TSR Appendix N Discussion

[Cadence]

Weirdly, thought from that list if you had to narrow it down to six, I'd probably take off Poul Anderson.

I know, Three Hearts and Three Lions has some major BDE when it comes to D&D. But ... eh.

(That said, if you take Gygax at his word, which is always a tricky proposition, de Camp & Pratt and Merritt are the ones to look to for immediate D&D influence, in addition to REH, Leiber, Vance, and Lovecraft)

On McCrae's list, I'm stuck in the middle of one of the Merritt books right now, and then Zelazny is the one I haven't gotten to yet.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

On McCrae's list, I'm stuck in the middle of one of the Merritt books right now, and then Zelazny is the one I haven't gotten to yet.

I envy you. There's a few things out there that I wish I could experience again for the first time, and Amber and Lord of Light are on that short list.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

This is a regular point of tension in the community. How well do RPGs emulate stories? How well can they emulate stories? How much of a game is really left the closer you get to emulating stories? And how many people would actually want to play the resulting game?

A lot of gamers actively avoid anything and everything that would make for a good story and complain loudly and frequently when the referee (or players) do things that would push story over random game elements, optimization, "winning," and various other gamer habits. There are several active threads by both players and referees complaining about the people on the other side of the screen doing things that make perfect sense if the game emulated stories, but are antithetical to gaming.

DCC RPG brings in a lot more of the Appendix N vibe and elements than early D&D did, but it's also terrible at emulating story. Random die rolls can kill any character at any time. Anti-climactic results abound. Magic is chaotic. A good crit can kill anyone. To me, DCC RPG is a terrible Appendix N emulator if you use the main characters of Appendix N stories as your baseline. It's not possible to play as Conan in the DCC RPG. Nor is it possible to play Frodo or Sam or Gandalf. Nor Elric. Nor Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. But, it is possible to play characters within nearly identical worlds as those characters.

Yeah, it goes back to the thing we've chased forever on this board.

"Is D&D a game or a story?"

"Yes!"

Weirdly, thought from that list if you had to narrow it down to six, I'd probably take off Poul Anderson.

I know, Three Hearts and Three Lions has some major BDE when it comes to D&D. But ... eh.

(That said, if you take Gygax at his word, which is always a tricky proposition, de Camp & Pratt and Merritt are the ones to look to for immediate D&D influence, in addition to REH, Leiber, Vance, and Lovecraft)

See, if a person is trying to shave Appendix N to its smallest number of works, I think Three Hearts and Three Lions has to stay. There are so many things in it that inspired D&D, that the book is an immovable object on the list.

However, I also happen to think that The Broken Sword is the better novel. But, it does not have anywhere near the number of concentrated D&Disms as Three Hearts and Three Lions.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

If I were going to write my own Appendix N, to include only the authors/sources that have contributed meaningfully to my current D&D campaign, it would be as follows:

Andrews, Shirley. "Atlantis: Insights from a Lost Civilization."
Brooks, Terry. "The Heritage of Shannara" (Trilogy)
Dumas, Alexandre. "The Three Musketeers"
Ellsworth, Shawn. "The Seas of Vodari"
Haggard, H. Rider. "King Solomon's Mines"
Hope, Anthony. "The Prisoner of Zenda"
Square Enix Co., Ltd. "Final Fantasy" (Game franchise)
Stevenson, Robert Lewis. "Treasure Island"
Verne, Jules. "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"
Westerfield, Scott. "Leviathan"
Wizards of the Coast, "Unearthed Arcana - Ixalan"

And if I were going to write my own Appendix X to include all of the authors and sources that have contributed meaningfully to all of my D&D campaigns I've run over the years, it would have tens of thousands of entries.

Good list, I've used about six of those myself.

 

[Irlo]

Dumas, Alexandre. "The Three Musketeers"

Have you read "The Phoenix Guards" by Stephen Brust? It's one of my favorites.

"The Three Musketeers" is "The Phoenix Guards" without sorcery.

 

[Oofta]

This is a regular point of tension in the community. How well do RPGs emulate stories? How well can they emulate stories? How much of a game is really left the closer you get to emulating stories? And how many people would actually want to play the resulting game?

A lot of gamers actively avoid anything and everything that would make for a good story and complain loudly and frequently when the referee (or players) do things that would push story over random game elements, optimization, "winning," and various other gamer habits. There are several active threads by both players and referees complaining about the people on the other side of the screen doing things that make perfect sense if the game emulated stories, but are antithetical to gaming.

DCC RPG brings in a lot more of the Appendix N vibe and elements than early D&D did, but it's also terrible at emulating story. Random die rolls can kill any character at any time. Anti-climactic results abound. Magic is chaotic. A good crit can kill anyone. To me, DCC RPG is a terrible Appendix N emulator if you use the main characters of Appendix N stories as your baseline. It's not possible to play as Conan in the DCC RPG. Nor is it possible to play Frodo or Sam or Gandalf. Nor Elric. Nor Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser. But, it is possible to play characters within nearly identical worlds as those characters.

Whether we're telling a story or not is a matter of preference. I don't want to tell a story when I game, I want to inhabit a world of imagination that has been formed by stories. I want to be the guiding hand of that world as a DM or experience it as a person living in a world of dragons as a PC. If I want to tell a story I'll write a story, when playing a game I want to have a story emerge from what we experience at the table and how our characters respond to those experiences.

Nothing right or wrong with having either goal of course, but a game that was all about a story simply doesn't work for me because it's not attempting to simulate the experience I want.

