Fantasy becoming too fantastic...?

[ChristianW]

Referring to the OP:

It's not so much that I dislike half-dragon treeant druids, it's that I don't have the time nor patience to stat block, then manage them in combat. I find those tasks - and D&D 3.5 at high levels in general - to be a huge pain in the ass and not worth the effort.

 

[Wik]

I personally feel that D&D, in it's current incarnation, does a very poor job of conveying that "Classic Fantasy" feel. Without seriously changing the design of the game or making your own new core classes/races, it is very hard to run a lower-magic game that is similar to Howard's "Conan" series, Tolkien, or even more modern classic fantasy such as Tad Williams.

Once you start changing how magic works in your campaign world, or how magical items and wealth are awarded to your group, you mess with the CR rules, and the XP rules. By nature, the D&D rules seem to encourage an "over the top" approach to fantasy - you cannot use the D&D rules to create a classical fantasy.

Most of us have seen Lord of the Rings, and I think every D&D'er who watched that movie at one point or another thought "man, that'd be cool to put into my game". I'm sure you watched that movie and were inspired afterwards to play D&D. God knows I was. But, so much of what made that story great would not work in D&D - the rules, quite simply, don't support a game based primarily around martial characters with few magical items.

That being said, I don't think D&D SHOULD try to recreate classic fantasy. The older I get, the more I realize that I like just how much high-magic stuff is found within D&D books. I'm already putting together my next campaign world, getting it ready for my triumphant return to D&D play. And this is coming from a guy who has tried to imitate Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn setting on two seperate occasions.

I say, just take the system and roll with it.

Oh, and Piratecat - I'm stealing your Vampire Ooze.

 

[Psion]

Once you start changing how magic works in your campaign world, or how magical items and wealth are awarded to your group, you mess with the CR rules, and the XP rules. By nature, the D&D rules seem to encourage an "over the top" approach to fantasy - you cannot use the D&D rules to create a classical fantasy.

Most of us have seen Lord of the Rings, and I think every D&D'er who watched that movie at one point or another thought "man, that'd be cool to put into my game". I'm sure you watched that movie and were inspired afterwards to play D&D.

I've had very little problem putting together a LotR style quest game with minimal changes. Your assertion here differs from my experience.

God knows I was. But, so much of what made that story great would not work in D&D - the rules, quite simply, don't support a game based primarily around martial characters with few magical items.

We ran a "knightly" 1e game with all cavaliers and no magic.

It was a freaking blast.

3e is even more flexible, and has loads of support. I would gladly redo that campaign with 3e with the additional d20 support it has for that sort of game.

There are a few threads like this one running on various fora. Where I am seeing the limitation lie is not with the rules, but the imagination and nerve of those using them.

It's your game. Take charge of it.

 

[mearls]

Y'know, I'm just wondering if I'm alone here, but with current trends it just seems that there's not much room for ye olde classic fantasy. I guess what I mean is that with the barrage of splat books going down the road of "who wants orcs and goblins when you could have dire-fiendish-half-dragon-githyanki" does anyone else kinda long for the simple stuff? You know, the merry band of heroes out to rescue the damsel in distress, maybe some goblins, a dragon perhaps, an evil wizard, and wits necessary--not nuke like magic items?

I think it depends by what you mean by "too fantastical". Slapping templates on stuff doesn't make it fantasy. It just makes it different. A half-dragon ettin that exists in a vacuum isn't too interesting.

On the other hand, a half-dragon ettin with one head a red dragon and the other gold, that is lawful evil for a year and a day when the red head is in charge, lawful good for a year and a day when the good head controls the body, is interesting to me. Elements of fantasy need some sort of context to be interesting, or some way to interact with the PCs in a fun manner.

If the PCs have to help the ettin while it is good, but they know that any day it could turn evil, that's a fun adventure. If the half-dragon is just standing there, exuding weirdness, I don't think that's compelling.

 

[The Shaman]

I say, just take the system and roll with it.

I say, play something else.

Seriously. There are other options out there. Quite a few of them. New designs. Old designs (which if you introduce them to new players are effectively new designs as well.) Find one that excites you with its possibilities, instead of irritating you with its conceits.

"But D&D is the World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game - it says so right on the cover! My players don't want to play anything else!" Convince them. Persuade them. Sell them. Cajole them. Bribe them if you have to. Ask them what they like about D&D, and use that to find another game system that gives both you and your players what you all want. Run a one-shot with a different system and make it really, really cool - make it easy on yourself and increase the sales value by converting an existing adventure that you know they like.

Maybe it's as easy as switching to Grim Tales or True20. Maybe it's OSRIC or Castles and Crusades. Or maybe it's 1e AD&D or OD&D (the one true game, or so I'm told).

