I noticed in your trailer that it was mentioned that the player could do an assortment of things before the siege. Players could poison the water, sneak into the castle, or lead a full assault. In real battles, the law of chivalry dictated that the knights had to follow certain guidelines before initiating a siege (Although most knights didn’t follow them). Will this be a part of the game. For example, you must first tell the Garrison that you would be besieging the castle and give them an opportunity to surrender the castle and leave without harm. If declined, they must allow all the civilians to leave the castle unharmed. Then when initiating attack, the besiegers must fire a volley of arrows at the castle gate to let the defenders know that the assault was initiated. I think people who like medieval history would find it interesting. I believe it matters because it would give more depth and choice to the player. this is why I think it should be a feature so if people agree with me, please like so the creators of the game can see this.
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We will not play as a knight or anybody in charge so there is no need for these stuff. But it’s interesting reading. I have doubts that anybody in these times did things this “gentle” way, at least in Bohemia, though.
Chivalry dead before it begun… Truthfully dont expect expect good treatment in battle or from higher classes. Peasants/ non-nobles = dirt and piss to nobles.
Bear in mind that more than a few peasants earned a fortune taking ransom just as nobles did. Just because you weren’t of noble blood didn’t mean that at least some of the rules didn’t apply to you, too.
yeah i forgot to take into account the area that the game was taking place in. however, I know of one instance which was at The Siege of Ladysmith.
If there’s some sort of respect/fame measurement planned in the game, following these rules can affect it positively (and more people will respect you), while breaking them harms your relationships with others.
Sounds interesting, but any “small” change/improvement postpones the game or decreases overall game quality.
Chivalry was invented in the victorian era to glorify the knight. As a code of conduct it never existed before the victorian era. So talk of chivalry during the time the game is set is inaccurate. Unless the commoners were part of a mercenary company their prisoners would likely be taken by their lord. Hell knights were valued based ob their ability to kill not their ability to follow a not existent code.
Study up on him pay attention to what he had done. Then read carefully how he massacred peasants women children and all for a “holy man”. Ps he is still regarded as a hero and he was knighted later in life.
That may have been when it became heavily romanticized, but it sure as hell didn’t ORIGINATE there. Remember that Mallory (died c.1471) defined a LOT of what we recognize today as chivalric ideals in L’Morte (even if Mallory himself failed to live up to them). Other elements date to as early as the Song of Roland c.12th Century, and the word itself (which is tied to the word “cavalry” and the French term for knight - chevalier) is older still, so these are concepts that are FAR older than the Victorian Era.
Some people are so intent on de-mythologizing things that they swing TOO far the other direction.
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I can share a story. In 1140 Konrad III besieged the Welfish castle at Weinsberg. When the Welfs were defeated, the men were sentenced to death, but departure was granted to the women with whatever they would carry on their backs. The women decided to carry their husbands outside and rescued their lives. Konrad remained adhered to his promise.
On one hand you can see the loyal wives rescuing their men and on the other you have a trustworthy king, who let his enemies escape because he gave a promise to their women. I know chivalry was a rare thing, but from time to time noble deeds were done.
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However, a biography by Edward Hicks, published in 1928, revealed that Malory had been imprisoned as a thief, bandit, kidnapper and rapist, which hardly seemed in keeping with the high chivalric standards of his book
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Malory
An idea is an idea. It was never followed. An idea is a house but if its never built would u call it a house?
That occurrence if it even happened would show that a king keep his word and was honorable. Which i would admit would be honorable and rare.
And it’s an ideal that, contrary to your statement, is FAR older than the Victorian era, even if individuals didn’t live up to them (which I outright said Mallory failed to do).
An ideal of what though? In the end knights where only trully prizrd for thier ability to fight. Would a king regonize a weak knight who is chivalrous over a blood thirsty and strong knight, i think not. Chivalry at the time was just a myth more or less no one sane would expect honorable treatment if they got captured.
No chivalry was only really observed after the Victorian era. Thus in my mind established then. An idea without action is nothing.
Chivalry was lived in tournaments and praised as courtly virtues. But wars cost money even then. So a short war was a good war and secure any means. Sieges were rare, expensive and often just as privation for the besiegers as for the besieged. There was a brief handover claim and if the brought nothing was trying to bring the matter quickly to an end. For chivalry there was little space, at best, when the besieged finally has revealed. A successful storming was plundered all they were worth, because that was part of pay. We moved into a war not to accomplish noble deeds to, but to make fat booty.
In our “clean”, regulated and “cultured” time, we would not admit it, but people were at all times very easy knit. War meant killing and raping without penalty, so only a social change of status for a certain time window. This was exploiting it.
Everything we read about today (should) naturally has a “moral” and wants to remind us anything about the meaning of war and decency of the warmongers … Who could write back then?
