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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gregweller" data-source="post: 19021" data-attributes="member: 879"><p>Personally, I find it hard to sustain fantasy without humor.  I *want* to be like 'Knights of the Dinner Table'. It might very well have something to do with spending six years in graduate school studying literature during the height of postmodernism.  I've just never been able to completely suspend disbelief enough to get the whole heroic thing. I'm thinking  of books that were very popular in literary circles during the 70s--John Barth's 'The Sotweed Factor' or 'Giles Goat Boy' and 'Chimera', Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' -- all these specifically deconstruct the myth of the hero. After reading all of those I was never completely able to look at heroic literature with a straight face. To me 'Tomb of Horrors'  or 'Rappan Atthuk' (sp?) are essentially comedies with lots of chopped off body parts (the apotheosis of this is Peter Jackson's movie 'Dead Alive')--they depict such an insanely hostile universe that the only proper response is to laugh or go mad--the MASH syndrome.  I don't think that this is an isolated thing in the gaming culture, either.  The 'Nightmare on Elm Street' movies and the 'Friday the 13th' movies are dark comedies.  Now don't get me wrong--I can play heroic fantasy, but the operative word here is 'play'--I might look and act like a hero, but inside, my chaotic neutral imp is looking at this in a completley different light.  I think that my single most memorable gaming moment was at a convention one time where the party had completely and totally misread the point of what we were supposed to be doing, and just stayed focussed on this one subplot. We were having a blast and it kept getting more and more ludicrous. Well, 3 and a half hours into it, the person that wrote the module popped in to see how it was running, and I will never forget the look of abject horror on his face when the DM told him that the party is still trying to beat information out of the old lady who they are convinced is a demon. If someone wants to play heroic fantasy straight, that's great, but there's some of us that just can't.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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