I feel like, while its necessary for our modern mind set to understand all of this, to your character it would sound a lot like over thinking it. In the real Dark Ages, there was a concept that rights came from God, either directly or indirectly through priests who interceded between people and God and kings who rules by divine right themselves. In a more anthropological description, we'd say that the belief in divine right was a tool for maintaining a social order. Whether that social order came from agreement of the people, force of arms or whatever is not something your average person living in that system puts much thought to. Where does our modern right to free speech come from? It comes from a system that to a greater or lesser extent protects that right and thrives from its existence.
I think this gets best at something that's been bugging me. I know that several people argue that rights are present looking at Dark Ages societies. But as I said in my question, they don't "organize themselves" around rights in the same way that we may consider ourselves to do so today. That is, in the time period, it's more likely to think of something *being* right or *doing* right than think of someone has *having* a right or no right. That's a problem when we're being asked to find the setting in the rights; it's difficult to look "through" the rights to see the society.
To contrast, in Sagas of the Icelanders, the social setting is presented mostly as customs, traditions, expectations, duties, and transgressions. It's possible to see rights all over the place while reading it, but the text rarely uses the word. In play, a handful of rights might be explored by players, with mechanics to implement them into the game.
Dark Ages currently has a setting with around a 100 different Rights, often contradictory, and I feel as a player (MC player or PC player) that I'm asked to resolve them before a setting can emerge. Further, I feel that, when so far playing without first resolving them, the setting is bland and nebulous, and that play mostly avoids those issues.
- Do players have rights?
- Does the MC have rights?
- Do non-players have rights?
- Do rights imply duties on nonplayers?
...
Nothing within the rules says so. I'm kind of confused why you would think the players have rights since they seem to speak directly to the social narrative within the game's fiction.
Margolotte has already indicated that the Denied Right move does not actually point at MC and PC players. There are other rights that do point at players, most of them involve having the right to a mechanical move (e.g., travel into a region), a mechanical substitution (rally warriors from among your peers), or both (explain to someone). Given the other correction, it seems more likely that these are also imprecisions of the current text, and that rights are supposed to only point at the fictional world.
I have more to say, but only time to write some of it (so I'm probably going to yell at Josh and Judson about it tonight). I still really want to get to what rights imply. I've been thinking about the SEP's article about rights (
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/) and the incidents that make up rights: privileges, claims, powers, and immunities. At the moment, I'm thinking about privilege ("A has a privilege to ? if and only if A has no duty not to ?") and claims ("A has a claim that B ? if and only if B has a duty to A to ?."). These are the implications in the world of the play that I'm trying to figure out. It's particularly difficult because the rights as presented are currently very contradictory. But it gets into questions of whether a player can do things that they have no Right to, and how characters are supposed to react to a PC with a Right.
Part of asking all of these questions is because I was starting to come up with solutions for the problems that I was having playing the game. And while I do believe that some of those ideas are steps toward making the game more playable (for me definitely, but hopefully for others too), I wasn't sure whether or not I was stripping out nuances intended to be in the game.
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