Quote:
Originally Posted by Michele
Well, most of the historical settings over human history featured slavery, and it was a fact of life. Naturally, PCs could be not wealthy enough to own slaves, or non-conformists who don't want to own other humans, or even abolitionists. But to have an entirey society without slavery, at TL3, then probably only having Create Food relatively common isn't enough, for the reasons I mentioned.
You either have to go all-out post-scarcity, for everything and not just food (and even then that might not entirely rule out violence and servitude); or you have to make it so that the result of the resource situation is an essentially classless, not stratified society (think hunter-gatherer bands).
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Historically, sure, but game settings tend to avoid this, largely taking the more modern approach of having poor laborers instead of slaves. That probably would have worked historically as well (and thus works fine for non-historical settings of comparable TL), although at least for a time I think slavery and serfdom may have been a bit more economically viable. Leaving it out has the advantage of avoiding distracting your players with emancipation plots and the like. Of course, that depends on the players - some may accept it as "just the way things are" or even make use of it to acquire new allies of sorts, but (unless playing an unsavory character) tend to treat their slaves more like employees.
(There are, naturally, also players who will gleefully have their characters abuse their slaves, which is another reason to avoid such settings)