Dwarves don't sell novels

[Zander]

WotC hasn't abandoned anything.

I wish that were true but Matthew Sernett, former editor of Dragon Magazine and current designer at WotC, has said otherwise.

D&D is inclusive, not exclusive, and its adaptability to almost any aspect of the broad fantasy genre allows it to be whatever you want it to be. Limiting its scope neither purifies nor strengthens it.

As I keep saying, if other people want robots and spaceships in their D&D game, I don't want to stop them. I'm certainly not on a crusade to limit other people's enjoyment of the game. But by the same token, I don't want WotC to discard tried and true fantasy in an effort to make the game mostly or entirely a sci-fi one.

 

[Hussar]

Let me see if I understand you correctly: Knights battling giants, hydras, talking trees and polymorhping wizards (The Faerie Queene, 1596) isn't fantasy. But people from earth getting into spaceships, colonising another planet and genetically modifying the fauna they find there to make it psychic (Pern), that is fantasy. You'll forgive me if I conclude that your understanding of fantasy is different from mine.

Yup, that's pretty much it.

Old(ish) English literature is not fantasy. That's pretty solidly romance poetry thanks. The Illiad is not fantasy either and nor is the Odyssey. I can say with great conviction that anything written before about 1860 is not fantasy. And I'd be right.

Pern is not SF. It borrows some of SF's clothing, but, that's because stories about dragons in the 1960's, written by women, wouldn't sell more than three copies.

When discussing genre, it is necessary to actually know the definitions of a given genre. I've had this exact same discussion more time than I care to count recently where people seem to think that genre means whatever they feel it should mean. It doesn't. Genre have fairly specific definitions and without those specific definitions, the words cease to have any value.

I asked this once before, so I'll repeat it. What, specifically, are elements of fantasy in DnD? I mean elements borrowed from fantasy genre, not mythology, not romance literature, not fable, folklore or science fiction. If you remove everything from D&D that is not purely borrowed from the fantasy genre, you wind up with a fifteen page booklet.

 

[Zander]

Yup, that's pretty much it.

Old(ish) English literature is not fantasy. That's pretty solidly romance poetry thanks. The Illiad is not fantasy either and nor is the Odyssey. I can say with great conviction that anything written before about 1860 is not fantasy. And I'd be right.

Arguments that amount to 'I'm right. You're wrong.' aren't terribly productive and I'm glad that you don't normally do that.

When discussing genre, it is necessary to actually know the definitions of a given genre. I've had this exact same discussion more time than I care to count recently where people seem to think that genre means whatever they feel it should mean. It doesn't. Genre have fairly specific definitions and without those specific definitions, the words cease to have any value.

I asked this once before, so I'll repeat it. What, specifically, are elements of fantasy in DnD? I mean elements borrowed from fantasy genre, not mythology, not romance literature, not fable, folklore or science fiction...

Your definition of fantasy seems to be what this entry calls Modern Fantasy. I consider fantasy the collection of all of the sub-genres listed there. Therefore, practically any element in D&D that is found in one of those sub-genres is a fantasy element.

 

[Hussar]

By the same token then, if you accept the idea that fantasy is a sum of its earlier incarnations, then why the problems with the inclusion of SF elements? After all, SF certainly should be covered under your umbrella of Fantasy.

After all, the Wiki article mentions Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as fantasy. This is the prototypical SF work. This is pretty much SF at its hardest at the time. In fact, Frankenstein's monster could be used to emulate all sorts of things in D&D couldn't it? A brilliant creator uses unknown forces to create a being that is neither alive nor dead. A being that longs to know what it is. A being that sound a helluva lot like Warforged.

Your arguement seems to be that D&D should continue to focus on "traditional" fantasy tropes - guys with swords on horses. The problem is, that focus was never really there in the first place. People have been importing non-traditional fantasy tropes all the time. Whether it's gnomish biplanes in Mystara, or Warforged in Eberron.

The idea that WOTC is somehow abandoning "traditional fantasy" is a fallacy. Look at any number of WOTC publications and you'll see that "traditional fantasy" is still very much at the forefront. However, there are also elements which should be explored as well.

There is no such thing as a bad source of inspiration. If the idea works and leads to a good game, it's good. Whether it comes from Shakespeare or the most torrid hack, I couldn't care less.

 

[Zander]

By the same token then, if you accept the idea that fantasy is a sum of its earlier incarnations, then why the problems with the inclusion of SF elements? After all, SF certainly should be covered under your umbrella of Fantasy.

After all, the Wiki article mentions Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as fantasy. This is the prototypical SF work. This is pretty much SF at its hardest at the time. In fact, Frankenstein's monster could be used to emulate all sorts of things in D&D couldn't it? A brilliant creator uses unknown forces to create a being that is neither alive nor dead. A being that longs to know what it is. A being that sound a helluva lot like Warforged.

In D&D it's a flesh golem and has been since 1E though the method of creation was more magical and less pseudo-scientific. Depending on how it is used, it can be a creature of horror, as in most films featuring Frankenstein's monster, or fantasy, as in most D&D settings.

Your arguement seems to be that D&D should continue to focus on "traditional" fantasy tropes - guys with swords on horses. The problem is, that focus was never really there in the first place. People have been importing non-traditional fantasy tropes all the time. Whether it's gnomish biplanes in Mystara, or Warforged in Eberron.

It's mostly not what is being included that concerns me but what is being excluded. I don't have a problem with there being a creature like the 3.5 gnome in D&D. But there was a gnome in fantasy already with a literary, iconographic and gaming history. Why wasn't it kept as the gnome in 3.5 with the current gnome being in a monster manual or supplemental work?

The idea that WOTC is somehow abandoning "traditional fantasy" is a fallacy.

Matthew Sernett says otherwise and he should know: he works for WotC.

