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

[Doug McCrae]

I guess you can definitively say that D&D isn't meant to emulate urban fantasy, though.

Or two world fantasy where kids from our world travel to Fairyland and sort out their problems. Narnia, Oz.

 

[Ariosto]

Getting too hung up on theoretical dividing lines can indeed be unhelpful. "We like both kinds here, Country and Western," though -- and as a fan of both, I find that Star Wars works (for me) much, much better as a fantasy than as science fiction. The purposes are different. SF considers what could be and comments on what currently is; fantasy deals at once in things that never can be and things that always have been.

Doc's prose can be torture to some, unfortunately. Cordwainer Smith's work is perhaps beyond easy categorization, being in a class of its own (and an enduring love of mine).

 

[Doug McCrae]

While all this trully makes a unique WORLD, I don't see it as making up a new genre.

It's not just the world. D&D has a story of its own. Multiple protagonists adventuring together, quite rare in fiction, go into massive monster, trap and treasure filled holes, existing almost nowhere else in fiction (except the film Cube, one of the closest things to D&D I've ever seen) and have fight after fight after fight after fight after fight...

 

[Mallus]

And that also brought rules changes

That's the big point of contention. I don't see anything particularly high fantasy about latter-edition D&D, particularly about 4e.

(Or 3e. Or 2e, for that matter, which was supposed to be some kind of turning point toward HF, but was nearly identical to 1e, rules-wise).

Basically, your evidence that supposedly demonstrates 4e being more 'high fantasy' can be explained/understood better other ways. For example, PC's do start tougher, but that has nothing to do with any sort of implied cosmic worldview, or the inability for evil to triumph over good. That change was made to alter the dynamics of the wargame part of the game. It's an entirely gamist decision.

Again, the change had nothing to do with helping D&D players reenact the Lord of the Rings. If anything 4e does high-action, amoral pulp sword and sorcery better than old-school D&D. It's can be just as episodic,challenging, and un-Christian. In fact, in 4e, you don't need to lug around a pseudo-Templar to heal your characters!

 

[Doug McCrae]

* Dungeons as underground fun-house of monsters, traps, mysteries, and mazes, often with more emphasis on player-challenge than on any given purpose.

Yes, Acererak and Halaster Blackcloak aren't characters, they're the DM.

 

[Krensky]

Not an exhaustive list of elements of the D&D pseudo-genre:

Dungeons And Dragons - Television Tropes & Idioms

 

[Raven Crowking]

"We like both kinds here, Country and Western,"

You deserve XP for the Blues Brothers reference, but unfortunately I cannot give them to you.


RC

 

[Doug McCrae]

In fact, in 4e, you don't need to lug around a pseudo-Templar to heal your characters!

Haha, good one. Zulgyan does have a point I think (provided you accept his highly questionable definitions of S&S and HF), but the path from S&S to HF has more twists than he makes out.

In Gygaxian D&D, the rules assumed the PCs were amoral looters, hence XP for gold. From Dragonlance onward, the default PCs were good guys. 2nd ed supported this with some rules - no xp for gold and no assassin class. This also made progression slower, making campaigns more epic.

3e brought back the assassin and level progression returned to the Gygaxian rate, making the game more S&S again. 3e remained lethal and fudging was no longer implied. 3e lost 2e's emphasis on story and setting so the game had, imo, become a lot more S&S, as Zulgyan defines S&S. Characters were more interesting mechanically but interesting characters aren't a HF trope. They're a trope of good fiction.

In 4e although there are warlocks and tieflings, they are just emo. PCs are still good guys, but some wear black. In 4e it's harder to die, so the game has become a bit more HF, epic quests are better supported.

But 4e is points of light, action is the most important element, not setting. In HF, setting is of supreme importance. The epic quest is really just an excuse to show off the geography and history of the author's beloved world.

In conclusion, 2e was the high point (or nadir) of HF in D&D. 3e is slightly more HF than 1e, purely because the PCs are assumed to be good, and 4e becomes a little more HF (but still less than 2e) because epic tales are better supported than in 3e.

 

[Ariosto]

That's the big point of contention. I don't see anything particularly high fantasy about latter-edition D&D, particularly about 4e.

(Or 3e. Or 2e, for that matter, which was supposed to be some kind of turning point toward HF, but was nearly identical to 1e, rules-wise).

Basically, your evidence that supposedly demonstrates 4e being more 'high fantasy' can be explained/understood better other ways. For example, PC's do start tougher, but that has nothing to do with any sort of implied cosmic worldview, or the inability for evil to triumph over good. That change was made to alter the dynamics of the wargame part of the game. It's an entirely gamist decision.

Again, the change had nothing to do with helping D&D players reenact the Lord of the Rings. If anything 4e does high-action, amoral pulp sword and sorcery better than old-school D&D. It's can be just as episodic,challenging, and un-Christian. In fact, in 4e, you don't need to lug around a pseudo-Templar to heal your characters!

That 2E pounded the square peg of legacy mechanics into the round hole of a new concept of what the game was about was for many (on both sides of the divide in opinion of the new concept) a bit of a problem.

Vulnerable player-characters and wide swings of fortune were not very conducive to the "heroic saga". The first factor could be greatly ameliorated simply by starting characters at a higher level. The second called for either railroad-style fudging (a la 2E) or revision of mechanics (a la WotC's designs, especially the latest).

Where the genre correspondence comes in -- and I hasten to repeat that I don't see this as any more than a side-effect -- is in one being primarily short form and the other long (and seemingly ever longer). An "S&S" story can quite properly finish with a protagonist coming to a bad end (not unknown in Dunsany, and common enough in C.A. Smith, I think). Such an incident, though, would be but a chapter in the epic novel form that has come to epitomize HF.

 

[Remathilis]

While all this trully makes a unique WORLD, I don't see it as making up a new genre.

Rem; that's all the specifics of the "D&D mileu". Setting stuff. That's not sufficient to call it a new genre.

Then again, the fact that D&D has never mapped all that well to highly differentiated and somewhat esoteric subgenre definitions makes categorization of it difficult anyway..

Well, D&D didn't revolutionize the literary world, but its not a book is it. But check out what it DID inspire.

* Countless other Fantasy RPGs: from Palladium to MERPS, they all owe something to the original.
* Video Game RPGS: Plenty of video games emulate the D&D tropes. Final Fantasy (white mage/black mage, etc) did it back in late 80's. Warcraft did it in the 90's. Everquest, Ultima and countless MUDS, MOOS, and other MMORPGS all owe many of their concepts to the "kitchen sink" approach of D&D.
* J-Animation like Lodoss Wars, Slayers, Bastard!, Beserk and more all take elements (some overtly, like Lodoss) from the concepts of D&D.

There are probably a few more there too.

The trick is that D&D's genre IS all other genres (well, choice bits of them) without emulating ANY of them perfectly. It takes tropes of S&S, HF, Sci-Fi, Westerns, Samurai stories, Myth, Horror, etc and mashes them to the point they become no single genre, but a blending that is uniquely D&D. While I listed some the traits that have origin in the game (and thus the "world" of D&D) they have become so synonymous with the concept of "generic fantasy world" that when healer-priests show up in Worlds of Warcraft or shapechanging druids fight for the cause of balance, we don't bat an eyelash that "D&D helped define that trait."