NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5861735" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I said above, I'm not sure that this is true. But even if it is true, the emotions in question are the emotions of the players.I do my best to listen only to decent music. I don't need to listen to crappy music in order to "balance" the emotional impact of the decent music that I listen to.I do my best to read only decent fiction. I don't need to read crappy fiction in order to "balance" the emotional impact of the decent fiction that I read.I do my best to watch only decent movies. I don't need to watch crappy movies in order to "balance" the emotional impact of the decent movies that I watch.And the same is true for RPGing. I don't need pedestrian sessions and diluted excitement in order to "balance" the emotional impact of a handful of awesome moments.Do the palates of critics, who spend their whole time engaging with a particular aesthetic medium, and experiencing the emotional impact that it has to offer, become jaded? Perhaps, although again I tend to be sceptical of this. But even were it so, my players and I spend most of our time engaged in other activities. I don't think, at four hours a fortnight, that becoming jaded by awesomeness is a serious risk.Besides being a somewhat cheap shot, I think that this comment runs together tropes and themes.I'll concede that it's an open question whether fantasy can, ultimately, evoke the same emotional and aesthetic depth as great literature, music, art or film. But I don't think that concession is a very costly one. Because I can certainly point to fantasy works - the best of Tolkien, the best of Le Guin's Earthsea, the movies Excalibur, Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - that evoke at least as much emotional and aesthetic depth as much second-best art. (And then there is also Wagner's opera, which arguably is among the greatest music ever and is clearly fantasy in its tropes.)All fantasy is inherently gonzo by mainstream aesthetic standards. What is distinctive about D&D, in my view, is that it embraces this gonzo-ness and pushes it to new heights. (Contrast D&D with Runequest or Pendragon, for example.) But this is about tropes, not about depth. Gonzo fantasy clearly runs a risk of degenerating into silliness, but a movie like Hero or Crouching Tiger shows that it need not, and conversely the attempt to avoid gonzo in fantasy can undermine depth, as the end result becomes a type of self-absorbed po-facedness (some members of the Rolemaster community exhibit this trait, in my view).Moreso than depth, I think that fantasy tropes curtail the viable thematic range that can be dealt with and communicated. But fantasy, with or without gonzo, can clearly deal with a wide range of traditional themes - loyalty, honour, duty, faith, betrayal, hope, despair, triumph, etc. And part of the point of approaching these themes via fantasy, in my point, is to use the fantasy tropes to paint them in a certain sort of larger-than-life way. Otherwise why fantasy at all? (Which is part of Eberron's non-appeal to me - it's kind of interesting in a "what if?" sort of way, but if I wanted to deal with the thematic space that a between-the-wars noir game opens up, what do I gain by incorporating fantasy tropes?)</blockquote>

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