The Flintstones fallacy: believing that the way people before us organised and interacted was pretty much just capitalism but with more rocks. Of course I didn't believe this as a concrete idea, but it was there in the background of a lot of my musings on society.
You'll see this with people who talk about gender relations. The best hunter brings more meat and gets the best girl. Except solitary hunting has never been our main tactic, and resource accumulation is a phenomenon of agricultural societies. And hunting isn't an RPG where some guy has higher skill rolls so gets 35% more meat on hunting actions.
Or you'll see it in fantasy settings where anything you need can be bought from a shop. Consumerism is an incredibly new development in human relations, and for the most part people have not engaged in economic transactions as we experience them today.
Interesting question. I guess it depends on the game you're running and what kind of gameplay loop you're going for. The fantasy consumerism trope isn't necessarily a bad choice for you game, as long as its not unexamined.
I like the idea of role-playing economic relations. Maybe you need to get into the good graces of the local nobility to access the capable blacksmith in town. Maybe you need to be rich to frequent the kind of place where you'll meet an enchanter or alchemist.
Kinda use DnD to expose class and power structures, ya know? Which reminds me of an excellent Marxist theorist by the name of Cockshott (lol). His video on [the medieval economy] (https://youtu.be/8PuvPEoNK5o) is very interesting.
Closely related is The Boomer Fallacy: everything in history, especially gender relations, was just a slight variation of white middle-class American life in the 1950s.
The Flintstones fallacy: believing that the way people before us organised and interacted was pretty much just capitalism but with more rocks. Of course I didn't believe this as a concrete idea, but it was there in the background of a lot of my musings on society.
You'll see this with people who talk about gender relations. The best hunter brings more meat and gets the best girl. Except solitary hunting has never been our main tactic, and resource accumulation is a phenomenon of agricultural societies. And hunting isn't an RPG where some guy has higher skill rolls so gets 35% more meat on hunting actions.
Or you'll see it in fantasy settings where anything you need can be bought from a shop. Consumerism is an incredibly new development in human relations, and for the most part people have not engaged in economic transactions as we experience them today.
What's the proper way to run a shop in something like DnD then, bartering?
Interesting question. I guess it depends on the game you're running and what kind of gameplay loop you're going for. The fantasy consumerism trope isn't necessarily a bad choice for you game, as long as its not unexamined.
I like the idea of role-playing economic relations. Maybe you need to get into the good graces of the local nobility to access the capable blacksmith in town. Maybe you need to be rich to frequent the kind of place where you'll meet an enchanter or alchemist.
Kinda use DnD to expose class and power structures, ya know? Which reminds me of an excellent Marxist theorist by the name of Cockshott (lol). His video on [the medieval economy] (https://youtu.be/8PuvPEoNK5o) is very interesting.
Love it, thank you
Closely related is The Boomer Fallacy: everything in history, especially gender relations, was just a slight variation of white middle-class American life in the 1950s.