D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

[Clint_L]

I have to disagree with you there. I don’t see anything particularly great about George R.R. Martin’s writing which seems much more like pulp than Tolkien. Many of the current fantasy writers really aren’t that appealing. I got more enjoyment from Weis & Hickman back in the TSR glory days than anything from other fantasy writes from the 90’s moving forward.

First, I think Martin and Tolkien are not very comparable writers; Martin is perhaps reacting against Tolkien's version of high fantasy, but they have very distinct styles and thematic agendas. I also would not use Martin to characterize contemporary fantasy, at all. He, much like Tolkien, is a singular entity. There is a significant amount of contemporary fantasy that pretty clearly draws on that gritty Martin style, though; Joe Abercrombie comes immediately to mind.

As for your latter point, art is subjective, so you're not wrong to like what you like. As a teacher of literature, I can tell you that there is a lot more contemporary fantasy writing that could be broadly characterized as "literary," meaning less driven by pure plot and less reliant on cliches and stereotypes. There is MUCH more diversity; like by orders of magnitude. Frankly, better writers are now writing fantasy, probably because they had the chance to grow up with it. It used to be that a serious writer wouldn't touch most genre fiction with a ten foot pole, and I am thankful that that has, to some degree, changed.

I largely avoid re-reading the fantasy that I loved as a youth because I find that most of it just doesn't hold up. I cannot tell you how much I loved Sword of Shannara when I was 12; I recently picked it up and had to stop after a few pages because I found it so obviously cliched that it was cringe-inducing. I read every Howard novel I could find as a kid and refuse to re-read him now precisely because I don't want to change that experience (I'll still re-read an old Savage Sword of Conan, though).

But most of those texts were distinctly not written to be timeless classics, they were written quickly to satisfy a publishing demand. Shannara was written, basically, to be Tolkien for kids and it works! So I'm not going to criticize it for being what it was intended to be. Conan stories were written as entertainment for a pulp magazine audience, to provide them visceral thrills. They work as intended. Considered in that context, no notes. Considered in a contemporary fantasy context, well, that's a different story.

This forum (all Internet forums?) skews much older. There's a lot of stuff we know that younger audiences don't, but that goes both ways.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I have to disagree with you there. I don’t see anything particularly great about George R.R. Martin’s writing which seems much more like pulp than Tolkien. Many of the current fantasy writers really aren’t that appealing. I got more enjoyment from Weis & Hickman back in the TSR glory days than anything from other fantasy writes from the 90’s moving forward.

Obviously taste is taste but there's no literary analysis that's going to suggest Weis and Hickman are, on literally any level, as talented as GRRM as writers. That doesn't mean you can't like them better, but it does mean that saying there's nothing "particularly great" about GRRM and other 90s and later writers whilst praising H&W rings pretty spectacularly hollow/individual. A lot of fantasy written today isn't great but also quite a lot is. NK Jemisin's Broken Earth series is honestly an "instant classic", for example. It also fits surprisingly well into older SF/F traditions - it could have been written in 1970-something.

 

[overgeeked]

I have to disagree with you there. I don’t see anything particularly great about George R.R. Martin’s writing which seems much more like pulp than Tolkien. Many of the current fantasy writers really aren’t that appealing. I got more enjoyment from Weis & Hickman back in the TSR glory days than anything from other fantasy writes from the 90’s moving forward.

I do something similar with sci-fi & fantasy. I prefer stuff from the 1970s or earlier. Just about everything since is hard to read. I think that’s when there was a big push to move away from plot and to instead focus on character. I’ll gladly read about cardboard characters in a great plot over “fleshed-out” characters in a paper thin or non-existent plot.

 

[Bedrockgames]

One thing I've learned is a lot of people basically speed read and the prose just doesn't matter as much to them. I remember my old business partner used to devour books silently reading them, and he was reading a series I had also read, that I enjoyed but found the prose to be kind of clunky (which is why I am talking around it). I asked him how he felt about the prose being kind of clunky and he said he hadn't noticed. So I asked if he sounded the words out at all, and he said no. And that insight explained a lot in terms of how he and I often had very different reactions to books

 

[Ruin Explorer]

(though I much prefer the second trilogy as the story is a lot more interesting in my opinion).

Is that the Caramon and Raistlin-focused one? I remember that being a lot more engaging and dramatic for me than the original trilogy, and the writing felt more like it was least aimed at teenagers, where the original trilogy's writing has (for me) a strong feeling of being aimed at like, older children (not necessarily a bad authorial decision if you want a wide audience of course! Not everyone has a mega-high reading age, nor should those people be sneered at).

