Recent studies have shown that violent video games don't make people violent (unless they're really mentally immature, but if you're playing DF you're probably mentally mature), so your argument is flawed, GoblinCookie.
You're wrong but we weren't talking about that.
Thanks GoblinCookie. I think I finally understand where you are coming from in your opposition to any implementation of class systems in game. I think most people are more mature than that, but there are of course exceptions.
I have a somewhat different perspective. I feel modern media tends to (inadvertently) downplay past discriminatory behaviour by making protagonists have unusually modern values. It bothers me as it tends to portray this myth of racism etc being some unusual aberration, when in fact those sorts of things were quite ubiquitous. Ironically, I feel censoring those ideas makes overcoming these issues more difficult as people are never confronted with them.
Racism is either nonexistent or very weak in the medieval times. Someone failing to depict racism in the medieval era then is pretty much historically accurate. Other things however that are unacceptable in modern times, sexism, homophobia and general religious bigotry are very much rife. The rise of racism is actually an interesting inversion of the normal story of societal progress towards the better.
The key problem with what you are saying however is that history is not some set of historical eras magically transforming into the next era. The next era has to fight against the present era in order to be born, but the present era has the majority of people on it's side, which is why historical progress takes centuries and millennia rather than happening in a single human lifetime. A story is also not something static, a story has a protagonist who fights against powerful enemies ultimately to bring about a desired outcome. Historical development is generally like that, a line of hero-protagonists overcoming the evil of their society, though in the case of racism it is a villain-protagonist making their society more evil.
It makes sense for the author to choose as a hero-protagonists in a medieval story someone who has a closer resemblance to the modern ideals than the average person of that era. The danger however is that in order to be realistic we cannot expect a person to hold such values in their entirety, but there is a considerable moral danger in this not being so. The reason for his is that the audience empathises with the hero-protagonist, that is fine if the hero protagonist is as good as or better than the audience but what happens when the hero-protagonist is only good because the villain-antagonist is worse than him?
That is one reason why historical fiction generally makes me uneasy. You don't want to identify, empathise with and hence think like people who are quite realistically worse than you are simply because they are more like you than villain-antagonists. That results in a kind of reactionary hybridisation, by which we in the modern world instead of moving forward end up resurrecting elements of the past which we left behind for a good reason.
For DF:
Without some framework for social hierarchy (beyond the limited roles of nobles now) the game will be quite limited in how societies are structured. I'd personally prefer governance and social structures to be as intricate as the geology. The concept of class can be interpreted quite broadly: You could have a "class" system based on seniority, for instance. It could be discriminatory in the sense that elders have more privileges than young dwarves, but everyone gets a chance to be an elder eventually. So, rule by a council of elders as a form of government.
What we would need is a "privilege" framework which defines certain prerequisites for a dwarf to gain certain rights (voting, eligibility for military service, noble title, right to make mandates, eight to own land and collect rents, etc). From there you could build up whatever system of government you like by defining whatever privilege structure you need. So, for a dictatorship you have a leader with the right to do anything, generals who can do almost anything but are obliged to demonstrate loyalty to the leader, and everyone else who must obey the laws but can otherwise do what they want. In a democracy, some citizens will be eligible to vote. Immigrants may only vote after being naturalized. Children cannot vote. All citizens are eligible to serve in parliament.
Please no arguments about semantics.
A more limited number of social structures does mean less work for Toady One.
As I have explained already to the OP, class divisions are not divisions in political decision-making within a class, those are more akin to the division between carpenter and fisher-dwarf than class divisions which are more akin to the difference between master and slave. The latter kind of divisions I am uneasy about because you will never be playing the slave but instead one of the masters, since only the masters have stories that we would actually wish to play.
One idea that contributes to your suggestion is the idea that in election campaigns, some individuals have more personal clout than others, which allows them to influence other voters and decide the election for the candidate they support.
A Republic is a type of governance where a collection of representatives(usually elected) form the government body, and either they elect a primary representative to lead the entire Republic, or they rule together cooperatively.
The representatives are either elected among themselves in the local governance group, or they are elected by all their constituents.
The constituency is either members of a group such as which economic bracket they belong to, or the inhabitants of a geographic region within the larger nation.
That is basically similar to what we would have in kings and nobles were elected. I could see that happening if the central government got strong enough that it's undemocratic nature offended against the traditional democracy of the sites which were previously mostly autonomous.
Mostly because GC has learned to back out when an argument is clearly lost instead of trying to save it.
I just have a policy of only posting every few days in order to give other people the time to comment so the thread does not become dominated by me and some other person. Backing out of arguments is still not my style.
Author
Topic: Government Types (Read 31868 times)