Dwarves don't sell novels

[Elfdart]

If you start to ask those types of questions of fantasy elements, you'll soon find inconsistencies and contradictions that undermine the fantasy. The reason it works in Star Trek and the like is that ST uses as its base real world science and builds consistent pseudo-science on top of it.

Oh please, the "science" in Star Trek is phonier than William Shatner's toupee.

Ok, so we want to go back on topic. Heh.

I think Danny pretty much hits the nail on the head here. Dwarves don't sell because they don't pull on the right strings.

For example, I'm pretty sure I could sell half-orcs. I remember reading Grunts! Great read. Novel's based on half-orcs could likely go in either a sort of parody style or into the whole Klingon mode as well. Rough and ready heroes, pretty dirty and grimy ones at that, do sell.

But dwarves have nothing going for them. They aren't individualistic, which, right there, is a big knock against them. You can't do the "lone hero" thing with dwarves. Dwarves travel in packs. Or, at least that's how we envision them. The other problem is that dwarves aren't rebels. They prefer stability and order. Again, big strike. Add to that an unappealing physique - short, fat and bearded - and you've got some pretty boring novels.

Depends on how you use them. If you're just going to use them as a shorter version version of Alan Hale Sr. (a chubby bearded actor who usually played Errol Flynn's sidekick), I see no reason why people would be interested. But if you looked outside the creatively constipated genre of Fantasy, you can turn them into fairly interesting characters. In many fairy tales, dwarfs are vicious, cruel and greedy. Rumpelstiltskin comes to mind. A story with a short, greedy little bastard as one of the main characters (and often from his point of view) has worked before. Danny DeVito made a career out of it, as did Joe Pesci.

I previously said that in media where the audience is relatively passive such as books and movies, the writer (and in the case of films, the director as well) can keep the audience from asking rational or scientific questions that would undermine the fantasy. In the Star Wars, Lucas slipped up, however. When he introduced midichlorians as the biological basis for the force, he opened a can of worms (see here). As a movie-maker, he was able to minimise the damage by not revisiting them in the subsequent Star Wars films. But as a GM in an RPG, they're even more problematic. What is to stop a PC from investigating midicholrians with a vue to creating a biological agent that counters them thereby neutralising someone's use of the force. And if the force has a scientific basis, then shouldn't force effects have them too? Why can't force effects be investigated scientifically as well? By introducing a pseudo-scientific explanation (midicholrians) for a supernatural effect (the force), the integrity of the fantasy elements is jeopardised.

That's just dumb. Midichlorians are mentioned all of three times in the prequels. Moisture vaporators are mentioned three times in the original movies. Both are just plot devices. The former to explain how the Jedi are able to find possible recruits to their order (also why there are so few Jedi) and the latter to explain why Owen Lars had any use for droids in the middle of a desert. The midichlorians are just a symptom of being endowed with the Force -not the cause of it, just as certain antibodies are symptoms of a disease. The difference is that back in the 1970s, people were capable of watching a movie and noticing what was important and what wasn't.

The difference in the successes of the respective franchises is largely due to the quality of the films that started them off. Lucas was a cunning thief (and I mean that as a compliment). He knew a good story when he saw it (Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress), and reshaped it to tell his own space opera story. The movie was pretty well cast and acted. He had a decent budget to work with.

Star Wars owed more to The Searchers than Kurosawa. Luke Skywalker and Martin Pauley could have been swapped and nobody would know the difference.

Speaking of Westerns, as I mentioned above, I have no use for cliches from Fantasy novels. They were hackneyed long before I was born and have sucked worse ever since. When I want an idea for a character in my D&D games, I look to westerns, horror, war movies, crime novels and any other genre I can think of. Yes, they are full of cliches too, but
as Mae West used to say "If I have to choose between evils I'll take the one I haven't tried before." I've played two dwarf characters and both were quite memorable because they had nothing to do with the standard-issue dwarf of every fantasy novel. The first was based on Freddie Sykes in The Wild Bunch while the second was based on the Burl Ives character in an old Gregory Peck movie called The Big Country, both westerns.

The best material for movies, TV shows, novels and games comes from those who refuse to be bound nd gagged by the cliches of a particular genre. Spy movies used to always revolve around guys in trenchcoats, fedoras and sunglasses stalking one another in the foggy, gloomy streets. Ian Fleming chucked most of that and added elements of Don Juan (especially his womanizing), as well as Victorian-era fantasies about exotic villains and their fiendish schemes that are undone in the nick of time. James Bond owed more to Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, Hitchcock and Don Juan than it did to The Third Man

Star Wars owes more to westerns, samurai movies, King Arthur and Wagner's operas than it does to science fiction.

I'll take Star Wars and James Bond, and you can have the cookie-cutter Fantasy.

 

[Kesh]

I'm wondering why this thread is still going on. I don't think new ground has been breached since page 2.

