It's been ages since I did a clickbait, hot-take, rant.
Lately, I've been listening to even more APs than usual. Most are wonderful, entertaining and inspiring but it turns out I am a picky listener and certain things I hear just ejector-seat me right out of the fiction whenever I come across them. I've already talked about tieflings and pun names and edgelords. That's not what I'm going to complain about today. Today I want to talk about 3 Anachronisms that somehow manage to become the pimple-on-the-face of whatever I'm listening to. In order from bad to worst, they are:
1: GLASS WINDOWS:
A quasi-fantasy world should not have glass windows for the same reason they shouldn't have mechanical pencils... these things just weren't around in the actual middle ages (upon which most fantasy I listen to is based). Yes there was leaded glass - windows of this material existed, but were small and rare. The other exception is the stained glass window. Those certainly existed but were so expensive as to only really be found in churches. Because this technology sort of existed in the medieval world, I'll designate this offensive anachronism as "least bad".
2: "OK"
Characters should not say "OK". I was writing script the other day, and I wanted to write that an NPC had "lost what was left of their cool" but I stopped and went back and changed it to "lost what was left of their composure". The idiom of "losing one's cool" was just too modern. It would've sounded weird. To be honest, if you scratch the surface, there are a lot of words and phrases that should be avoided because they were coined in modernity, but at some point we have to just accept the inconsistencies and even hypocrisies of fantasy. Still, "OK" ... is not OK.
3: THE RAPIER
I don't know why this one bugs me the most. It is anachronistic - rapiers did not appear historically until the late fifteenth century. But you know, it's not the anachronism that bothers me... I think it's a correlation I feel exists between "characters with rapiers" and "players with 'Main Character Syndrome'" ... is it just me? Maybe. But the character with a rapier is very likely, I feel, to be either an edgelord or a joke character who speaks with loud blustering bravado and possible wears a floppy crushed velvet cap.
"OK". Rant over. And it feels good to get it out.
So, what bugs you? What are some things that you can't stand in APs?
I think we just want to believe in the secondary world, and various anachronisms or inconsistencies snap us out of it. Encumbrance feels unsolvable for me, nobody in their right mind would fight a duel with a heavy bag, but it's the default implication. 45lb gnomes with 70lbs of equipment are my most detested offenders.
ReplyDeleteRapiers sort of bother me as well, even though I think they are cool. Even 15th century side swords/early rapiers don't match the popular image of a long, thin blade accompanied by a complex hilt either. They were still cut and thrust weapons with a broad blade.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest problem to me is that the archetype of the swashbuckling rogue implies the existence of firearms. The Three Musketeers are not called the Three Rapierists, after all. In general, these characters tend to feel like they've been scooped out 1718 Nassau (conveniently without their brace of pistols) and dropped into a totally anachronistic setting. The attitudes of this era don't really fit with a medieval setting either, thus the main character syndrome feeling.
That said, I think the late middle ages makes for a very cool TTRPG setting. There's a brief window where longswords and dramatic gothic plate armor are contemporary with side swords and the start of the age of sail. Firearms exist, but they are slow and unwieldy enough that they don't make for practical primary weapons for an adventurer, and the longbow even remained relevant on the battlefield into the 16th century. The goblin tribe likely won't give you 60 seconds of uninterrupted time to reload your arquebus, so even if you have one, it's not game breaking.