 

[Dioltach]

Thank you for the link; this article is fantastic and I heartily recommend it!

If you get the chance, read Sometimes the Magic Works, which contains Terry Brooks's thoughts on writing and his perspective on writing and publishing The Sword of Shannara.

 

[GnomeWorks]

what would you say are the notable differences between LitRPG and RPG-mechanics verse? or is it just one's the genre and the other's the trope?

They are effectively the same, but that loses some nuance.

Take something like The Wandering Inn, where the system is limited to handing out classes, levels, and "skills" (I think a reasonable D&D equivalent would be... feats, probably?). That's the full extent of the system: there are several instances of people getting skills and having to figure out what they even do. There's no deeper mechanics: for the most part, physics and biology operate largely like you'd expect. Early on a character cuts her hand open, and it bleeds and gets infected, like you'd see in real life.

On the other end of the spectrum would be something like Harry Potter and the Natural 20, where the character imported from a (3e) D&D setting into HP very clearly operates with D&D mechanics as his physics while everyone else operates normally, and he's very aware of said mechanics and openly refers to things like hit points and whatnot. Said character gets sent to the medical ward several times, and the nurse freaks out because his wounds spontaneously heal after exactly 8 hours of bedrest.

So there's a spectrum, here, and some works are going to fall on different parts of it, and often in different ways.

The key issue with LitRPG is that most of it is kind of shockingly* badly written stuff (I mean in a literal "bad fan fiction-tier prose, pacing, plotting, characterisation" sense), really focused on the power fantasy of essentially knowing the secrets behind the universe, that everyone else doesn't. But obviously people can find that out for themselves when they read it.

Some of the other main complaints about badly-written LitRPG are the "dreaded blue boxes," an obsession with numbers, and excessive level-up notifications.

Like, imagine if every time someone leveled in Order of the Stick (also LitRPG, btw) we got a comic-length update of nothing but the character's character sheet being updated. Every time, without fail. Possibly with the character giving commentary on their choices, and a good chance that if there's commentary, it'll include something about how there's a difficult choice between some options to be made, possibly without context of what those options do.

 

[overgeeked]

They are effectively the same, but that loses some nuance.

Take something like The Wandering Inn, where the system is limited to handing out classes, levels, and "skills" (I think a reasonable D&D equivalent would be... feats, probably?). That's the full extent of the system: there are several instances of people getting skills and having to figure out what they even do. There's no deeper mechanics: for the most part, physics and biology operate largely like you'd expect. Early on a character cuts her hand open, and it bleeds and gets infected, like you'd see in real life.

On the other end of the spectrum would be something like Harry Potter and the Natural 20, where the character imported from a (3e) D&D setting into HP very clearly operates with D&D mechanics as his physics while everyone else operates normally, and he's very aware of said mechanics and openly refers to things like hit points and whatnot. Said character gets sent to the medical ward several times, and the nurse freaks out because his wounds spontaneously heal after exactly 8 hours of bedrest.

So there's a spectrum, here, and some works are going to fall on different parts of it, and often in different ways.



Some of the other main complaints about badly-written LitRPG are the "dreaded blue boxes," an obsession with numbers, and excessive level-up notifications.

Like, imagine if every time someone leveled in Order of the Stick (also LitRPG, btw) we got a comic-length update of nothing but the character's character sheet being updated. Every time, without fail. Possibly with the character giving commentary on their choices, and a good chance that if there's commentary, it'll include something about how there's a difficult choice between some options to be made, possibly without context of what those options do.

Yeah. It’s like the difference between being a character who lives in a world that runs on RPG rules vs being a player transported into that world while retaining all your out of character knowledge of the game, how it functions, the rules, etc and having a head’s up display to interact with. Very different. Another way to look at it is the difference between reading a book of D&D fiction vs reading a transcript of someone’s thoughts who’s playing a D&D video game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Is that the Caramon and Raistlin-focused one? I remember that being a lot more engaging and dramatic for me than the original trilogy, and the writing felt more like it was least aimed at teenagers, where the original trilogy's writing has (for me) a strong feeling of being aimed at like, older children (not necessarily a bad authorial decision if you want a wide audience of course! Not everyone has a mega-high reading age, nor should those people be sneered at).

Yes it was the one about the twins

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

This is where I got the info.

The Man Who Invented Fantasy

It seems like elves and wizards have been around forever. But one man is responsible for book publishing’s commitment to the fantasy genre.

slate.com

This video pairs nicely with that article: