D&D is its own Genre of Fantasy?

[buzz]

Actually, the movie "Krull" always struck me as an attempt to do a movie version of a D&D game -- right down to a couple of characters getting randomly killed by a spike trap out of nowhere.

The SF elements always made me associate it with Arduin, but same diff', really.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly, Law & Order, Buffy, Angel, Gilligan's Island, Friends, The Lord of the Rings, Battlestar Galacitca, X-Men, and everything else that's ever had an ensemble cast.

Absolutely incorrect on nearly every count.

Star Trek varies the protagonist's POV from episode to episode. Barring that, it's usually the Captain.

Star Wars does not have multiple protagonists. It has one: Luke Skywalker. That you would single out Star Wars, which was deliberately mapped to Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, is particularly odd.

Firefly likewise has one protagonist, the Captain.

Can't speak to Buffy or Angel since I was never into either of them, but-- just a guess here-- the protagonist's role is filled by Buffy and Angel, respectively.

(You would have a very hard time convincing me that Joss Whedon doesn't know his classical structure and milk it for everything its worth.)

Protagonist does not mean "character." Protagonist doesn't just mean "one of the good guys."

Ensemble cast does not equal multiple protagonists.

Classical structure, in fact, demands an ensemble cast, because the additional characters serve as reflections on the protagonist; in addition they often serve in mythic roles that we respond to (and, in fact, subconsciously demand): Old Man, Magical Helper, Mentor, Trickster, Fool, and so on.

I'm not arguing that multiple protagonists isn't possible. I'm not arguing that stories about D&D games can't be written. I'm simply suggesting that the yardstick by which most of humanity defines a "good story" makes "a good D&D game story" less likely; and by extension suggesting that the more popular such a story is, the less it will echo a typical D&D game; and the more like a typical D&D game the story is, the less popular (ie, good) it will be.

 

[Imp]

All I'm gonna say is that there's a whole lot of confusion on this thread between what makes one genre different from another, and what makes a story different from a game.

You can have a novel about WWII, a movie about WWII, a tabletop RPG, an FPS game, etc. and they'll all use characters differently, but the genre will be the same.

 

[Umbran]

Absolutely incorrect on nearly every count.

Well, that depends a bit on your definitions. In terms of classical literature analysis, "protagonist" means one thing. In terms of more casual discussion, though, it means something quite different. I think the issue at hand isn't the classical definition, but simply the number of characters who get significant spotlight time. For a game this is essential, but it takes extraordinary skill and lots of effort to pull off in a popular narritive.

In Buffy, Angel, B5 and Firefly, there are goodly attempts to spread the classical protagonist's role around somewhat. We are lead to identify with multiple characters, the viewpoint is shared among multiple characters. We are lead through the individual personal journeys of several characters, rather than just the one we'd have in a classical structure. And that's what is hard to pull off in a popular narrative.

 

[buzz]

In Buffy, Angel, B5 and Firefly, there are goodly attempts to spread the classical protagonist's role around somewhat. We are lead to identify with multiple characters, the viewpoint is shared among multiple characters. We are lead through the individual personal journeys of several characters, rather than just the one we'd have in a classical structure. And that's what is hard to pull off in a popular narrative.

Wulf, Umbran is saying basically what I would. I also don't agree with your take on the various examples I cited. E.g., everybody knowns Han is the hero of Star Wars.

A strict Classical definition of "protagonist" only matters if we're talking about ancient Greek drama. A little surfing will show that "protagonists" has been commonly used to refer to the main characters in a given work since as early as 1671. The simple fact is, the examples I've cited show that you can follow the development/arc of more than one character in a work of fiction. It's done all the time in all kinds of media.

Granted, it's easier to follow a single character, especially if you've got a limited amount of time, but any long-form (novel) or serial media (comics, TV) can work around this.

Ergo, I don't see any reason that because D&D focuses on a team it requires that any fiction spawned from it suck.

 

[Chiaroscuro23]

Apparently we have a different understanding of the conventions of both D&D and classical narrative.

Different races and classes, heroes heading out for adventure-- these are not the conventions of D&D being discussed here. Those are the conventions that D&D has successfully borrowed from story. Of course they work.

