Yudhishthira’s Dice

I love history. Been learning it all my life, since 6 month old me was read “A Study of History” by my graduate-school attending father. You should ask Mo about our trips together, and how I have to stop and read every historical plaque and see every historical landmark and go to every historical recreation and read every book on the history of wherever we’re visiting. She puts up with it well, but even she gets short on patience sometimes because my love of history is consuming.

It’ll be no shock, considering the context, that I also love RPGs. So you’d think it would be chocolate and peanut butter when the two go together, right? That I’d be constantly up to my eyeballs in historical RPG play and all of it would rock and all of it would roll. And yet I’d say less than 20% of my RPGing history has been playing historical games, and of that very little of it stands among my best moments in gaming. Don’t get me wrong, many of them were fun — but when asked about my top five game experiences I find myself thinking of things like Exalted and Dogs and Changeling, and not my Dark Ages or Persian Empire games. (Only my last full campaign of Pendragon, which was as much Romance as History, meets the high water mark.)

Despite this I still have a deep and abiding love for historical gaming, or at least the idea of historical gaming. I’ve also worked on a few quasi-historical games. Suryamaya, which should be out this year, is not a historical game – but is very much based on Indian history and mythology. I’m also currently being asked to look at doing a Sassanid Persian Empire game using RuneQuest OGL. Furthermore, whenever I think about my game The Wounded Lion I always think of it in terms of historical settings. Because of that, and my mixed history with it, I wanted to take a look at some of the agendas, goals, and ideas that go into playing various types of historical games and why we would, or would not, want to play them.

Reasons Why We Like (or Dislike) Historical Games

• In order to feel like you are there, as part of the history
• Playing the “what if” game. As in “what if the Romans had gunpowder” or “what if Ceasar had invaded Persia”
• Having a reason to do research, especially a reason to do joint research with friends
• Because history can give a game a “realistic” grounding that helps in the suspension of disbelief and acts as a catalyst to creativity and imagination.
• Fetishization of history, the more scholarly form of using, say, Superhero RPGs as a reason to argue about if Spiderman could whup the Flash.
• History makes a powerful tool to comment about the present through allegory or metaphor, even if you aren’t really talking about the history as fact (see any movie about Rome made in America)
• History taken factually and faced on its own makes a powerful tool for confronting, supporting, and generally playing with our notions of ourselves, our past, and our place in the world
• The massive research and books form pretty tourist books to deep scholarly works gives a deep, rich, and easily accessed wealth of material for setting. It’s also a setting that your players may already know something about and have emotional investment in. (Alternately, it could be one that they have even less interest in than something featuring elven-vulcan halfbreeds, depending on their relationship to history.)

It’s also worth noting that almost all of the above can be taken in different modes: form the intellectual strategy of the war-game “what if” to the emotional escapism of immersing in Victorian melodrama – or the reverse cognitive appreciation for the forms of French Romanticism to the deep emotional resonance of Roman what ifs.

This list is hardly definitive, its just what I came up with in reflecting on my own history and after reading essays and posts on the subjects by such field luminaries as Paul Elliott, Mark Galeotti, and John Carnahan. If you’ve items to add, or disputes with the listed items, then by all means post them to the comments!

So I’m going to stop there for now, because I want feedback on what I’ve said – especially on anything I’ve missed – before I continue on with my theorizing.

So here we are in our fancy WordPress digs.

Now, if someone could tell me how to make the gutter between the post and the sidebar a bit wider, I’d appreciate it. Also, any must have plugins or the like — let me hear about em.