Hrm. My opinion is that complete accuracy isn't all that fun. Folks have used tax records to do analysis of, say, how many farmers it takes in a village for a blacksmith to be present, and so on and so forth. It was a lot more than you might imagine.
On the other hand, looking at the D&D 3.5 Dungeon Masters Guide 2, they have finally fleshed out Saltmarsh. Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year? Because that's roughly how infrequently it would have to occur for their little club to escape notice. Hardly worth paying dues for, sitting around, discussing that murder you managed five years ago and how you look forward to one in another five.
Take a look at city-building ... in most games you rarely see the hub-and-spoke develop around a port city, despite that being a prevalent pattern, or the unique feel of isoheight versus steep streets in a hilly region (the San Francisco pattern). If you watch city maps over hundreds of years, many forces are at work, and I think they might be simulable but I don't know if the end result would be enjoyable enjoy to warrant it.
If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.
The balance between actual plausibilty and what one might call "fantastical satiation" is quite difficult. Your large-sized dragon, perhaps your standard-issue Vermithrax Pejorative, would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure. Clearly, this isn't very satisfying for your story-telling, either.
The balance is rough and I suspect that nitpicking in the name of accuracy can undermine most of what is constructed.
Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year?
The charitable interpretation might be that, in addition to being responsible for assassinations in the town, the guild is also responsible for assassinations in the surrounding countryside; in medieval times the rural population significantly outnumbered the urban population. (Also, a world with Raise Dead might be able to sustain a greater rate of assassinations per capital per year...)
But yes, plausibility gets distorted in favour of playability.
Well, Raise Dead is pretty pricey. And face it, nobody is out there paying to assassinate farmers. If you really want a particular farmer dead, ask some of the nearby lizardfolk to do it for a song.
Farmers are really interesting in the tax records, at least a function of property. They're the plankton of feudal society: necessary but otherwise nobody pays much attention to them. The miserable hamlets of D&D have an over-representation of every conceivable occupation but that of the farmer. Aside from being menaced by various low hit die creatures or being subject to the odd bout of lycanthropy, they're background figures only. Sad, but true.
> And face it, nobody is out there paying to assassinate farmers.
Ah, but in small towns essential services are often performed by volunteers. You've got your volunteer fire department, volunteer EMTs, volunteer assassin's guild, the usual.
In one of my campaign worlds the assassins guild was run by a church; you had to pay once to kill them, and again to make sure they stayed dead :P
Introducing magic, or any kind of efficient machine or analog for modern medicine that might appear as magic in a fantasy setting means you get to throw out most of the rules that are learned from historical observations, except where you base those lessons learned on post-industrial revolution studies where the availability of electricity and modern industrial tools haven't been made readily available to developing communities and countries.
Also an assassin guild may be paid to do it discretely - i.e. disappear someone rather than just kill. That would allow for more assassinations per year to go unnoticed.
Yeah, success in this type of game is definitely about channeling a very specific set of power fantasies, delivered along with all those addictive brain reward feedback loop game mechanisms.
You're totally right about the limited potential for enjoy-ability of realistic forces in city/system simulation games. After all, the best examples of these games usually simplify. Like, the old SimCity games focus just on the zoning mixed with some taxes. Or, the Anno games depict colonization of (unsettled - haha) land mixed with maintenance of trade routes to reward the player with 'growth'.
The article however does deliver a pretty good idea of how one could go about depicting the specific area of interest studied by the author - medieval farming and village planning. I think all of us can easily imagine a very enjoyable game there.
The question of balance is interesting, and IMO highly dependent on how strong and original the selected set of core mechanics is. The better they are, the less of this 'fantastical satiation' aspect is needed to cover them up. But what is most interesting to me is the question of what should mechanics in such games themselves actually depict? Like, to actually be worth spending time playing?
This assumes the differences are purposefully designed rather than out of ignorance of the past. I think you can create a unique game by looking at the historical time periods these games were made about and going from there. This is because most of these games actually start with something like DnD and go from there.
As a simple example of where this can lead you into historical inaccuricies... the long sword. Long swords are two handed swords. It's not a hill I'm gonna die on but the reason why people think long swords are 1 handed is completely because of DnD and everyone copying them.
Ars Magica the RPG was set in a low-fantasy version of Europe, you had three different characters you could play during a story - a magus of the Order of Hermes, a companion of the mage's covenant (knights, scholars, churchmen and other important people), and one of the "grogs" who lived and worked at or around the covenant - peasants, maids, men at arms and thieves. It certainly wasn't an accurate depiction of the Middle Ages, but it came a lot closer in trying to make the setting more historical, and on top of that make it so that being more historical was an integral part of the game.
>If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.
Actually it would be worse. The most populated caves would be made by ant or termite colonies so if there were ant like monsters as big as humans then a small dungeon would have hundreds of monsters. Way too much for a single adventurer.
> Your large-sized dragon would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure.
Just to point out, virgin-demanding dragons are an entirely separate mythic tradition from hoarding dragons, which spend their time hibernating.
On the other hand, looking at the D&D 3.5 Dungeon Masters Guide 2, they have finally fleshed out Saltmarsh. Bizarrely, a town of less than four thousand people actually has an assassins' guild, with roughly ten members. Do they take turns, each assassinating one person a year? Because that's roughly how infrequently it would have to occur for their little club to escape notice. Hardly worth paying dues for, sitting around, discussing that murder you managed five years ago and how you look forward to one in another five.
Take a look at city-building ... in most games you rarely see the hub-and-spoke develop around a port city, despite that being a prevalent pattern, or the unique feel of isoheight versus steep streets in a hilly region (the San Francisco pattern). If you watch city maps over hundreds of years, many forces are at work, and I think they might be simulable but I don't know if the end result would be enjoyable enjoy to warrant it.
If you look at our actual cave ecosystems, troglobionts, which are adapted for living strictly in caves, are typically quite tiny. There's simply no food down there! Resources are scarce. Hence you would get no gelatinous cubes or hook horrors or carrion crawlers stumbling around the caves, lurking about, waiting for adventurers or the average bear. Instead you get some very small, pale shrimp. This is not exciting for the adventurer. Some handwaving of a source of energy called "Faerzress" eventually takes place and is only vaguely acceptable if one does not look hard, serving as kind of a bottom trophic level for the game.
The balance between actual plausibilty and what one might call "fantastical satiation" is quite difficult. Your large-sized dragon, perhaps your standard-issue Vermithrax Pejorative, would need something like a log flume ride of virgins delivered straight to its gullet to sustain its bulk, not to mention the caloric expenditure. Clearly, this isn't very satisfying for your story-telling, either.
The balance is rough and I suspect that nitpicking in the name of accuracy can undermine most of what is constructed.