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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8340405" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sure. I think S&S has to be understood as encompassing more than just REH. I just get a bit bemused by pronouncements that such-and-such is not part of S&S when REH stories are replete with such-and-such.I get the impression, by reputation, that Leiber's stories involve less moral/honourable protagonists than REH's Conan. Though I don't know if that's true.I'm also not sure if The Dying Earth should be included in S&S or not - Vance definitely presents moral/honourable conduct in a very different light from REH, but this feeds through to the world in general. The whole thing is cynical in a way that Conan isn't, and that I think Moorcock isn't either (though some Moorcock characters might be).I fully agree with what you say about "hardboiled"/pulp detective fiction. I had almost made a post contrasting And Then There Were None with The Maltese Falcon, but held back because I've never actually seen the 1945 Christie film.I think I might see more continuity between this "post-Victorian" style and modernism in the stricter sense than you do, but that seems pretty tangential to the main point. My criticism is amateur whereas my philosophy and social theory is professional, and by "modernism" I'm meaning more in thematic or politico-social terms than as an artistic movement. (And I certainly don't want to say that REH is an author who, in either technical or artistic terms, is on a par with (say) Hemingway; on the other hand I think the authors of WotC D&D books could learn a lot from reading REH and giving their work a good edit!)I'll finish with a paragraph (or two, as it turns out) that is (are) probably more controversial (vis-a-vis you and probably vis-a-vis other posters too). I think that one problem with trying to "do S&S" using D&D is that D&D has already muddied the waters quite a bit. On the one hand, D&D is replete with the tropes of "high fantasy"/conservative romance - paladins, many clerics, Tolkienesque Elves and Dwarves and Orcs, many non-Planescape readings of the alignment system, etc.On the other hand, the typical interpretation of dice rolls in D&D (as best I can tell from entirely non-scientific observation) is that they represent the workings of a cold, impersonal universe. Gygax's protestations to the contrary (eg in his discussions in his DMG of the fact that higher hp, and better saving throws and other abilities, represent the interventions of supernatural forces in favour of the PCs) never really seem to have taken hold. I'm not even sure Gygax believed them in his actual play, despite having written them in his rulebook. And this is S&S through-and-through: a universe without providence, and in which "fate" is just a label for what a person makes of him-/herself. I think this can sometimes make it a bit hard to focus on exactly what needs to be done to D&D to more purely align it with S&S play.</blockquote>

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