Try to work backwards from the unique game conventions of D&D and you will run into trouble. Multiple, equal protagonists = trouble. Characters who are fully invested in the story, suddenly disappearing = trouble. Replacing those characters = trouble.

Go back and read Arbiter's post again. He hit the high points. I don't really have the time (nor do I suspect that most people would appreciate) a more in-depth "lecture."

Right, so that's the issue exactly: you're using some nonstandard meaning of "D&D Fantasy." The idea that fantasy as a bookstore genre has changed in the wake of D&D is not new. It's been much discussed on internet boards over the years. It's also an idea that I think has a lot of strength to it, though sadly I haven't found much except links to the Forge while tooling around in Google. I'm sure that SFWA or somebody has an interesting essay somewhere online. But my Google-fu is weak.

Anyway, I think it's arbitrary and counterproductive to label some of the results of D&D rules taken from story and others contrary to story. Having multiple protagonists from diverse "racial" backgrounds with diverse skill sets who fight evil together while getting constantly stronger is pretty odd, no doubt. And stories with multiple equally important protagonists aren't run-of-the-mill, but a team of specialists working together is normal. And you don't even have to leave the arena of contemporary genre fiction to find exceptions (Song of Ice and Fire involves probably dozens of perspective characters. World War Z is an homage to the oral histories of Studs Terkel.) Can we think of a reason that one consequence of D&D rules, like characters getting stronger with time, is contrary to story while another consequence, like a team of specialists working together to overcome problems, is not? I don't think we can.

But all of that is premised on your idea that "D&D Fantasy" is defined by (some of) the game artefacts. Using the more traditional definition, we see stuff like (again, I can only dredge up the Forge, at http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cach...=4243+"D&D+fantasy"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=us )

• D&D fantasy is almost always pseudomedieval.
  by this, I mean medieval color layered on a more modern setting. there are nation-states in almost all D&D worlds, as well as other modern concepts like: taxes, exchange rates and tithes based on percentages; shops with merchandise on display; citizens talking about equality, tolerance, and other modern sensibilities; magic as a substitute for technology, and so on. most of it boils down to a disguised version of our society, with the economics perhaps resembling the california gold rush. when D&D fantasy attempts a nonmedieval setting, it usually layers the new setting's color on top of the medieval color, which is still layered on modern society.
  
• D&D fantasy is "feature rich".
  I don't mean that it's necessarily good, or that the many elements in the setting actually mesh together. but there is a lot of background material in D&D fantasy. can you imagine D&D and its clones without a "monster manual" or a list of spells? this goes for D&D fantasy novels as well: creatures, spells, potions, and the like tend to be well-catalogued in D&D fantasy worlds; there's little mystery or minimalism.
• D&D fantasy has a simplified morality.
  it's what people used to call "comicbook morality", back when comicbooks weren't written by people with literary aspirations. it's also a lot like the morality in old-time westerns. good guys are good, bad guys are bad. it's ok to mug someone and steal their gold if you are the opposite alignment of whatever they are. even the religion is simplified, despite the nine alignment system: the gods are involved in turf wars and occasionally grant adventurers special powers in exchange for alliegance.
• D&D fantasy is about what you can do rather than how you feel.
  this ties in with the simpilified morality. D&D fantasy is about killing monsters, solving puzzles, and gathering treasure. it's not a travelogue of a fantastic world, nor is it an exploration of deep moral issues.
• D&D fantasy tends to escalate.
  it may start out small, but since there is not much personality or plot in anything that happens, the only way to build excitement up to a story climax is to keep piling on bigger and bigger things. more monsters! more treasure! more powerful spells! and then finally there's a direct battle with the gods and it's all downhill from there.

there's more to it than that, but I think you get the picture. D&D fantasy isn't high fantasy or swords & sorcery, or any other kind of fantasy, mainly because it's not very literary, in the sense that it doesn't depend on complex themes, detailed characterization, colorful descriptions or anything like that. I think really old westerns, like hopalong cassidy, as well as gangster/g-men movies (but not film noire) are the real ancestors of D&D fantasy. the fantasy element, really, only comes from the amazement people felt when they read tolkien and said "WOW, he described an entire imaginary world!"

would classify Aspirin's Another Fine Myth, Gygax's Gord books, Craig Shaw Gardner's books (A Malady of Magics, etc.,) Lyndon Hardy's Master of Five Magics, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld books as D&D fantasy. Pratchett is the best writer of the group and is writing more boredline parody than D&D fantasy, followed by Aspirin, then the more serious Master of Five Magics, and on down. it's the light writing style, the thinly-disguised modernist details, the piles upon piles of fantastic objects and creatures, and the stripped-down characters that group them together.

