D&D is theme park based mostly on modern-day USA with some Wild West influences. It's very obvious for people from Europe playing it :)
The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages. I'm not sure Americans even understand the difference between a village and countryside.
When D&D has people living in the countryside it's often American-style single-family farms in the middle of nowhere. That wasn't a thing.
For actual medieval theme every small town should be surrounded by dozens of small villages with lots of people living in close proximity farming lots of small fields, and where one village ends - another starts.
Most places shouldn't have enough people to sustain full-time inns and shops. Weekly or monthly markets were done instead so that the same traders could be reused between many places.
The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
> The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages.
In my experience most D&D settlements have to fit onto a two-page spread in a letter/legal sized book. So they've got space for an inn, a store, and maybe one or two places with things to advance the plot.
A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn, but there just ain't the space on the page.
Villages are smaller so they are easier to generate and fit on a page than towns. But people design based on what they experience (in games and in real-life). So most adventures take place in towns or in the wilderness. Americans probably never seen a village.
> A realistic town might need 300 houses for each inn
300 houses in one place is already a big city in dark ages. Let's say 2 stories with 2 families on each level, with 5 people in each family - that's 20*300 = 6000 people.
6000 people would probably be top 10 city in a kingdom in 1300. Rome was 25 000 people back then.
And inns were mostly for travellers, so the number of houses weren't that important - it mattered if you are integer number of days of travel from the last trade center.
Honestly I just took the present day number of houses in the UK (30 million or so) and divided by the number of pubs in the UK (46,800 or so) which gave 641 houses per pub, then I knocked that down to 300 lest people think I was over-estimating the number of houses.
Of course, that present day number is 30 million houses for 67 million population, i.e. 2.2 people per house - not the 20 people per house from your assumptions.
Without some of that the game would be unplayable or at least highly constrained.
A 2 week ride on horseback would be a reasonable trip in that milieu but has to be compressed somehow; at best the group could meet and game out some encounters during that time period but that takes dedication, and if that was the way you rolled you’d also put them in a conference room for a long weekend to play the dungeon.
And largely due to game play. Lot could be scaled down to present enough generic npcs and buildings, but having to spend time traveling through same town for 5, 10, 30 minutes or more each time is not exactly fun. Or takes special kind of player. I am not saying there is not fans of that level of realism, but it is not big niche.
> The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.
To be fair, that's kind of the case. Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world. A level 1 spellcaster may be able to do two of the following things a day using their two spell slots (depending on what kind of spellcaster they are):
- feed up to 10 people for a day (and heal them, to boot) with goodberry
- create 10 gallons of potable water with create or destroy water
- double walking speed for 10 minutes without exhaustion (expeditious retreat)
- move a third again as fast as normal for an hour without exhaustion (long strider)
- load up and move 500 pounds at those speeds without having to carry anything themselves for an hour (Tenser's floating disk)
That's just food and transportation. A level 1 cleric totally trounces period-accurate medical care and compares pretty favorably to a whole modern hospital filled with specialists and equipment (and with a few more levels under their belt they do much better than modern medicine as they can bring the recently deceased back to life).
But that's starting to miss the forest for the trees. I definitely respect people, like the author of the article, that focus this deeply on hobbies -- I can barely do that for paying work. But it misses the point of D&D for me.
Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
I, for one, would expect social and political structures to deviate from history once you've added magic in the mix.
In my eyes, the article's argument is akin to people a thousand years from now role-playing in 2020s America but adding in Star Trek-style replicators and wondering why the rules don't model Homeowners Associations (HOAs). Sure, lots of current Americans are subject to them but what percentage of players would find that enjoyable? And are you sure they'd still exist in such a world?
> Sure, not everyone is an adventurer, but level 1 adventurers probably aren't particularly rare in the world.
How often do you meet other adventuring groups when you play D&D?
Post-scarcity magic utopia is one solution, but it's certainly not the setting of most D&D campaigns.
> Fundamentally, my response to the article is that D&D's just a collection of systems meant to generate fun, not be an accurate model of a particular time and place in history.
Sure, but more realistic medieval fantasy can be just as fun and more interesting (cause your players' unconscious assumptions about how any world has to work are broken).
The biggest thing is that in D&D most of population lives in towns & cities, and there are very few if any villages. I'm not sure Americans even understand the difference between a village and countryside.
When D&D has people living in the countryside it's often American-style single-family farms in the middle of nowhere. That wasn't a thing.
For actual medieval theme every small town should be surrounded by dozens of small villages with lots of people living in close proximity farming lots of small fields, and where one village ends - another starts.
Most places shouldn't have enough people to sustain full-time inns and shops. Weekly or monthly markets were done instead so that the same traders could be reused between many places.
The way D&D worlds are usually structured could only work if everybody has a magic car and food is abundant.