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The author has written extensively about why he does things like this, and I'll sum up: He is a professor of pre-modern military history, and students come int
by aidenn0 3y ago
The author has written extensively about why he does things like this, and I'll sum up:
He is a professor of pre-modern military history, and students come into his classes thinking that pre-modern European battles were at least a little bit like the things they see in 300, or LotR, or D&D games, when in fact they get more wrong than right.
Also, the fact that a setting is fantasy is not carte-blanche for being unrealistic. We could e.g. critique characters as acting against their motivation if they do so, we don't just say "There are dragons so who cares if someone just randomly decides to hit themselves in the head with a hammer"
- ourmandave 3y agoLike the Physics 101 teacher that has to teach students that Wiley Coyote is not an accurate representation of falling objects.
- aidenn0 3y agoI am not sure how to read your comment. Did you mean to imply that people coming into his history class are stupid for thinking that their only experiences with certain items (swords, armor, &c.) have some grounding in reality, or did you mean to imply that people actually go into physics 101 thinking that Wile E. Coyote physics are real?
- ourmandave 3y agoThe latter. Nobody believes you hover until you hold up a that says "Egads!" But a teacher complained he had to explain you keep moving laterally if you run off a cliff instead of falling straight down.
- whartung 3y agoMaybe at the 101 level, but I think when we talk at the quantum level, the coyote may be on to something. The whole Schroedingers cat thing and about state collapsing to “reality” under observation as manifest when the coyote, suspended in mid air, looks down and THEN a suddenly falls. I bet there’s a lecture buried in that phenomenon somewhere. IANAQM.
- Yoric 3y agoFunny, but as you probably suspect, it doesn't quite work like that :)
- marginalia_nu 3y agoJust as there is hard and soft sci-fi, fantasy makes different levels of committment to realism. D&D has always been a flippant pastiche with little grounding in history.
- aidenn0 3y ago> D&D has always been a flippant pastiche with little grounding in history. But it has often represented itself as more than that.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoBy whom? I guess as a tabletop RPG you can run some sort of hyperrealistic variant of D&D, but at its core it's got a few to many talking swords for that sort of thing.
- D13Fd 3y agoWith dragons and magic, I don’t think it’s representing itself as historically accurate.
- aidenn0 3y agoOkay, let's try a different analogy. Let's say there was an urban fantasy where dragons attack present-day New York. If a character's 1993 Chevy Corvette breaks down because an issue with the carburetor, we wouldn't just say "it's not supposed to be realistic; dragons!" It would rightly be seen as an oversight by the author. Arms and Armor are a technology and D&D at least pretends that the (non-magical) versions of them are based on said technology.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThis is how a lot of fiction operates though, it doesn't attempt to portray realism first. This is true in everything from western movies to rom coms. The story comes first, and the details have to be just believable enough to not stick out so much as to break immersion. Although what breaks immersion varies. Someone who's at most shot a few cans or a deer won't perhaps question a bad guy being sent flying backwards from a revolver shot, a war veteran might see this as jarring and unrealistic.
- cultofmetatron 3y agoyup, checkout the anime "goblin slayer" if you want an idea of realistic humans fighting as realistic humans in a fantasy setting. warning: shit gets dark
- aidenn0 3y agoFWIW, I read the first LN and couldn't really get into it.
- seanhunter 3y agoI get that. I feel for arms and armor specifically, in a world where you have magical methods of production, magical materials and non-human races needing to utilize these, you're so far removed from pre-modern European tech as to make the comparison a bit redundant. I mean the main trailer artwork has Laezel bearing a greatsword with a kind of semicircular notch in the blade with a hook on it like you could use it as a giant tin opener. Hopefully noone needs to be told that's unrealistic when she herself looks like some sort of psychopathic grinch knight.