Once established, the formula was endlessly manipulated and played with so as to stretch the bounds of generic fantasy without breaking out of them. The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavrial Kay, for example, which is actually way above average, brings five young people from the real world into a generic fantasy world, and each one of them has a different dramatic world-saving destiny. (WARNING: SPOILERS HERE) One, to save the world, becomes a voluntary Odinic sacrifice and hangs on a tree for three days, and is then resurrected with mysterious (read: annoyingly unreliable) godlike powers. Another, not to be outdone, saves the world by willingly becoming a human sacrifice to the earth-mother goddess in the manner of the Adonis cult. One woman assumes the identity and powers of an eternal chain of powerful Seeresses. Another bears the rape-child of the Dark Lord who ultimately saves the world (the world gets saved many times in the trilogy) by killing his father, AND she's also really the current incarantion of Queen Guinevere in a perpetual (until the events of the trilogy end it) repetition of the Arthur-Guinevere-Launcelot triangle. The fifth guy becomes a mighty warrior of the horse-riding plains tribes who hold back the forces of darkness; saves the world by activating a key artifact in a key battle at a key moment, and is also selected by a goddess to get her a demigod son. (NOW how much would you pay?) There are also about a dozen native characters who also have similarly dramatic world-saving destinies. (END SPOILERS)

What else is D&D-ish in Fionavar? Well, there's dwarves, elves, a mish-mash of gods variously derived from Norse, Celtic, and Greek-adopted-Asian pantheons, torrid southern deserts and frigid northern wastes (all within a "world" that, when travel distances are closely observed, turns out to be about the size of Rhode Island), god-powered clerical magic including healing, secular wizards with plain-vanilla magic, magical items and artifacts, and dragons. But this is pretty clearly generic fantasy derived from other earlier generic fantasy, not directly from D&D.

Of course there's a lot of argument, and I can't say I agree with all of this. But it is pretty normal to think of D&D as its own genre, rather than as of a piece with sword & sorcery, high fantasy, and so on. And to think that this genre has infested bookstores for some time in books that do not come from playing the game directly. Normally people only suggest such a division to express their disgust for D&D fantasy. Not me, though. I have nothing against it.

FYI, my own shorthand for if a fantasy book is D&D-influenced is if it contains "gold pieces" and the modernist economic construct associated with them.

 

[CruelSummerLord]

Absolutely incorrect on nearly every count.

Star Trek varies the protagonist's POV from episode to episode. Barring that, it's usually the Captain.

Star Wars does not have multiple protagonists. It has one: Luke Skywalker. That you would single out Star Wars, which was deliberately mapped to Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces, is particularly odd.

Firefly likewise has one protagonist, the Captain.

Can't speak to Buffy or Angel since I was never into either of them, but-- just a guess here-- the protagonist's role is filled by Buffy and Angel, respectively.

(You would have a very hard time convincing me that Joss Whedon doesn't know his classical structure and milk it for everything its worth.)

Protagonist does not mean "character." Protagonist doesn't just mean "one of the good guys."

Ensemble cast does not equal multiple protagonists.

Classical structure, in fact, demands an ensemble cast, because the additional characters serve as reflections on the protagonist; in addition they often serve in mythic roles that we respond to (and, in fact, subconsciously demand): Old Man, Magical Helper, Mentor, Trickster, Fool, and so on.