 

[overgeeked]

Whether we're telling a story or not is a matter of preference. I don't want to tell a story when I game, I want to inhabit a world of imagination that has been formed by stories. I want to be the guiding hand of that world as a DM or experience it as a person living in a world of dragons as a PC. If I want to tell a story I'll write a story, when playing a game I want to have a story emerge from what we experience at the table and how our characters respond to those experiences.

Nothing right or wrong with having either goal of course, but a game that was all about a story simply doesn't work for me because it's not attempting to simulate the experience I want.

I agree. My preferences seem to align with yours.

But it's not really a question of preferences. It's a question of capability and functionality.

It's not "should RPGs emulate stories?"

It's "can RPGs emulate stories?"

And "to what degree can RPGs emulate stories while still remaining something we'd recognize as a game?"

To me, RPGs can badly mimic a few features of stories, but they cannot emulate stories while remaining a game. The closer we get to emulating a story, the less of a game the activity becomes. To achieve things like a satisfying climax to the story you have to remove the game elements that could cause an anti-climactic resolution, like player choice and random chance.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree. My preferences seem to align with yours.

But it's not really a question of preferences. It's a question of capability and functionality.

It's not "should RPGs emulate stories?"

It's "can RPGs emulate stories?"

And "to what degree can RPGs emulate stories while still remaining something we'd recognize as a game?"

Can? Yes. To what degree? Rather a big one! It's why games like Shadowrun, Masks, and V:tM/W:tA exist. They are quite literally all, to one degree or another, emulating some kind of story environment (specifically: cyberpunk and transhumanism; Teen Titans-style supers; and Anne Rice-style "what measure is a monster?" romances, though Werewolf is more about eco-activism/terrorism and self-inflicted societal collapse.)

To me, RPGs can badly mimic a few features of stories, but they cannot emulate stories while remaining a game. The closer we get to emulating a story, the less of a game the activity becomes. To achieve things like a satisfying climax to the story you have to remove the game elements that could cause an anti-climactic resolution, like player choice and random chance.

Why? The key to making it work is to do at least one of the following:

• Make the gameplay actually about facing climactic problems, so there is no such thing as a player choice which does not face them (unless, of course, they simply choose not to play.)
• Bake the underlying thematic concepts you want to examine into the mechanics, so that by engaging with them, you are necessarily producing some kind of narrative, and whatever conclusion results is part of the exploration.

The former is "Story Now," or what I call "Values & Issues." Gameplay functions by establishing the things the character (and by extension, player) Values, what things they really don't want to give up or part with, and then putting those things on the line with Issues that have to be resolved. Sooner or later, something has to give--and that's where the climax for that scene occurs. Perhaps it's the agonizing decision to give up some other value instead of the thing currently at Issue. Perhaps they take a risk and succeed, and thus get what they want; or they take a risk and fail, and pay a price. Regardless, the gameplay occurs in the process of generating and resolving climactic moments.

The latter is "genre sim," or what I call "Conceit & Emulation" (not for nothin that that second word is there!) With C&E, it doesn't really matter whether the conclusion is satisfying in and of itself, for exactly the same reason that there are many extremely effective stories that have no clean, satisfying conclusion but are still excellent literature. Because the point of C&E isn't to come out feeling like, "Yeah, that was a really nicely wrapped-up story!" It's to explore something through play--to start from a concept, a premise, a theme, and find out what results from the clash of that concept/premise/theme and the personality of the characters involved. In that sense, it's a lot like Shakespearean tragedy; Romeo and Juliet spoils its own ending in line six, for God's sake, and the conclusion is, "Romeo kills himself mere seconds before Juliet wakes up, and then she kills herself in response, and then their families show up and reconcile in their grief." That's not satisfying at all! And yet the story is timeless, almost literally; R&J is a medieval retelling of a myth where the oldest known written version is from Ovid, but he was almost certainly retelling an etiological myth from Babylon, and artistic depictions indicate it was at least a couple centuries older.

There's no need to take player agency away. You just have to make "climax and resolution," or "theme and (thematic) exploration," be the tools by which gameplay occurs. Then, as long as you do in fact actually engage in play, some kind of story is inevitable! Dungeon World does the former; Vampire: the Masquerade does the latter; Masks does both.

 

[Parmandur]

The only thing I can contribute to that discussion is that I've met Terry Brooks (he lives nearby), and found him to be an excellent human being. He's patient with his fans, he's very supportive of derivative works, and apart from the occasional bit of shade he throws at George R. R. Martin's publishing schedule, he never has anything bad to say about other fantasy authors.

He's not flawless, and neither are his books, but if you're hunting for inspiration in your D&D game you can do much worse than Terry Brooks.

Reading Brooks autobiography, it made a lot of sense of Sword of Shannara (which made me absolutely apoplectic as a middle schooler) to learn that Brooks had spent years learning to write by finding models he liked, of various genres, and very intentionally rewriting them beat for beat to learn what made them tick. The last one of those he did happened to be a pretty readable LotR copy-pasta that he sent to editors right when Lester Del Tey was looking to test if people would buy a generic, beat for beat ripoff of LotR. Right place, right time. I appreciate that he branched out once he could focus on writing full time.

 

[Parmandur]

Whenever Appendix N comes up, I think about the six author list in the middle of this post...

https://www.enworld.org/threads/a-shorter-appendix-n.674084/#post-8066806

... by this thread's OP.

Anderson, Poul: THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS;
Howard, R. E.: "Conan" series
Leiber, Fritz: "Fafhrd & Gray Mouser" series; et al
Moorcock, Michael: STORMBRINGER; STEALER OF SOULS;
Tolkien, J. R. R.: THE HOBBIT; "Ring trilogy"
Vance, Jack: THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD; THE DYING EARTH; et al

Pretty solid short list.