Yeah I just have a habit of over exaggerating historical events. It just make them sounds a bit more epic (and poetic). Probably cause I’m usually have to write things that are so dry and boring that I need an outlet. I feels like I could make the life of the most ordinary Baker from medieval Europe sounds like an exciting adventure
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That could be an exciting adventure.
Even a baker going to buy some new quern stones from the nearest market town and seeing a procession of pilgrims pass by could make a good story, albeit not a conventionally “epic” one.
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Gives me an idea for a game start out as a war-torn posit and maybe become a better leader argued a military commission plus we rise up and a mercenary company get Land and title then play the game of politics lose it and die.
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except the lose it and die part I like it,
Are you kidding me? Baking is boring as hell. Maybe a camp cook in one of the wars could be interesting. But never a baker. All that measuring and waiting.
My wife and sister-in-law would probably disagree.
More importantly, a good writer can make anything exciting. It’s not about baking itself, but portraying the process the way people who love baking see it.
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They have it takes place during the Medieval ages you have the guild system which is a whole nother layer of complexity and tomfoolery that you are just fantastic it witing.
I definitely can’t then. Cooking is an art, baking is a science and I already do enough science in my life already. But I think a story about a cook/chef in war time would be pretty interesting. No matter the time period, location or culture, soldiers would still love to be able to eat something nice while marching. It could be their last meal and yet there are supply shortages and good food usually don’t keep well. Making a nice meal for soldiers were a real challenge. Cooks would have to get real inventive during times like those
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You definitely don’t have to be one of the movers and shakers in a historical game for the story to be interesting and the choices to matter. You can show how the historical events impact the lives of more everyday people, and immerse into the daily life and experiences of the time. Getting invested in individual characters is a useful way to work with making choices matter in a historical setting (as it is in any setting).
That makes me think it might be rather entertaining to see a mythologized fictionalized version of a comparatively recent event 
With sort of the premise that this is the future’s take on the event, their own jumbled anachronistic dramatized version. It would have to be something where that wouldn’t be insensitive and trivializing, but just picture, say, George Washington and his robotic wooden teeth dueling Queen Victoria and her awesome sorcerous control over the sun… and yes, I know they’re not contemporaries. That’s the point.
Maintaining supply lines, foraging for food, providing support, social interaction… there’s all sorts of potential for a noncombatant main character in a war zone. Considering how significant supply trains have been throughout history, I’d love to see these kinds of characters explored more 
Not just cooks, too.
Every Hollywood WW2 movie ever made.
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Plus more magic and dueling? 
Talking about a more deliberately silly myth and magic parody of Hollywood takes on more distant history… give the last couple centuries the same treatment that generic Greco-Rome or the supposedly interchangeable Aztec-Inca types get…
“America won the war singlehanded” is a deliberately silly myth.
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“Intentionally comic,” then. As in, writing something that’s supposed to be funny, more as a parody of dramatized media portrayals of more ancient events. I was making a whimsical digression, nothing more. I’d agree that Hollywood WWII depictions are usually silly. Those would also tend to fall under insensitive and trivializing.
It would, though, be nice to see more evenhanded depictions of world war two. Considering how significant and destructive the eastern front was, it could stand to get more attention.
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Ahem, indeed. Battle of Britain was pretty much Britain having to fight the war single handed after all. No denying the USA entering the war, as with WW1, helped a lot mind.
I have to admit my Three Kingdoms knowledge entirely comes from playing Dynasty Warriors, so I don’t exactly know if the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Lu Bu and the like is real or not.
Since we’re been talking a fair bit about Alternate History, anyone here read Harry Turtledove? Guy did a great extended set of series on things like the South winning the American Civil War in 1862, WW2 starting in 1938 instead of 1939, the Japanese invading Pearl Harbor as well as bombing it, WW3 starting over Korea in 1951 and so forth.
There’s a lot of Czech, Polish, Canadian, ANZAC, and South African pilots who might disagree. That’s not counting the Second Sino-Japanese War on the other side of the planet either.
They’re real, but their characterisations are based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was more or less a puff piece with Liu Bei as the hero.
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Mind you this is how podcast but the podcast I listen to makes him sound very incompetent compared to his other two contemporary.
He was.
Cao Cao was the superior administrator and ruler by far, and the House of Sun (Sun Jian, Sun Ce, then Sun Quan) were all better military commanders.
If it weren’t for his complete lack of loyalty and Zhuge Liang running his civil service for him, Liu Bei would have probably gotten nowhere.
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hey if he does show you anything how much luck and personal Charisma can really get you
-Or having powerful descendants 1200 years later, for that matter…
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Fascinating discussion, may I be so shallow and cloying as to point fans of military history in the direction of my little known Hosted Game Divided We Fall, set in the Spanish Civil War and featuring multiple characters with different roles in the conflict.
To address the question posed at the beginning of the thread, I made the decision with that game that the characters actions could not impact the historical outcome of the war. That was a decision specific to that game because the characters were ‘ordinary people’ rather than the top decision makers, plus the outcome of the civil war to a large extent was determined by decisions in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Berlin and Moscow…
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