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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6985225" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>This prompted another thought too.</p><p></p><p>The idea that hungry, vicious monsters will be distracted by dropping a few gold pieces (from a pouch that presumably contains more of them?) or some food has a fairy-tale quality to it.</p><p></p><p>But adventurers probing corridors with 10' poles like Advanced Squad Leader units doesn't.</p><p></p><p>This tension between realism/mundane modernism on the one hand, and fairy tale imagination on the other, is not confined to FRPGs. You can see it in Tolkien too, where the chapters on Lorien try to integrate the faerie queen idea with the conventions, tropes and trappings of a more-or-less naturalistic novel. Press too hard the question "What do the elves of Lorien actually eat, and where do they get it from?" and the whole thing falls over. (In passing: one impressive thing about BW is how it integrates the banalities of elven economic production into the elven skill songs, and so is able to venture into this territory without completely losing the fairy tale element.)</p><p></p><p>A lot of the recurring discussions among D&D players - about "realism", "living, breathing worlds", whether Tucker's kobolds are fair or GM bastardry, whether dragons should play more like Smaug or more like the Godfather - seem to me to have their origins in this basic tension.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6985225, member: 42582"] This prompted another thought too. The idea that hungry, vicious monsters will be distracted by dropping a few gold pieces (from a pouch that presumably contains more of them?) or some food has a fairy-tale quality to it. But adventurers probing corridors with 10' poles like Advanced Squad Leader units doesn't. This tension between realism/mundane modernism on the one hand, and fairy tale imagination on the other, is not confined to FRPGs. You can see it in Tolkien too, where the chapters on Lorien try to integrate the faerie queen idea with the conventions, tropes and trappings of a more-or-less naturalistic novel. Press too hard the question "What do the elves of Lorien actually eat, and where do they get it from?" and the whole thing falls over. (In passing: one impressive thing about BW is how it integrates the banalities of elven economic production into the elven skill songs, and so is able to venture into this territory without completely losing the fairy tale element.) A lot of the recurring discussions among D&D players - about "realism", "living, breathing worlds", whether Tucker's kobolds are fair or GM bastardry, whether dragons should play more like Smaug or more like the Godfather - seem to me to have their origins in this basic tension. [/QUOTE]
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