 

[Gez]

But by the same token, I don't want WotC to discard tried and true fantasy in an effort to make the game mostly or entirely a sci-fi one.

I'm quoting myself back to ask you a question:

Jack Vance's Dying Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar, James P. Blaylock's Balumnia, R.E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, and Joann K. Rowling's Harry Potter are all works of fantasy, and they're all very different and follow different conventions.

I suppose that of those, Blaylock, Leiber, Rowling, and Vance are all guilty of not making tried and true fantasy but things that are mostly sci-fi because there are elements of steampunk, or pulp scifi, or references to the contemporary world?

 

[Zander]

I suppose that of those, Blaylock, Leiber, Rowling, and Vance are all guilty of not making tried and true fantasy but things that are mostly sci-fi because there are elements of steampunk, or pulp scifi, or references to the contemporary world?

For the puposes of what I said earlier, "tried and true fantasy" can be taken to mean fantasy that is very old (e.g. Homer, Beowulf, Spenser) and/or very popular (e.g. Tolkien), i.e. pretty much everything on this page up to and including LotR.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

As I keep saying, if other people want robots and spaceships in their D&D game, I don't want to stop them. I'm certainly not on a crusade to limit other people's enjoyment of the game. But by the same token, I don't want WotC to discard tried and true fantasy in an effort to make the game mostly or entirely a sci-fi one.

The problem that I think I, at least, have with your line of argument is that Wizards of the Coast isn't doing any such thing.

There are no robots or spaceships in anything Wizards of the Coast publishes. There are warforged - which are certainly, explicitly, and undeniably inspired by robots, especially by Asimovian questions of personhood and purpose - and there are traces of Second Edition's spelljammer ships to be found here and there, chiefly in Lords of Madness, but no robots per se or spaceships anything like those found in Star Trek or even 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You complain that Wizards of the Coast has a race in its Player's Handbook called "gnomes" which is entirely unlike the gnomes of folklore and myth. I have to tell you that my response is, per Bill Hicks, four simple words: Yeah? And? So? What?

We can point to any of the fantasy creatures such as elves or dwarves in a work such as Tolkien's and demonstrate that not only are they inspired by one culture's "take" rather than by another's, they are also significantly and at times wildly different in Tolkien's novels than in his inspirations.

His dwarves, for instance: do they, like their Norse inspiration, "seem to be interchangeable and may be identical with the svartálfar (black elves), and sometimes the trolls"? Is it Tolkien's dwarves or his trolls which "fear sunlight, which might even turn them into the stone they sprang from"?

If Tolkien can pick and choose what attributes he gives to creatures he calls according to folkloric or mythological names, and create new creatures (hobbits) which are similar to other such creatures but distinct from them in order to serve Tolkien's own purposes, why is it illegitimate for the writers of D&D to do the same?

At this point we have thirty-two years' worth of D&D material, amounting to many times the output of any single fantasy writer. Why shouldn't Wizards of the Coast pick-and-choose elements to emphasise from this massive resource? If they want to emphasise the tricksterish, close-to-nature feylike attributes of gnomes, or make "gnome" the playable race which stands in for tricksterish nature spirits but makes sense in the context of established D&D worlds, how is that illegitimate? "According to myth, gnomes hoarded secret knowledge just as they hoarded treasure" - the gnomes of Zilargo in Eberron certainly hoard secret knowledge, for instance.

Not only is there more to fantasy than Spenser, Tolkien, and other writers primarily inspired by folklore and myth - a Hell of a lot more, at this point in the history of fantastic literature - there's also the completely reasonable phenomenon of recursion, reflection upon what D&D has already done to innovate in the fantasy genre and further development of those new ideas.

Honestly, I think you're tilting at straw windmills.

 

[Zander]

The problem that I think I, at least, have with your line of argument is that Wizards of the Coast isn't doing any such thing.

There are no robots or spaceships in anything Wizards of the Coast publishes. There are warforged - which are certainly, explicitly, and undeniably inspired by robots, especially by Asimovian questions of personhood and purpose - and there are traces of Second Edition's spelljammer ships to be found here and there, chiefly in Lords of Madness, but no robots per se or spaceships anything like those found in Star Trek or even 2001: A Space Odyssey.

You complain that Wizards of the Coast has a race in its Player's Handbook called "gnomes" which is entirely unlike the gnomes of folklore and myth. I have to tell you that my response is, per Bill Hicks, four simple words: Yeah? And? So? What?

We can point to any of the fantasy creatures such as elves or dwarves in a work such as Tolkien's and demonstrate that not only are they inspired by one culture's "take" rather than by another's, they are also significantly and at times wildly different in Tolkien's novels than in his inspirations.

His dwarves, for instance: do they, like their Norse inspiration, "seem to be interchangeable and may be identical with the svartálfar (black elves), and sometimes the trolls"? Is it Tolkien's dwarves or his trolls which "fear sunlight, which might even turn them into the stone they sprang from"?

If Tolkien can pick and choose what attributes he gives to creatures he calls according to folkloric or mythological names, and create new creatures (hobbits) which are similar to other such creatures but distinct from them in order to serve Tolkien's own purposes, why is it illegitimate for the writers of D&D to do the same?

A very good question. Tolkien and those other authors I've already alluded to have been vetted as "tried and true" by a combination of their popularity and/or endurance. Sweeping them aside is a kind of hubris on WotC's part.

Honestly, I think you're tilting at straw windmills.

And I think you're mixing your metaphors. It's "tilting at windmills" or "clutching at straws". I think you mean the former.

 

[Gez]

A very good question. Tolkien and those other authors I've already alluded to have been vetted as "tried and true" by a combination of their popularity and/or endurance. Sweeping them aside is a kind of hubris on WotC's part.

D&D is popular and enduring.