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Anyone Else Tired of The Tyranny of Novelty?

nevin

Hero
Can one really speak of either a "tyranny of novelty" or "hegemony of novelty" when D&D 5e is both (a) the largest game in the TTRPG market by a country mile, and (b) 5e was designed to be more conservative/nostalgic in its design (e.g., "rulings not rules," etc.)? Or do people actually fear the slightest murmur of novelty that much?
I think you completly missed the point. if i understand the op, he saying not every single encounter has to be new and shocking. Not every adventure has to somethin no one else has seen before. Its ok to just save the princess, or go fight orcs. Novelty can be fun doing things that have been done before can be comfortable and fun in thier own way.
The incredibles said it best "if everyone is special no one is special" "if everything is new and novel then novel is the new normal without any of the comfort or predictability that normal usually has.
 

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Aldarc

Legend
I think you completly missed the point. if i understand the op, he saying not every single encounter has to be new and shocking. Not every adventure has to somethin no one else has seen before. Its ok to just save the princess, or go fight orcs. Novelty can be fun doing things that have been done before can be comfortable and fun in thier own way.
The incredibles said it best "if everyone is special no one is special" "if everything is new and novel then novel is the new normal without any of the comfort or predictability that normal usually has.
I'm not directly responding to the OP's point with my own here, as I have already have much earlier addressed the OP's point much earlier in the thread. Have a good day.
 

happyhermit

Adventurer
Commercial art is a product. Movies get regularly remade for the next generation of 14-25 moviegoers. If you can get their parents to show up because of nostalgia even better ticket sales. It has to be different because kids don't want to see the 'mom&pop' version and the 'mom&pop' don't want to see the same movie they already saw 10-15 years ago. That is the economical tyranny of pseudo-novelty at work.

My opinion is that they should never remake any movie. Just go full 100% novelty with brand new ideas and scripts.
...
The "economic tyranny of pseudo-novelty" that has stories changing and heard by multiple generations is sooo different from the old-as-humanity traditions of oral storytelling that had... people telling the same stories with subtle variations for many generations. It couldn't possibly be that humans actually like the same stories and songs and enjoyed them for millennia, while factors in modern society have disincentivized that sort of thing.
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️
I'm beginning to suspect that WotC does not build its adventure books strictly like you expect them to (i.e., Paizo). WotC very often uses these adventure books as stealth GM resource books for a variety of settings, themes, and campaign types (e.g., urban, naval, jungle, etc). WotC uses this as extra incentive to get people to pick up books that they may otherwise not have an interest in running. They may prefer running their own adventures, for example, but Adventure Book X has guidelines for running desert campaigns, so now they're more interested in buying it. I suspect that they figure that you can either run a "bog-standard, quasi-medieval...vanilla setting" on your own or that there are more than enough such adventures already out there. So I don't think that they are not driven so much by "the expectation of continual originality," but, rather, "the expectation of further consumer utility."
I don't think I would characterize Paizo's APs as being stealth GM resources. The initial AP line was fully intended to be GM resource along with the adventures.
 

Aldarc

Legend
I don't think I would characterize Paizo's APs as being stealth GM resources. The initial AP line was fully intended to be GM resource along with the adventures.
Okay? I clearly said that WotC uses them as stealth GM resources. If you want to correct me that they are not stealth resources for WotC or even say that this is also how Paizo uses their APs, then that is fine, but if you want to correct me, at least get my argument right or show that you read rather than reacted to my post.
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️
Okay? I clearly said that WotC uses them as stealth GM resources. If you want to correct me that they are not stealth resources for WotC or even say that this is also how Paizo uses their APs, then that is fine, but if you want to correct me, at least get my argument right or show that you read rather than reacted to my post.
Sorry - I hadn't noticed that the Paizo reference was just parenthetical.
 



Yeah, poking around I have found some fragments of stuff. There's a 13th Age Glorantha book too that tries to approach heroquesting. It sounds like the gist of it is a fairly cool way of flavoring an adventure, and at least in the original game IIRC (dimly, didn't play much RQ) there were some variant magic rules and such. Sounds like the newer incarnations follow that pattern as well.

So, because the 'mythology' of Glorantha (or other settings like 13a Dragon Empire) are not codified, you can basically construct whatever narrative you want, or in Story Now terms I guess just assume that 'what happens follows the myth'. Nothing wrong with that, it is a pragmatic approach, and then you just write a lot of "and then the band of heroes..."