For me it's The Fantasy Trip, an amazingly cool system that's been out of print for something like twenty-five years - if I decide to run a fantasy campaign again at some point in the future, I will use TFT. (In the meantime I'm cannabilizing parts of it for my classic Traveller campaign.) TFT will be an easy sell - point buy characters, talent system (a combo of 3e's skills, cladd features, and feats), broad archetype characters that can be customized readily (want to play a wizard who swings a sword, or a hero who casts spells? done - no multiclassing required!), detailed and fast-moving combat system (with armor as damage resistance, called shots, and ability damage instead of hit points), unified dice mechanic (say hello to my little friend, d6!), an advancement system, monsters with "character levels"...oh yeah, I can sell this game, no problem.

I could continue spending my time trying to fit 3e D&D to my setting concepts, or I could find a system that does what I want it to do straight out of the box - and so I have. That's an easy choice for me to make - the less time I have to spend thinking about the rules, the happier I am. I would much rather spend my time on writing the setting or creating a really cool villain, instead of evaluating splatbook crunch or retconning class features so that they make sense in the context of the game-world.

 

[jasin]

The "problem," if there is one, is more with how D&D mechanics represent things as dire-fiendish-half-dragon-githyanki, which is sort of the same as going around describing yourself as a dire-Irish-half-Italian-Korean (or whatever you happen to be) in your everyday life. As soon as you get past D&D's heavy emphasis on labels, things seem a lot less ridiculous.

Well, there will still be some monsters that will be plain silly (to some people, since that is really an issue of taste).

But yes, labels can make all the difference. In my current game, I took a dire wolf and gave it the alzabo's (from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun) ability to mimic voices and memories of those it has devoured (which, even if it can be a strategically useful ability, didn't change the encounter one bit) and called it an alzabo, and it was the creepiest dire wolf ever. Last session, I took a displacer beast and put it at the side of a wizard who was into surgery and grafting and experimenting on living things. Instead of saying it's a displacer beast, I just described it as a huge cat with tentacles, and even though everyone knows about displacer beasts, it got labeled "catopussy" and after the wizard was dead, there was a serious discussion among the PCs whether it's an abomination that should be wiped out or just a poor animal that's suffered enough that should be left in peace.

 

[Psion]

I say, play something else.
(...)
Maybe it's as easy as switching to Grim Tales or True20.

That's a dandy point too. So many people are gnashing their teeth in frustration that D&D is not catering to their needs, when there are games out there stuggling to stay afloat in the market that are well tooled to meet these needs.

It's almost tragic.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Most of us have seen Lord of the Rings, and I think every D&D'er who watched that movie at one point or another thought "man, that'd be cool to put into my game". I'm sure you watched that movie and were inspired afterwards to play D&D.

Nah. I've got no time for the novels and I found the films only slightly less ponderous. Plus, for me, the "Epic Quest to Save the World from Darkness" is such a tired plot idea, it's comatose.

I like some classic fantasy - Leiber, Howard, Vance, for instance - but then again, I would never lump those writers in with Tolkien.

My preferences are strongly for "modern" or "contemporary" fantasy stories, stories which don't take place in some pseudo-medieval western European Tolkien-pastiche setting. It's one of the reasons I like Eberron so much: Wizards of the Coast is producing a setting suitable for my tastes and preferences, while still supporting the "traditional fantasy" of the Forgotten Realms.

(I can appreciate the argument advanced by some Greyhawk fans that the Forgotten Realms is too "high fantasy" to really cater to the traditional mold, but I can also understand why Wizards of the Coast would want to support only one of their "traditional" fantasy settings so as to reduce market fragmentation, and why they'd choose the setting with the best-selling novel lines and even computer games over the world which never had either.)

 

[ColonelHardisson]

It's the whole half and half (and half) thing that throws me. The above example wouldn't bother me a bit if it was called "Halaster's death slime" or something, but throwing half this and thatt templates and prestige classes on a patch of goo, just ruins my suspension of disbelief. Even if it accomplishes the same goal. I'd rather see Halaster's death slime made up on the spot as a new creature than a grey ooze with 3 or 4 templates and pcs tacked on any day.

Why? As a player, why would you ever know how the creature was made? Is the DM telling you this? If so, why? It strikes me as more a matter of a DM showing too much behind the curtain. All the players should know is what they experience or dig up in-game. If you're a DM, sorry, but suspension of disbelief is really not your gig. You do all the world creation, you imbue the setting with mystery. Those templates and classes are there to make the creation of "Halaster's death slime" easier.

 

[Arkhandus]

I'd have just as much fun playing a D&D campaign with an old-fashioned, classic swords and sorcery style as I would with the current massive menagerie of creatures, magic items, spells, and whatnot. But it'd get boring to play one or the other exclusively, for me anyway.

You can still run a more classic fantasy campaign, really; just ignore most of the new books and other material, choose a few races and a handful of monsters to exist in your campaign world, cut out a few classes, alter the wealth-by-level guideline for your campaign (it is JUST a guideline/suggestion in the DMG, y'know), and voila. When the best spellcasters around are duskblades, bards, rangers, and paladins, there's not going to be much worry about spell or magic item saturation.