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*Pathfinder & Starfinder
D&D Has Never Been Suitable for Generic Fantasy
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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5926767" data-attributes="member: 58197"><p>No. Middle-Earth is not the least bit generic--and understand, I'm not saying this as a Tolkien fanboy offended that you would apply such a label to the master's work. I'm saying it as a fantasy fan who detests the assumption that Tolkien speaks for all fantasists.</p><p></p><p>Look at "A Song of Ice and Fire." Look at the Earthsea Trilogy, or the Dark Tower books, or the Black Company, or Harry Potter. Go back to Shakespeare and read "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Switch to graphic novels and read the Sandman books. All of these are fantasy classics, but none of them looks much like "The Lord of the Rings" beyond general details of having magic and being set in a medieval world--and in the case of Harry Potter and the Sandman, not even that. I love Tolkien, but his work has become a blight on the genre because people act like there isn't anything else.</p><p></p><p>As to the question of what <em>is</em> generic fantasy, I don't think you can point to a single work of fantasy and say "That's generic fantasy" any more than you can point to a person and say "That's an average person." (The average person, after all, is 51% female and 49% male.) However, you can say that a system <em>supports</em> generic fantasy if it can be used to reproduce a wide range of fantasy settings and tropes. A system that could, with equal ease, mimic Lord of the Rings, the Black Company, Harry Potter, and Midsummer Night's Dream would have a good claim to support generic fantasy. In this respect, D&D fails hard. Other systems fail too, but not as hard. I'm not offhand aware of a system that I would say succeeds.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5926767, member: 58197"] No. Middle-Earth is not the least bit generic--and understand, I'm not saying this as a Tolkien fanboy offended that you would apply such a label to the master's work. I'm saying it as a fantasy fan who detests the assumption that Tolkien speaks for all fantasists. Look at "A Song of Ice and Fire." Look at the Earthsea Trilogy, or the Dark Tower books, or the Black Company, or Harry Potter. Go back to Shakespeare and read "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Switch to graphic novels and read the Sandman books. All of these are fantasy classics, but none of them looks much like "The Lord of the Rings" beyond general details of having magic and being set in a medieval world--and in the case of Harry Potter and the Sandman, not even that. I love Tolkien, but his work has become a blight on the genre because people act like there isn't anything else. As to the question of what [I]is[/I] generic fantasy, I don't think you can point to a single work of fantasy and say "That's generic fantasy" any more than you can point to a person and say "That's an average person." (The average person, after all, is 51% female and 49% male.) However, you can say that a system [I]supports[/I] generic fantasy if it can be used to reproduce a wide range of fantasy settings and tropes. A system that could, with equal ease, mimic Lord of the Rings, the Black Company, Harry Potter, and Midsummer Night's Dream would have a good claim to support generic fantasy. In this respect, D&D fails hard. Other systems fail too, but not as hard. I'm not offhand aware of a system that I would say succeeds. [/QUOTE]
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