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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8086810" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can't claim to know the whole S&S or fantasy oeuvre, by any stretch of the imagination. I know REH's Conan, and JRRT and Le Guin's Earthsea, well; I know Vance a bit; I know Leiber and Moorcock's works by reputation and by the RPG works built around them.S&S - whether the stakes are quite low (eg The God in the Bowl, a REH Conan story) or high (eg The Hour of the Dragon, another REH Conan story) - involves protagonists who drive the action, and who impose their own moral vision on the world.The epic fantasy I know - JRRT, Earthsea, lower quality stuff like Dragonlance - posits a world which brings its morality with it. The heroes - if they are to remain and to succeed as heroes - have to come to terms with that, and give effect to it.D&D defaults to S&S in feel (even if not in tropes) if it is player-driven, and to epic fantasy if it is GM-driven. There are ways to do RPGing which are player-driven yet involve epic fantasy, but those approaches are not all that common in the D&D-playing community.This is part of the difference between GH and FR: the latter is presented as heavy with metaplot and hence GM control over much of the fiction; whereas GH is not. Thus while GH has many non-S&S tropes (elves, dwarves, Iuz, St Cuthbert, etc) it still supports a broadly S&S=protagonist-driven feel.</blockquote>