 

[Hussar]

Heh, we just want to make sure that the horse is good and dead.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Hammering Black Beauty, the Equilitch

I understand not liking the cliches, but realize that stereotypes and cliches are a BIG part of how the average person interprets the cover art and plot blurbs in the 30 seconds they take to decide whether to continue considering buying that book or not.

30 seconds- that's all you have to grab that browser's attention and get him to delve deeper.

If your cover art or your plot blurb doesn't distinguish YOUR story about a dwarf from the browser's preconceived notions of "dwarfness" he or she will make that purchase decision largely on those cliches.

OTOH, if your cover art is of a Warhammer-wielding dwarf attacking a dragon...both of whom are in pink tutus...you will have shattered the stereotypes you hate...but you may fall into yet other stereotypes.

 

[WayneLigon]

I'm wondering why this thread is still going on. I don't think new ground has been breached since page 2.

Well, we had a nice long four page detour because we continually forget that you can't change people's opinion on th e 'net And because you could just answer the original question with 'Elves are pretty and dwarves ain't', and where's the fun in that?

 

[Zander]

This bears repeating.

Quote (Eric): "See, I don't hold WotC in such high regard that everything they touch somehow sets a new definition for it. They are just one more publisher who presents fantasy elements with their own spin. They have no obligation to ensure purity of concept."

This bears repeating.

Especially the part that I bolded.

Did Dante have no respect for epic when he put centaurs in a river of boiling blood and harpies in hell?

No. Much like everyone else, he takes a concept and mutates it for his own use.

There is no pure concept of, say, a dwarf. There is no Iconic Dwarf Form that every dwarf must live up to or be considered "not a dwarf."

Note the central issue:

Quote (Zander): "The problem is that WotC believes that they can redefine any fantasy element without regard to its past adding not just supplements but changing D&D's core."

The fallacy here is that fantasy elements have a definition that D&D is obligated to use outside of what D&D does define them as. That dwarves have to be a certain way, based on Zander's (IMO, very selective and puzzlingly arbitrary) selection of what dwarves have been in the vast annals of history to the present.

They have none. There is no iconic dwarf, no typical dwarf, no standard mythic dwarf or standard fantasy dwarf. There is an often-used stereotype, but even the stereotype has significant variations.

In other words, the D&D definition of "dwarf" is what they decide it is, not what observers of fantasy tradition think it ought to be. The dwarf is an inkblot. It's subjective, not objective.

WotC can't redefine fantasy because fantasy never had much of a definition to begin with. They can make their own fantasy, and they do it, and it sells books. They continue to do it, and it continues to sell books. WotC dwarves are not a redefinition of dwarves any more than Dante's centaurs are a redefinition of centaurs.

WotC is not obliged to do anything but it would make a great deal of commercial sense if they did adhere to "often-used stereotype". D&D became popular in part because it appealed to the "purity of concept" that you at once deny and accept exists.

Certainly, being the first RPG was an advantage. After that though, it wasn't until 3.x that D&D was highly regarded for its mechanics. Indeed, much of the mechanics that distinguish 3.x from earlier versions existed in other RPGs first. For the best part of its history, D&D's mechanics were behind other RPGs, not ahead. So if D&D was mechanically clunky, why did it continue to be the most popular RPG? There were certainly challengers. In the early 1980s, for example, Runequest was seen as a potential rival. One of the reasons (perhaps the primary reason) that Runequest and those other RPGs failed to dethrone D&D was that D&D represented a more core (or, if you prefer, stereotypical) fantasy. The fantasy in D&D was already known to the greatest number of people. Whether or not those people labelled the elements they found in D&D that they were familiar with as "mythology", "epic poetry", "modern fantasy" or whatever wasn't relevant. What was, was that those elements were familiar and could be easily incorporated into D&D's fantasy. Indeed, D&D's ventures into non-core fantasy settings such as Spelljammer and Darksun have not been as popular as their core fantasy settings such as Greyhawk and FR.

It is a well known dictum in psychology that people like what they're familiar with. If WotC want D&D to thrive, they could do a lot worse than having halflings with hairy feet.

 

[Zander]

Zander points to WOTC as not being able to "sell" dwarves. Name another author who has?

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

It's called "The Hobbit" for a reason. I actually can't think of any novel which features dwarves as the primary focus for the text. Terry Pratchett's Thud, I suppose. Other than that, not too much. I would hardly be blaming WOTC for failing to sell what no one else can sell either.

Not novels but how about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or even the Nibelung? Both have sold and both feature dwarves.

 

[Gez]

In both of these classics, Dwarf == Gnome == Elf.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

Heigh ho, heigh ho
To make your troubles go
Just keep on singing
All day long, heigh ho

So that is the Dreaded War Chant of the Fluffy Beards Clan? That's really badaxx!

 

[Turjan]

In both of these classics, Dwarf == Gnome == Elf.

This is correct. And this is the main reason why anyone calling out WotC for violating "traditional" racial stereotypes is so much off target.