"HF" vs. "S&S" gaming: the underlying reason of conflict and change in D&D

[Raven Crowking]

Didn't the Dragon continually add optional material to 1e for years? Like a decade? And that's just a single source. I'm not sure I see your point.

In the 1e era, simply appearing in Dragon did not make something an "official" rules addition.

And why does source matter?

If it doesn't, then the OP's initial statements must be true, even if you don't believe it to be true of the baseline. Or anything else I say about any edition of the game, for that matter, good or bad. After all, where those mods came from is irrelevant, right?


RC

 

[Ariosto]

Yes, there was a lot of new (or not so new, if one had S4 and the Dragon issues) and significantly game-changing material between the covers of UA ... until the pages fell out of the cheap binding. The Survival Guides introduced "non-weapon proficiencies". Oriental Adventures was a case of "never the twain shall meet" unless one was (I think) foolhardy.

Some folks call "the orange spine books" (perhaps including the MM2) the 1.5 edition.

There are actually quite a few differences in detail in the 2E core rules, for better or worse (or both in different ways) depending on perspective. Some monsters (such as dragons and giants) got notably beefed up. However, it is pretty trivial to use a 1E module with 2E rules, or vice versa; and one might get the best of both worlds by treating the newer volumes as complimenting, rather than replacing, the older.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

The DMing advice in 2e is explicitly to avoid making the PCs disposable.

To a lesser degree, 3E did this as well. Looking at the systems independant of the DMing advice, both systems were meatgrinders for PCs, especially at the lowest levels. You had to run the game contrary to the system(or the dice) to avoid making the PCs disposable, and most people in my experience did just that.

4E was the first edition of D&D to truly embrace non-disposable PCs at a system level, with its bend but don't break PCs that are easy to thrash but hard to finish off.

 

[Zulgyan]

D&D fantasy's world view is that the purpose of life is to kill things and take their stuff. There are no morals. Money, magic items and killing things are of value. It's a deeply primitive genre, which is probably why it's used mostly for games, not novels.

Even in post Gygaxian D&D, which assumes the PCs are of good alignment, these 'good' people kill hordes and hordes of sentient beings and rob them. Ostensibly in a good cause. Post-Gygaxian morality is something of a figleaf.

You're wrong about the importance of trappings, they're an important part of most genres, particularly in the case of D&D fantasy, which is probably most notable for its quite bizarre trappings. Sword & sorcery with no pre-Renaissance combat and no magic isn't sword & sorcery.

By contrast horror and noir are genres that can take place anywhere. They are trapping free, relying on mood and atmosphere.

The way you describe D&D, which I agree with generally, is pretty much sword & sorcery to me.

 

[Zulgyan]

Note that being hard to kill is also a characteristic of popular swords and sorcery heroes.

EGG said that an 8th level Fighter in OD&D would be like Conan.

That's also very hard to kill in OD&D.

 

[Melan]

No kidding, even with Bledsawian level demographics (i.e. a lot of NPCs who are 2nd to 4th level PC-classed types), a 8th or 9th level fighter can wipe the floor with a whole lot of opponents. Alone. I have seen this, and it wasn't pretty.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Sword & Sorcery literature is based on an Atheist worldview. So there is no god to take care of you. No god to be the parameter and judge of morality. No higher force of good that will finally triumph over evil. Humanity is alone. So it's all about power and survival.

I find this amazingly laughable.

Jirel of Jorey, Elak of Atlantis, Swordsman of Mars and dozens of other Sword & Sorcery style heroes survive because of... "DM Fiat." The characters are indeed often helpless in many situations and rely on outside sources. It may not be god, but it is a higher force that saves the day. I can't count the number of times Dalan (powerful druid spellcaster) saves Elak nor how many times Jirel is powerless agianst some 'potent sorcerery' or how even Conan is saved by the Phoenix Sword when necessary.

These entities may not be the good but they are certainly heavily used to enforce "the GM said so." attitude that may have been very common in early gaming.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Nothing in this thread has convinced me that the OD&D/1E was S&S more than later editions, or that changing fantasy tastes away from S&S drove the evolution of game mechanics.

 

[LostSoul]

That's because the divide has nothing to do with genre tropes and everything to do with player priorities.

The first post does a good job of outlining those priorities, but then gets it confused with a specific genre. Whatever. You can play a game with all the HF tropes and still cater to the player priorities that the OP calls Sword and Sorcery.

 

[Ariosto]

I think that an "adventure path" should be easier to manage with the tools in 4E (in the sense of reducing the need to "fudge"). That's a boon for "high fantasy" if by that one means a grand saga. One can come to that approach with all sorts of fiction-genre influences, though.

If the heroes are more clearly "larger than life" from the start, then that may veer away from an "everyman turned hero by necessity" theme that seems to me prominent in Tolkien's works and their emulators. It suggests to me rather the heroes of mythology, often demigods, from which I see a direct line to at least a prominent strain of S&S. "Coming of age" stories do not seem to figure much in the latter. We tend to meet the great adventurers when they are already in their primes, suggestive to me more of Traveller than of any edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In a modern epic of Good versus Evil, the ilk of Conan or the Gray Mouser is likely to be not the main protagonist but one of the supporting cast.

(Lin Carter's "Thongor of Lemuria" cycle comes to mind as just such a melange as seems to me evocative of D&D.)

I think key differences in expectation between the original game and the new have much to do with the wargame context of the former (from which our term "campaign" derives). Many aspects of the old rules make much more sense when seen from that perspective, just as many newer rules are more sensible when viewed in light of a concept of a "story game".