lies behind D&D’s strangest and perhaps least satisfying design choice - ‘Vancian Magic’ and clerical spells derived from a plethora of real-world multi-faith examples. Mechanically and thematically these aspects of Dungeons & Dragons were and are among its weakest elements and no TTRPG rules’ set has yet made a convincing attempt to address this lacuna.