Ritterlichkeit wurde auf Turnieren gelebt und als höfische Tugenden gepriesen. Kriege kosteten aber auch damals schon Geld. Also war ein kurzer Krieg ein guter Krieg und sicher jedes Mittel recht. Belagerungen waren selten, teuer und für die Belagerer oft genauso entbehrungsreich wie für die Belagerten. Es gab eine kurze Übergabeforderung und wenn das nichts brachte wurde versucht, die Sache schnell zu ende zu bringen. Für Ritterlichkeit war da wenig Platz, bestenfalls wenn sich die Belagerten dann doch noch ergaben. Bei einer erfolgreichen Erstürmung wurde geplündert was das Zeug hielt, denn das war Teil des Soldes. Man zog in einen Krieg nicht um noble Taten zu vollbringen, sondern um fette Beute zu machen.
In unserer “sauberen”, geregelten und “kultivierten” Zeit wollen wir das nicht wahrhaben, aber Menschen waren zu allen Zeiten sehr einfach gestrickt. Krieg bedeutete Töten und Rauben ohne Strafe, also nur eine soziale Zustandsveränderung für ein bestimmtes Zeitfenster. Das galt es auszunutzen.
Alles was wir heute darüber lesen (sollen) hat natürlich eine “Moral” und will uns irgend etwas von Sinn des Krieges und Anstand der Kriegstreiber vorgaukeln…Wer konnte denn damals schon schreiben?
to me this is a simple formulation. saying chivalry never existed before victorian times is like saying christianity never existed before modern times because not everyone followed its teachings to a tee, and the crusades were a time of corruption and violence, not temperance and turning the other cheek. it’s a rather silly argument.
the point of education isn’t to make up things that suit your ideology, such that the task of demything somehting isn’t to rewrite history and claim it never existed, but rather put it in the correct context.
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@213. ~60% to 70% of my friends are athesis… The rest are agnostic and i only know one girl who said she is catholic. And one more thing your argument is invalid. The teachings of the church tells us god loves us all and to have temperance but most of the stuff god does in the bible is violent. The only thing i learned from what he did was if something annoyes you kill it and send it to hell. So ya in the medival era they followed it pretty well.
Personally, I think that this sort of thing can add to the atmosphere, but if it impedes the players path to enjoyment then it should probably left out. As much as I know that many people on these boards hate this word in relation to KCD, it is, in the end, a game. I like what @mossess described and can see it being used as sort of “set dressing” for certain events (though I’m assuming KCD is not going to utilize much in the way of scripted experiences … I hope). But (and I don’t think @mossess is proposing this), I would not want to see any sort of hard-coded “rules” that prevent me from playing the game because I have not followed some color-by-numbers medieval code of conduct. (Again, I’m not suggesting that’s what @mossess or anyone else is calling for - just my penniless thoughts!)
What, then, do we make of the chivalric literature of Christine di Pizan and Chretin de Troyes, or the epic chivalric tales found in the Chanson de Rolande and the genre of troubadoric Chanson de Geste that followed it? You seem to be confusing what Victorians called chivalry (which was mostly an effort to codify what where perceived as being the good qualities befitting a gentlemen) with the medieval concept of chivalry, which was quite different from how the Victorian’s imagined it. Granted, the Victorian’s
liked to harken back (often anachronistically and wrongly) to the medieval past as providing some historical origin for the values of their time, but despite that the plain fact of the matter is that a concept of chivalric ideals most definitely did exist. The key distinction is that where the Victorian’s believed chivalry to be some rigorous code of manners and etiquette, the concept that actually held sway in medieval Europe had far more to do with physical bravery and personal integrity than social etiquette.
Methinks you could benefit from reading some serious studies of medieval religion and beliefs, because (to be quite frank) your own views rather ironically have more than a smack of the attitudes prevalent among Victorian authors like Sir Walter Scott. Regine Pernoud’s “Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths” & Jonathan Riley-Smith’s seminal history of the Crusades would be a good place to start, among others.
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In addition to this, even the whole concept of medieval warfare is wrong in most of our heads. In most cases it was far away from a well organized modern total war, where large tracts of land where devasted and thousands of people were slaughtered. Around 1400 it was only the very early beginning of war with large numbers of mercenarys. Most wars in that time were very small local conflicts. If you read about them in original documents, you can read for instance about “the mill from miller YXZ was burned down”, “10 cows and 4 chickens were stolen from the farm XYZ”, “one woman was raped on Sunday, the attackers were hanged”, and so on… in most cases those conflicts were ended by a treaty and paying money and/or giving an amount of land to the other party. I think, if a knight in that time has fight in more than one really big war in his active life, he would be called an old veteran. Most of his time, a knight was not fighting and living at the edge of death, but more like an politican or manager, or, if he was a minor knight, he has to run his own farm and must earn his living together with his few peasants. Plenty of time to cultivate chivalry.
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