I'm not arguing that multiple protagonists isn't possible. I'm not arguing that stories about D&D games can't be written. I'm simply suggesting that the yardstick by which most of humanity defines a "good story" makes "a good D&D game story" less likely; and by extension suggesting that the more popular such a story is, the less it will echo a typical D&D game; and the more like a typical D&D game the story is, the less popular (ie, good) it will be.

Well, as was just pointed out, Buffy gave other characters a great deal of screen time and development of their relationships, and some of them definitely grew in power as time went on. Some characters would be written out of storylines, and new ones would appear and be worked into the story. They didn't just pop out of nowhere; they were introduced.

Same thing with a show like C.S.I.: Although Grissom is technically the main character, as supervisor of the team, the characters all have their own quirks and personalities, and more about them has been revealed as time has gone on as well. One new character became a full-fledged investigator after being a "lab rat": an upcoming episode focuses on the secondary "lab rats" as well.

Record of Lodoss War is another classic example: There is a main protagonist, but he himself becomes a much better fighter as time goes on, all while other characters have their own conflicts and their own time in the spotlight. Some of them die, while later on, new "PCs" show up and become part of the cast of "protagonists" in their own mind.

None of these franchises want for fans. And, like you yourself said, Star Trek rotates the protagonist from one character to another. Why should it be any different for a party of adventurers?

As to why I would insist on writing it in "Game Fantasy", that is to say, with all the tropes of the "Fantasy Heartbreakers" Ron Edwards wrote about, it's a lot like the analogy Gary Larson made in "The Far Side Tenth Anniversary Book": If he tried writing "Blondie", it would still come out looking like "The Far Side"-Dagwood getting bitten by his rabid dog, for example, and then killing his boss. (Seriously, that's what Larson said.)

Similarly, I've already pointed out what would happen if I tried to write "A Tale of Two Cities" or "King Lear"; some of the characters would end up becoming elves or orcs, and it might be set in a game setting. Why? Because I love D&D/stereotypical fantasy motifs, and I enjoy including them in my work-for me, writing in a world where only humans existed, would be personally unfulfilling, and I'd hate every minute of it. I wouldn't enjoy writing the work, and it would show in the poorer quality.

I personally refuse to believe that innovation always means coming up with something totally new: writers like Shakespeare freely recycled plot ideas, putting their own gloss and execution on them that made them stand out. Renovating and updating old ideas and stories, and innovating them, is a common theme in fiction-would the likes of Howard, Lieber or Moorcock have made up every last part of their creations from their own minds, without incorporating other ideas and myths into their work? I wouldn't think it diminishes the quality if they borrowed elements from classical myth, for example.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Well, that depends a bit on your definitions. In terms of classical literature analysis, "protagonist" means one thing. In terms of more casual discussion, though, it means something quite different.

When I say "multiple, equal protagonists" in the context of classical narrative structure, and my comment is subsequently quoted in a refutation of my point-- well, I figure the definition is my prerogative.

I'm doing the best I can to make my definition clear, otherwise there's not much point to the discussion.

If we're going to expand the definition of "protagonist" to include "any character the reader can identify with," that's a pretty big stretch that sorta needs to be laid out up front.

We are lead to identify with multiple characters, the viewpoint is shared among multiple characters. We are lead through the individual personal journeys of several characters, rather than just the one we'd have in a classical structure. And that's what is hard to pull off in a popular narrative.

Other than continuing to conflate "character" with "protagonist," you got my point.

So, starting with the thorny problem of multiple protagonists, add on lots of other game and meta-game conventions of D&D, and it really isn't that hard to understand why there aren't many "good D&D stories."

 

[buzz]

If we're going to expand the definition of "protagonist" to include "any character the reader can identify with," that's a pretty big stretch that sorta needs to be laid out up front.

I don't think anyone is pushing it that far, Wulf. However, I think your strict Classical definition is equally out of place in talking about the fiction relevant to this thread, much less fiction written in the last 100 years. E.g., I think you'd be hard pressed to prove that either Fafhrd or Grey Mouser is a protagonist and the other not.

That said, I agree game fiction tends to suck, at least what I've seen.

 

[Storyteller01]

Yep, at least the game is. The fiction written for the game doesn't usually follow the gaming rules, so I can't say much for them. The game itself definitely has its own feel and logic.