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

[Doug McCrae]

3) Conan wins against all odds because he is a literary protagonist, no doubt. But the novels constantly stress that it's all about his own skill, resourcefulness and luck, with no intervention from a Christian-like god how wants good to win over evil.

You have a point there. In Lord of the Rings, much of the heroes' success is due to having an angel fighting alongside them.

 

[Doug McCrae]

In 1e, PCs were motivated by money, like Conan and Cugel. XP was awarded for gold. Now XP is mostly awarded for killing things. Not sure if that makes d20 D&D more like high fantasy, mind you, but it's less swords & sorcery.

 

[mmadsen]

Old school D&D was very lethal for the characters created for it, and that lethality was part of playing the game. Surviving was its own reward, as you gained experience and became more powerful. It was also a life or death struggle, and the challenge of that was fun in its own way. But then a funny thing happened. Characters who survived the early grind of old-school D&D started taking on a life of their own. People started becoming more invested in that sort of character, and found playing a living, breathing character over a long term campaign more rewarding than the hack and slash grind of dungeon crawling. As a result of this, people started trying to play that sort of game from the beginning.

This is exactly how we played the game, back in the day. First-level characters were expected to die. Repeatedly. Then Frodo IV would make it to second level. If he made it to, say, third level, you quietly erased the IV from his name, and everyone forgot the names of his ill-fated cousins.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

This is exactly how we played the game, back in the day. First-level characters were expected to die. Repeatedly. Then Frodo IV would make it to second level. If he made it to, say, third level, you quietly erased the IV from his name, and everyone forgot the names of his ill-fated cousins.

I'd have to say that this comes from D&Ds evolution from a tabletop wargame. In most tabletop wargames, your pieces are all expendible. Early D&D treated PCs as expendible, and expected you to play the game like a wargame. Playing the game as a story came later, and had different demands, one of which was characters that were less expendible.

 

[Ariosto]

I think this is more of a "just so story" than an actual explanation of the history of D&D. I simply do not believe that during the design of OD&D actual thought went into differentiating fantasy sub genres. These sub genres weren't even that widely acknowledged until more recent times.

Addressing your second claim first: Fritz Leiber suggested "sword-and-sorcery as a good popular catchphrase for the field" in 1961, responding to Michael Moorcock's request for a term (his proposal being "epic fantasy") for the kind of fantasy-adventure story Robert E. Howard wrote.

In itself, that could be a very broad usage. Indeed, De Camp and Carter used it interchangeably with "heroic fantasy" to refer indiscriminately to the whole spectrum from Fafhrd to Frodo. However, Leiber himself wrote that

It strikes me (and something might be made of this) that Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are at the opposite extreme from the heroes of Tolkien. My stuff is at least as equally fantastic as his, but it is an earthier sort of fantasy with a strong seasoning of "black fantasy" -- or of black humor, to use the current phrase for something that was once called gallows' humor and goes back a long, long way. ... In a way, they're a mixture of Cabell and Eddison, if we must look for literary ancestors. Fafhrd and the Mouser have a touch of Jurgen's cynicism and anti-romanticism, but they go on boldly having adventures -- one more roll of the dice with destiny and death.

The foreword to the original D&D set suggested:

Those wargamers who lack imagination, who don't care for Burroughs' Martian adventures where John Carter is groping through black pits, who feel no thrill upon reading Howard's Conan saga, who do not enjoy the de Camp & Pratt fantasies or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser pitting their swords against evil sorceries will not be likely to find DUNGEONS and DRAGONS to their taste.

"Swords & sorcery best describes what this game is all about," Gygax wrote in the AD&D PHB, "for those are the two key fantasy ingredients." DMG Appendix N, Inspirational and Educational Reading, indicates his sources of inspiration. "The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt." There is an entry for

Tolkien, J.R.R. THE HOBBIT; "Ring Trilogy"

but the list is dominated by works that most critics and genre authors would categorize as S&S, horror or "weird tale", SF, or some other category of adventure fiction distinct in theme and temperament from the "high fantasy" of Tolkien. Gygax has indicated that he much preferred The Hobbit to TLOTR.

 

[Rechan]

This is exactly how we played the game, back in the day. First-level characters were expected to die. Repeatedly. Then Frodo IV would make it to second level. If he made it to, say, third level, you quietly erased the IV from his name, and everyone forgot the names of his ill-fated cousins.

