Gaming Generation Gap

[Hairfoot]

I just started reading Jack Vance. I'm through the Cugel books and into Magnus Ridolph. I got the nostalgia in reverse: "ah, so this is what OD&D was based on when I played it!"

 

[jasonbostwick]

More recently I've been reading China Mieville (just finished The City & The City; and just today noticed that he's going to be working on a Paizo supplement...).

A Paizo supplement? Where did you hear about that?

I saw the news about Tales of New Crobuzon but nothing about Mieville and Paizo beyond what was in Dungeon 352.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Umm, what? When was Conan terrified? Ever. I've read the Howard novels and I've watch the movies. At what point is the super-heroic, last son of Atlantis, who is stronger, faster, smarter and more bad assed than everyone around him EVER terrified.

I think it's the very nostalgia colored glasses that you wear that disconnect you from "realism" and "simulationism".

Quote from REH:

"And then the hair lifted from the nape of his neck, and he felt his skin roughen with a supernatural thrill."

This knowledge however did not calm the youth's sudden chill of terror. Fearless beyond his years in war, willing to stand against a man or brute beast in battle, he feared neither pain, nor death, nor mortal foes. But he was a barbarian from the northern hills of backward Cimmeria, and like all barbarians, he dreaded the supernatural terrors of the grave and the dark, with all its dreads and demons. Much rather would Conan have faced even the hungry wolves than remain here with the dead thing glaring down at him from its rocky throne, while the wavering firelight painted life and animation into the withered skull-face and moved the shadows in its sunken sockets like dark, burning eyes."

"He stopped, frozen in mid-stride, as a sound - an indescribable, dry creaking - came from the throne side of the crypt. Wheeling, he saw... and felt the hair lift from his scalp and the blood turn to ice in his veins. All his superstitious terrors and primal night-fears rose howling, to fill his mind with shadows of madness and horror. For the dead thing lived..."

You didn't read very far then. Those are from the very first story.

 

[Reynard]

I pray to the gods of comedy that he didn't.

Fruedian slip?

 

[Reynard]

I guess this is my generation gap...you talk about simulation and realism, yet prefer 1e. Seems like (never played, just read threads on it) 1e is incredibly unrealistic. People talk about going through PCs like a fashionista goes through clothes. "Tom died when he opened the door and all the water came rushing out and smashed him against the wall. Then Bill...aww man. He fumbled with his great axe and decapitated himself. It was amazing! Johhnny...he actually got through 3 rooms of the dungeon before walking into that invisible green slime." The high death rate and rotating roster of PCs is realistic? I know adventuring is dangerous, but...wow. It makes me wonder why these people didn't just line up to walk into a meat grinder and get it over with faster.

What you're describing here is a kind og KoDT over the top satire of play, which, while highly entertaining, doesn't really have any bearing on actual play.

 

[Shemeska]

A Paizo supplement? Where did you hear about that?

I saw the news about Tales of New Crobuzon but nothing about Mieville and Paizo beyond what was in Dungeon 352.

Here's a link to it, the Guide to the River Kingdoms which will be a supplement on the setting for one of the next Pathfinder APs.

Thieves, brigands, deposed princes, and the truly desperate inhabitants of the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting flock to the River Kingdoms, a motley collection of tiny enclaves whose rulers command only so far as their brute strength and mercenary armies can carve out for them. This comprehensive 64-page guidebook presents the first-ever extensive overview of this treacherous land, where any man can become a king so long as he keeps his hand on his sword and his back free of daggers. More than a dozen rogue kingdoms come alive with lavish illustrations and detailed maps in this first look at the setting for the next Pathfinder Adventure Path: KINGMAKER!

by Eric Bailey, Kevin Carter, Elaine Cunningham, Adam Daigle, Mike Ferguson, Joshua J. Frost, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Rob Manning, Colin McComb, Alison McKenzie, China Miéville, Brock Mitchel-Slentz, Jason Nelson, Richard Pett, Chris Pramas, Jeff Quick, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Neil Spicer, Lisa Stevens, Matthew Stinson, and John Wick.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There's less fear, trepidation, uncertainty and just plain retreat and/or failure in modern stories, regardless of medium, than there is in stories from just one or two decades ago. Blame John McCain or Hulk Hogan (yes, pro wrestling is genre entertainment) if you want, but the "action hero" is one who gets "bloodied" but never goes down, who always pulls out a badass move in the end and wins the day. Compare this to earlier, when even Conan was terrified of the undead or demons or magic.

It does seem utterly bizarre to me to associate Conan with any kind of realism. Trepidation, uncertainty? That's not Conan. That's the opposite of Conan. He's not a modern hero, not some angst-ridden, doubting Peter Parker type. There's very little internal world, he's all external, a man of action, not a useless philosopher like Elric. He's a man's man. A tail-chasing, danger-embracing, skull-splitting escapist fantasy for the depression years.

The passage anti-Tolkien quotes above is quite uncharacteristic, dealing as it does with Conan's thoughts and feelings for a whole two paragraphs.

Okay, so magic is his kryptonite, he's allegedly scared of it. That doesn't stop him killing almost every weird monster and wizard he meets. He doesn't avoid encounters that don't have any treasure, like old school D&Ders faced with a wandering monster. He murders them.

