"Exceptional Fluff" - the bane of RPGs (ranty)

[eyebeams]

1) If I was restricted to the cliched story about beating the evil baron, I sure as hell *would* liven it up to keep it from being dull in both colour *and* plotting. Ugh.

2) Many RPG fiction books have been discreetly written by "serious" speculative fiction writers (using pseudonyms) who need to get paid. GW's Warhammer is famous for this. There's also plenty of fiction that's equally discreetly based on RPGs - Brust likes to be coy about this now for rather complicated reasons (among them: someone else *also* technically has the right to write stories in a very similar world, derived from the same RPG), but Joel Rosenberg, George RR Martin and Raymond Feist are other examples.

3) Ignoring raising/resurrection is a pretty solid tradition. I don't think Ed Greenwood or Gary Gygax used it to any degree in fiction set in their own worlds. Yeah, it would be neat if D&D conventions were very closely obeyed to the point of mutating the genre, but when it comes to novels, gamers are by no means the sole audience. There's a reason why plenty of bookstores stock more RPG fiction than actual RPGs. Fiction set in a game world is designed to be entertaining in its medium, not to enhance the entertainment value of a different medium like tabletop play. Hell, Drizzt is despised as a tired Mary Sue figure among gamers who hated the 4e FR book mockup with him, but he's still fresh for non-gamers.

 

[Leontodon]

Clearly you haven't read any of the Dragaera novels. It's possible, but insanely expensive, and there are ways of preventing it.

Whenever somebody important gets killed in a novel setting that has "Raise Dead" you would have to come up with an awful meta-explanation of why this special guy there just did not get ressurected. It destroys way more than it contributes. And you also should think about the non-gamer audience who finds the very idea of ressurecting people senseless (within a novel).

 

[Derren]

Whenever somebody important gets killed in a novel setting that has "Raise Dead" you would have to come up with an awful meta-explanation of why this special guy there just did not get ressurected. It destroys way more than it contributes. And you also should think about the non-gamer audience who finds the very idea of ressurecting people senseless (within a novel).

Or they could use other methods to silence a person like kidnapping him.
It all takes some creativity, but that requires too much effort (from the readers to understand it)
In a world with raise dead you simply can't tell the same generic, cliché "Boy with Destiny saves world" story which make up the majority of RPG fiction, at least not without making some alteration to it.

 

[Fenes]

3) Ignoring raising/resurrection is a pretty solid tradition. I don't think Ed Greenwood or Gary Gygax used it to any degree in fiction set in their own worlds. Yeah, it would be neat if D&D conventions were very closely obeyed to the point of mutating the genre, but when it comes to novels, gamers are by no means the sole audience. There's a reason why plenty of bookstores stock more RPG fiction than actual RPGs. Fiction set in a game world is designed to be entertaining in its medium, not to enhance the entertainment value of a different medium like tabletop play. Hell, Drizzt is despised as a tired Mary Sue figure among gamers who hated the 4e FR book mockup with him, but he's still fresh for non-gamers.

Ed Greenwood mentions Raise Dead. After a massacre at a ball in one of the Seven Sister's novels he mentioned how the corpses were gathered, how the next day the spells would be cast, and then the griefing would begin for those who would not rise. Just one of those little bits that make a novel a D&D novel, and not a generic fantasy novel.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

This is why I like the fact that Eberron novels are not canon. There is no way someone can destroy the Eberron setting by making a poor choice for the plot of a novel.

While I've only read Warhammer fantasy (not 40K), it has seemed like there haven't been any Warhammer fantasy novels that changed the face of the setting like there have been in almost every D&D line. I haven't found them yet at least.

However, putting out an edict that game fiction is non-canon is not the same ensuring through tight editorial and developmental control that no novel gets approved that overturns important aspects of the world.

Plus, ensuring game fiction doesn't overturn aspects of the setting is not the same as ensuring game fiction doesn't represent book characters doing actions game characters cannot do according to the rules.