I'd have to say that this comes from D&Ds evolution from a tabletop wargame. In most tabletop wargames, your pieces are all expendible. Early D&D treated PCs as expendible, and expected you to play the game like a wargame. Playing the game as a story came later, and had different demands, one of which was characters that were less expendible.

You know what this reminds me of? And, I hate to bring it up, but...

Video games.

Or more specifically, 70s-early 80s arcade games. You were expected to die, die, die. And maybe you made it to level 2. At which point it got harder, and you likely died a billion more times, before you reached the 3rd level. The goal was training yourself through countless trial and errors how to survive.

Granted, many of those games were made to eat your quarters.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

You know what this reminds me of? And, I hate to bring it up, but...

Video games.

Or more specifically, 70s-early 80s arcade games. You were expected to die, die, die. And maybe you made it to level 2. At which point it got harder, and you likely died a billion more times, before you reached the 3rd level. The goal was training yourself through countless trial and errors how to survive.

Granted, many of those games were made to eat your quarters.

That really hasn't changed for Wargames though over time. I'm still moderately familiar with Warhammer Fantasy/40K, and skirmishes for those games tend to result in an almost 90% casualty rate for the playing pieces. Most tabletop Wargames I've watched people play kill off pieces at an alarming rate, much higher than real world warfare in fact.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd have to say that this comes from D&Ds evolution from a tabletop wargame. In most tabletop wargames, your pieces are all expendible. Early D&D treated PCs as expendible, and expected you to play the game like a wargame. Playing the game as a story came later, and had different demands, one of which was characters that were less expendible.

OK, but let's take a step further back and divorce the individual characters from the players...and show how individual PCs can still be expendable even in a very story-based game:

If I as DM am telling a story, or if the players are building one on their own, or both, it's the *players* (including, here, me as DM) to whom the story is being told and-or by whom the story is being crafted. The characters, and more importantly the party as a whole, are either way merely the transitory vehicle through which the story is presented.

So, that said, it really matters not whether any particular character survives, as long as the player is still there. An example of such is my experience playing 3e's Forge of Fury - I went through 4 or 5 characters in that thing but I as player was still around at the end and got to see how the story came out.

One might almost say that adventures (the S+S part) are written for characters and stories (the HF part) are written for/by players. And only a TPK can end the story prematurely, and maybe not even then if someone's got a backup character or two waiting in town.

Lan-"some stories, however, go on long after they really should have ended"-efan

 

[Ariosto]

I mean no disrespect to the dead, but RPGs are bigger than Gygax. ... You might have a point in terms of D&D, but when it comes to RPGs, sorry man.

So the genre is moving because the next generations of gamers have less experience with the materials of the previous one. They want to emulate what they have read, seen and relate to, instead of what their dad's generation read, seen, and relate to. The game reflects that shift.

That seems to me precisely the point of the OP!

"Bigger than" can have an inclusive meaning, as in "Gygax's D&D is also an RPG". A meaning that excludes it would be like excluding Chuck Berry from rock & roll.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

OK, but let's take a step further back and divorce the individual characters from the players...and show how individual PCs can still be expendable even in a very story-based game:

If I as DM am telling a story, or if the players are building one on their own, or both, it's the *players* (including, here, me as DM) to whom the story is being told and-or by whom the story is being crafted. The characters, and more importantly the party as a whole, are either way merely the transitory vehicle through which the story is presented.

So, that said, it really matters not whether any particular character survives, as long as the player is still there. An example of such is my experience playing 3e's Forge of Fury - I went through 4 or 5 characters in that thing but I as player was still around at the end and got to see how the story came out.

One might almost say that adventures (the S+S part) are written for characters and stories (the HF part) are written for/by players. And only a TPK can end the story prematurely, and maybe not even then if someone's got a backup character or two waiting in town.

Lan-"some stories, however, go on long after they really should have ended"-efan

Characters who were present from the beginning tend to have a larger and deeper role in the story, and their players tend to be more heavily involved and invested in them. A new character who replaced a dead one is at a storyline disadvantage, as there are large parts of the saga that character wasn't present for. Duke Feldegar who sent the PCs into the Caves of Peril back at level 1 will have more to say to the original PCs than he would to replacements, and vice-versa when the PCs return there at level 5.

I'm saying that these are two different ways to play, and neither is wrong. I will say that RPG players as a whole tended to gravitate towards storyline play with less expendible characters, and RPG design over the past 35 years has followed this trend.