I had trouble getting my head around Heroquesting to be honest, but I understood it somewhat hen playing the computer game about running your gloranthan tribe (king of the dragon pass?). From the point of view of the tribe, the myth is obviously set, and they look for opportunity to re-enact the myth: trying to emulate it as well as possible, with the possibility of irritating the god if you do it badly. And you must deal with the consequences. If you re-enact the myth of Orlanth plucking the eye out of the Troll God by killing a Troll chieftain, there is strong possibility your diplomatic standing with the Troll tribe will plummet.

So, to take an illustration from a "set in stone myth", let's say one would want to gather the favor of Apollo, he could look for opportunity to do an easy, one-step quest (like re-enacting the killing of Python, just find a suitably large serpent and kill him... if you kill a dragon, you'll probably succeed your heroquest, if you only kill an adder, you'll probably incur the wrath of the god) and you get a small boon. More complex quests are multistep. For example, when going with the myth of Perseus, where he's born and cast at sea with his mother, then land somewhere where he is raised and ends up killing the local king, and becomes known for tricking a group of 3 hags to get a few magical items, and then defeating Medusa... A known heroquest would be, as a multi-step quest:

1. Embark at sea and let you derive, landing somewhere after surviving the trip
2. Steal a precious possession from a coven of hags (their hag eye? The soul bag of a night hag?)
3. Kill a Gorgon
4. Kill the local king of the place you disembarked
5. Get back home, killing a sea monster along the way.
6. Profit. (Err, no, blessing from Zeus)

Of course, after that, you might have problem with alienating another tribe because one of your questers killed their king, so its best if you "set up" the sea trip to end in an enemy territory already. Identifying and locating the monsters for reenactment purpose could be adventures in itself. PCs could also devise the heroquest from the lore presented to them. Like in "well, we learnt about the myth of Castor and Pollux, the two of us want to reenact that myth...what can we do?" and the end result being appreciated by the closeness of the reenactment... (so something quite removed, but vaguely tied to it would bring a small benefit, while a multistep reenactment could even bring the full-on, six-month of immortality gift [at this power level, resurrection is usually within reach of D&D players, so stablizing them automatically at 0 isn't very powerful.... it would be much more interesting to a runequest character]. Of course if during the end fight of your heroquesting, none of the two questers that took the role of Castor and Pollux die, then the quest is botched, because heroquesting also involved reenacting the mistake. Real myth are complex enough that we have large latitude to imagine re-enactment but I think some in-game myth are developed enough to make it possible if the players are invested in the world's lore. After all, the orcs warrior who pluck his eye out and take his anger against elves, dwarves and humans in turn is just doing a small-scale heroquest to Gruumsh, so there is precedent in 5e's lore ;-)
 
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aramis erak

Legend
Will it make any difference. My point was that I’m talking about WOC. The size of the company is no protection from the expectation of continual originality.

To be clear, I’m referring to the themes and encounters of the written adventures. Not rules incarnations which will of course vary.
And yet, for 4 of the last 8 years, it's been mostly adapting the old to the "new 8 years ago" mechanics of 5E. 5E Itself was niether novel nor traditional at release - all the concepts were in use on other, successful (well, profitable, really), games. But they pulled a lot of non-novel mechanics from a variety of sources... the only thing novel about D&D 5e was the specific combination. But that was lightning in a jar. They expressed the core class tropes in the simplified 5E mechanics, while yet preserving the AD&D and 3E class fel

It's the right combination of increasing complexity over time, and easy core mechanic applied very broadly throughout all the class mechanics.

4E was as good a game as 5E... it just wasn't the feel any older edition (pre-4E) fans were expecting.

And, let's be honest ... the Campbellian Monomyth sells. It sells books, it sells movies, and it sells RPGs... And 5E, much like BXCM, has the same four tiers of play... but slightly different level widths, fitting 36 vs 20 levels. And both ground deeply in the monomyth.

The last several years have been proof positive that there is no tyranny of the new... because WotC's been stuck in "Rework old stuff" and "Port setting from our other big game"....

On the other hand, that's not uncommon across the industry. New editions of dozens of older games in the last 24 months... Arcanum, T2K, TOR, CortexPlus/Prime, and many others.
 

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