[Forked Thread: How Important is Magic..?] 5 things you need to know

[Fallen Seraph]

If you had said Morrowind, with it's stark badlands environments, it's mesopotamian dwemer, the rich variation between the architecture of the three houses...I totally would've backed you up.

One of the dream RPGs I have is a Morrowind one. Either its own system or as a setting for another.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Wait so 3.5 FR wasn't D&D?
(hint they had guns and didn't even hide that fact even a little)
Then why do fans get so much uppity over 4th edition FR where they have no guns?!

Apparently people like D&D + guns since FR wasn't hated too much in 3.5.

Hey, you forgot to quote the rest of my post:

While it's clear from other threads that D&D is not a single monolithic entity with defined boundaries, it is still a realm/genre that has edges. They are wispy, but there are clearly things that are beyond those edges. Add just one of those items...ok, make orcs Klingons...and it doesn't cease to be D&D. But add in the borg, a guy named DATA who is a cyborg, warp drives, space ships, and such...and it isn't modern fantasy. It also isn't D&D.

I bolded the relevant part.

So, please, don't mischaracterize my statement as merely "guns =/= D&D". I'm saying that if you start adding AK-47's, flack jackets, missiles, tanks, etc, then you've wandered far too far.

Yes, there were guns in FR. If I remember correctly, and I'm no expert, they were rare, found in Waterdeep, made by gnomes and clerics of Gond, and were frowned upon by Elminster and the Red Wizards.

They were hardly commonplace, and were used as an anomaly...a foil/juxtaposition to show how fantasy is not the modern world...and how much guns changed that world even in small amounts.

Was everyone in FR a gun totin' buckaroo? Not in my recollections. Guns hardly defined the setting (as opposed to other settings where people don't even wear armor due to the existence of guns).

As I said in the part of my post you left out, the edges are wispy, but they exist. It's a matter of degree.

 

[alleynbard]

I can find a lot to use in both the Hellboy comics and the Hellboy movies.

In fact, the fae as depicted in Hellboy II are one of my inspirations for the noble fae of the Feywild. When mixed with a healthy dose of actual folklore, the courts can be terrifying and wondrous places all at once.

I also like to mix a good deal of Charles De Lint in my games:

http://www.sfsite.com/charlesdelint/

His vision of the Otherworld meshes well with both the Shadowfell and Feywild. His work can also be used as inspiration for the Primal spirits.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

So I looked up "modern fantasy" and...

So I looked up "modern fantasy" and it seems I was (and probably wasn't alone) totally misunderstanding the term.

I looked here:
Fantasy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Which led me here:
Science fantasy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and here:
Dark fantasy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


And so I learned about a very subtle "genre bridge" called science fantasy. My understanding from this is that "Modern fantasy" doesn't mean "fantasy that is newly written in modern times" as I believed it to be (e.g. the Golden Compass). Instead, it seems it means the modern world with a fantastic twist (using fantasy tropes/themes/magic/the supernatural/etc).

So, that said, I'll have to take back whatever I said about what "Modern Fantasy" should be. HOWEVER, I still stand by the point that D&D is specifically Medievalist Fantasy, and not modern fantasy.

As I've tried to explain, my perspective is that you lose something when you start making it into "anything and everything". D&D has a character of its own. Are there settings (like Spelljammer) that are Science Fantasy? Yes. Should D&D as a whole move in the direction of Spelljammer? IMO, no.


So, I think I finally understand what the OP is asking (I hope). I think it is: "What kinds of elements would you like to add to subgenres of D&D, or indeed what subgenres would you like to see, that are pulled from Modern Fantasy, including, but not limited to Science Fantasy."

That's a great idea for a thread, and I hope to read others thoughts on this.

I had mistakenly thought he was asking "how would you change D&D at its very core to emphasize modern ideas and move away from the medieval fantasy component?" To that my answer would be, you don't.


So, sorry for being so confused, and I hope my newfound clarity (at least I hope I get it now) might possibly help others who were making the same mistakes as myself, understand what this is all about.

Again, cool thread idea, now that I get it.

 

[alleynbard]

What could be stolen for D&D:

- Setting the campaign in a city would be good, then depicting one social environment in which the core gameplay takes place. This kind of play depends heavily on NPCs, so you need a lot of them. Didn´t one of the Waterdeep book have a fully-detailed adventurers quarter with many NPCs?

- Using Personas: your PCs physical body doesn´t get stronger in the conventional sense. XP is used to increase the power of your Persona, which does the brute of your fighting in the dungeon reality. Basically, every PC has two "sides": a socializing side for using in relationship-building and for recrouting NPCs to your cause. And a mystical Persona you summon to do battle.
Getting people with strong Personas, merging Personas with others to create new Personas is a core part of the game. This is why socializing is so important: find people that help you along in your quest, find people with strong Personas to recruit.
There are many ways how you could represent the Personas mechanically - i think i would use "culture packages" (race + stats/skills for socializing) and "class packages" (your Persona & its powers).

- This would also neatly separate two parts of play: RP-heavy play in "the city" and combat-heavy play in "the dungeon". This would allow for two kinds of XP-System: RP-XP and Combat-XP are used to increase two separate sets of stats.
Perhaps you could use D&Ds stats and cut them in two: Physical are "Persona-" Stats, Mental are "Socializing-" Stats?