As Hussar says, Conan is a superhero. One reason I disliked REH's stories is that Conan is so very much better than everyone around him, he rarely experiences serious setbacks, he hardly ever loses. In only one I read was he actually, temporarily, defeated, knocked unconscious by a stone thrown at his head. That event was remarkable because it was exceptional. Conan doesn't really experience the 'middle downturn' common in fiction. Unlike a wrestler he doesn't lie on the mat in the middle of the fight, getting stomped by the cheating heel. As soon as he confronts a foe, he wins.

 

[Hussar]

Quote from REH:

"And then the hair lifted from the nape of his neck, and he felt his skin roughen with a supernatural thrill."

This knowledge however did not calm the youth's sudden chill of terror. Fearless beyond his years in war, willing to stand against a man or brute beast in battle, he feared neither pain, nor death, nor mortal foes. But he was a barbarian from the northern hills of backward Cimmeria, and like all barbarians, he dreaded the supernatural terrors of the grave and the dark, with all its dreads and demons. Much rather would Conan have faced even the hungry wolves than remain here with the dead thing glaring down at him from its rocky throne, while the wavering firelight painted life and animation into the withered skull-face and moved the shadows in its sunken sockets like dark, burning eyes."

"He stopped, frozen in mid-stride, as a sound - an indescribable, dry creaking - came from the throne side of the crypt. Wheeling, he saw... and felt the hair lift from his scalp and the blood turn to ice in his veins. All his superstitious terrors and primal night-fears rose howling, to fill his mind with shadows of madness and horror. For the dead thing lived..."

You didn't read very far then. Those are from the very first story.

Heh, that's most certainly NOT the first REH Conan story. However, that's the first one of the reprints, so, that's fair enough.

Ok, when Conan is a young teen, he's afraid. Note, while being afraid, he still takes the sword and kills the undead creature. So much for being so scared he runs away.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There has been a tendency, over the last 100 or so years, for heroes in adventure fiction to become more powerful in absolute terms. They've become weirder and more magical. (Psychologically, however they've become more realistic, more doubt-ridden, we see more of their thought processes.)

Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen demonstrates this. Most of them were the bad guys in the original stories. If Moore had created a League composed of protagonists from the time period, if they'd all been like Rudolf Rassendyll or Raffles, the story would have been too boring for our modern sensibilities. Instead he choose the more outre, interesting characters. The ones with the powers and impossible machines. Villains became protagonists.

Although superheroes, the most powerful characters in adventure fiction until Dragonball Z, appeared in the late 1930s at first they were mostly just guys in costumes. Most Golden Age superheroes weren't like Superman or the Spectre, they were Batman-types. It was only by the Silver Age they virtually all had powers, and in general the level of power increased over time.

In fantasy fiction, the rise of the wizard as protagonist exemplifies the trend. In the 1930s, wizards were the bad guys. Gandalf is a mentor, not the hero. Post WW2, the wizard could take the starring role - Elric, Dying Earth, The Face In the Frost, A Wizard of Earthsea. 1974 D&D, with its wizard and cleric PCs, was part of this trend towards more powerful, magical heroes. Compare also the willingness of all D&D PCs to use magic to Conan's distrust of the stuff.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I am definitely older generation and have played all those video games. They aren't that high on my inspiration list.

The fact that they are not that high on your inspiration list probably has something to do with the generation gap. People tend to be more inspired by the stuff they first encounter, and the stuff they encountered most often in the younger years.

What I find most interesting here, though, is how self-referential this may have become to D&D (and other fantasy RPGs, but most D&D). A large percentage of the influences that are supposedly "younger generation" were influenced directly or indirectly by D&D.

The video games above, all influenced by D&D. More recent fantasy video/computer games? Influenced either by D&D or games influenced by D&D. The OP, and several other posters, list their primary literary influences to be D&D novels. Anime, a lot of it was influenced by D&D, sometimes quite directly.

Twenty years from now many may consider some version of D&D to be a perfect representation of their fantasy inspirations because they all grew out of D&D.

You certainly have a point in saying that D&D has been extremely influential in the modern conception of fantasy, but I think you overstate exactly how influential it is.

Sure, the original Final Fantasy blatantly steals a huge number of ideas from D&D in general and Dragonlance in particular, and many of these stolen ideas (such as the Black Mage/White Mage/Red Mage distinction) continue to stay close to the thematic core of the series, but at the same time the Final Fantasy series has gone off to create a huge number of interesting and unique ideas that don't resemble core D&D whatsoever. I mean, at this point a significant fraction of the Final Fantasy games feature modern or futuristic settings in which swordsmen, wizards, guns, cars, and robots all exist side by side, something that D&D itself has not supported whatsoever, and probably won't support any time soon.

At the same time, many other videogames have been creating their own ideas and diverging more and more from the D&D default. If anything, the kind of vanilla fantasy that D&D represents is considered old-fashioned and cliché in the realm of modern videogames, and new games are continually pushing the boundaries of fantasy and looking for new inspirations and ideas.

So, in a certain sense, D&D is showing its age, even in 4E, more than it is really representing the pinnacle of modern fantasy.

To put this in a bit clearer of terms... There are plenty of people I have encountered who seem to not want to see a ninja class, or even ninjas as a whole, in 4E. However, from my own perspective, the ninja may as well be part of the "vanilla core" of fantasy character archetypes, right alongside the knight and the wizard. Ninja certainly are not some kind of exotic thing you only put into an "oriental" campaign you play when you want to try something different for a while. I think the same might be said for the use of firearms in a fantasy game...