Have your PCs attended a humble peasants wedding in any of your games?

Have your PCs attended a humble peasants wedding in any of your games?

There was a wedding at the temple we burned down. We ate and drank well that night, embers in the moonlight, screams of despair told the village of our coming. They would never again celebrate the gift of life in this blanked, desolate town.

Well the only marriage that has happened in one of my games was between an Arabian prince and the heir to fantasy Russia, which is about as far from peasants as you can get.

Except the Prince is literally the son of a whore and the princess is an unlikable literal bastard, so it's actually pretty peasant tier. Good thing everyone, including the couple, is out of the loop.

Peasants don't celebrate their weddings. At least not in the way you have in mind. Usually they are wed because the girls father was paid to allow it. The only celebration is maybe a small dinner and a rough and tumble in the hay.

Peasants don't have the time to spare to organize such extravagant events in any case. Or the money.

Wedding celebrations were first used to show off how wealthy the people getting married are, and rub shoulders together with high society.

what?

the poorer people are, the more important it is to show off your wealth to the neighbors.

>Wedding celebrations were first used to show off how wealthy the people getting married are, and rub shoulders together with high society.

Yeah, but you don't have to be wealthy to want that.

No. The only game that it might have potentially been relevant had a society where peasant celebrations and rituals belong to the peasants, and noble celebrations and rituals belong to the nobles, and everyone tries to avoid crossing the wires.
Important people don't go to peasant weddings because it's supposed to be a time where they don't have to worry about offending some snooty noble.

Not peasants, but middle class merchants.

The party burnt the entire church to the ground after the party healer/prostitute started a fight with the bride.

Then the party's pseudo-paladin officiated a peasant and a very confused guard's wedding as a way to escape from having to pay their debt to society.

the guard and peasant are happily married with a son and daughter now.

It's also a chance for two families to meet each-other and make good impressions. That's VERY important for poor people that don't have a lot of leisure time. If you are sending your daughter off to a new family you want to know they are on the up and up.

Slovakian weddings, about as peasant tier as you can imagine, last about a full day and involve a huge extended family. Any single people of the right age will find themselves shoved together by relatives hoping to make more marriages happen in the future.

As to my characters..

A GURPS game set in 1983 had us attending a wedding in Afghanistan to meet a contact and build rapport. We smuggled in a nice wedding present and got drunk with the more mellow warriors of god.

>A GURPS game set in 1983 had us attending a wedding in Afghanistan to meet a contact and build rapport

That sounds pretty cool, user. Were the players like CIA assets or something?

Yeah, Rhodesia war veterans drawn into a new war by the promises of a CIA handler that wanted reliable, dangerous and deniable men in country. We had three months to study the situation and learn some Farsi from an Iranian, meaning we could barely make ourselves understood if we had to do something more complicated then ask for a beer and had to lean hard on our local translator.

No. Sadly, no. Our DM only cares for gigantic plots between kings and gods, which makes me want to fucking sleep. I just want to meet little people, dammit.

That's fucking radical

>party healer/prostitute
Are they both equally important roles in the party?

I feel this is some sort of bait, to draw out a specific response

There's more to a peasant wedding that just the dowry or bride price, the idea of creating a contract to link two families together is really important.

Generally speaking weddings are going to be the only time that peasants throw large celebrations on their own behalf, and are basically what they do with the little wealth they accumulate over their lives. In many traditions a dowry is paid, meaning that the wife's father pays the husband's father, ostensibly to help insure that his daughter's new family has the means to support her, and the husband's father throws the biggest wedding he can for them.

In some societies this is handled not by the husband's father but by his paternal uncle instead. This tends to occur in avunculocal societies, where the new couple goes to live with the uncle, instead of with the husband's father.

There's also a notable difference between dowry (what you probably thought you were talking about) and bride price (what you actually described). The idea that you just sell your daughters is actually uncommon. In most societies the the wife's father pays the husband's father, this is called a dowry. The idea of a bride price, the husband's father paying the wife's father, is actually on the rise recently in areas that once practiced dowry. Dowries are currently illegal basically everywhere because they were encouraging people, particularly in backwoods India, to basically marry some rich girl, split the dowry with the cops, then murder her and do it again. Bride price does not have this issue, and is thus becoming a more acceptable alternative.

This is genuinely informative.

Once had a game where we attended a peasant wedding. Got drunk, threw some hay around, good times.

>Arabian prince is the son of a whore

So like just about all harem children?

How much are these bride prices and dowries? It seems odd to me that given you're losing your daughter who would contribute to the family's wealth somehow through labor, you pay yhe ither family as well.

You misunderstand what a harem is/was.
A harem ensures a successor. It's not the Rulers personal fun area.
And in legal terms the ruler was married to all the woman in the harem he was not related to.

If you want ruler marrying whores (albeit of the highest class), look at the romans.

Not him,but it kinda makes sense considering that a pregnant woman needs far more ressources.

So the dowry is kinda like saying "I know it's a hassle raising children and looking after pregnant woman when you could instead get more shit done, here have a compensation for this. Treat my little girl well."

tg teaching things

>Peasants don't celebrate their weddings.
This is some of the worst pseudo-history bullshit I've ever heard. Please, don't post again about these things.

This, on the other hand, is actually pretty well informed. I still feel like one thing needs to be filled in or clarified:
>to basically marry some rich girl, split the dowry with the cops, then murder her and do it again.
The main reason why dowry is generally being outlawed and considered a dangerous practice, especially in poorer, patrilinear societies such as India, is not so much because of the dowry-motivated murders (though they are a problem in India), but rather that it leads to frequent increased infanticide of female children. The reason for that is pretty simple:

If you are a very poor farmer, live in a patrilinear society where your daughter will leave your family for the husband's one after the marriage AND you NEED to provide dowry, it means that each daughter becomes a significant future financial burden for the family that is unlikely to pay off. You are going to feed a child until wedding age, scramble every little spare money you can save up so you could pay for somebody to marry her, and... that is it.

A boy becomes an assent, an investment: once he grows up, beside working, he will further bring money into the family through the dowry he'll gain through marriage. But a daughter, that is just a financial sinkhole.

This is one of the MAIN reasons for female infanticide in some regions in India, but it became even bigger problem among rural folk in China (in regions where dowry was customary) after the one-child policy was established and the female children infanticide skyrocketed pretty much exactly for this reason.

My last game was all about the players crashing a peasant wedding.

We're playing a Viking campaign, mind you.