- Dungeons are "out there": Dungeons exist, but they are situated in a realm beyond the normal world. Perhaps its a City-of-doors-solution, perhaps you send your soul & persona into the Abyss while sleeping. Treasure-hunting and experience-gainging is happening as usual.

- In the City, the party creates their own network of relationships, dependencies, finding allies and enemies. Much here is roleplay, but this part of the game is supported with a full rulesystem which is not more nor less complex than the combat side of the game.

Intriguing idea. I will have to think on this some more. At first blush it has some "Dungeon as Mythic Underworld" vibes. Sort of. More, in the idea that the dungeon represents something as opposed to being just a lair for some monsters.

Philotomy's OD&D Musings

 

[Cadfan]

My understanding from this is that "Modern fantasy" doesn't mean "fantasy that is newly written in modern times" as I believed it to be (e.g. the Golden Compass). Instead, it seems it means the modern world with a fantastic twist (using fantasy tropes/themes/magic/the supernatural/etc).

You're right, except that people aren't always precise in their terminology (or even aware of the terminology) so you have to be careful about what you think people mean.

I've probably used both meanings interchangeably in this thread.

For myself, all I'm really interested in is taking some of the tropes and character archetypes from more recent fantasy writing and adding them into D&D. Honestly, its not that different from playing the "how do you make [popular fantasy character X] in D&D?" or "how do I make a [genre] campaign?" games.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

What D&D could steal from Persona

I've been watching my wife play through Persona 4, so I can vouch for it as an awesome RPG with several innovations worthy of attention. Some of these elements seem too large a step away from the current game, such as portraying the PCs as mostly mundane people who fight via fantastical avatars in a reality separate from the real world. Besides, I think this element is mostly a superficial stylistic trait of the game.

For me, the key idea behind Persona 4's gameplay is its construction of two parallel modes: dungeon delving and social networking. On each game day (a key resource), the player must choose whether to spend the day in the dungeon fighting or building relationships with NPCs that inherently augment the PC's powers (in the game's fiction, the avatar's power happens to depend in part on the web of social relationships the PC has developed). You could import this idea into D&D by using out-of-combat gameplay to govern how precisely a PC grows more powerful. Suppose that players don't have access to every published feat and power when they level up. Instead, their selection depends on the NPCs with whom they've developed relationships.

Of course, some DMs no doubt already employ such a scheme. The recent DDI article on the White Lotus Academy even featured arcane powers that were specialties of that school. But honestly I suspect that most DMs just allow their players to choose freely from among available feats and powers. The potential here is to use the traditional importance of feats and powers (to the players) to increase the significance of the role-playing choices players make or even the outcome of certain skill challenges.

You choose to work with House Cannith instead of the Dark Lanterns? Your artificer may choose one of their patented attack spells the next time she levels up. You failed the skill challenge to prevent the assassination of the city's most popular gladiator? Now he can't train you in those multiclass gladiator feats.

In short, for me the key element of Persona is that how you play the game determines how your character can grow in power, not just your XP totals.

 

[Hussar]

/snip


There is far, far too much steampunk mentioned. China Meiville? No.

/snip


The golden compass...

The Golden Compass is pretty much what a D&D steampunk game could look like - flying ships, clockworks, huge gothic buildings and hand crafted constructions, and honking big empires to boot.

It's borrowing pretty heavily from Steampunk.

Keefe, I think there is a problem here that we cannot overcome. In the 70's when EGG and Co were creating D&D, they drew on the fantasy that was popular at the time. Look at the bibliography in the back of the AD&D DMG and half the books are less than ten years old at the time of publication.

But, times were VERY different back then. You could assume, with a fair degree of accuracy, that any fan of fantasy over the age of 15 had probably read at least books by each of those authors. Maybe not the specific works cited, but, at least a fair chunk of the authors. Why? Because, at the time, fantasy was a tiny niche genre tucked in on the coat tails of SF. That bibliography represents a fairly large chunk of all the fantasy you could read at the time. Certainly a large chunk of the better fantasy authors anyway.

Fast forward to 2000 and the release of 3e. Since 2000, there have been about 400 new fantasy novels released every single year. That doesn't count print on demand, reprints, or franchise novels. That's 400 original novels every year. There's been more fantasy novels published in the past nine years than in the seventy years prior to 1e being released.

And that's only novels. That doesn't count other media like computer games or whatever. You simply cannot pick a small number of fantasy authors and assume with any degree of accuracy that even a small number of your audience has read them.

For someone who is 20 years old this year, Harry Potter has been around most of their lives. The first Harry Potter book came out in 1997. Potter's a fixture for them. But, other than that, you can't really point to any ten sources and presume that your audience has experienced them.

D&D is 30 years old. It's its own genre. It's the kitchen sink that everyone chucks in whatever tickles their fancy. And that's just peachy to me.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Because, at the time, fantasy was a tiny niche genre tucked in on the coat tails of SF. That bibliography represents a fairly large chunk of all the fantasy you could read at the time.

Untrue.

This myth has been busted in previous threads, and it is easy enough to bust by picking up any examination of the genre which has actual critical merit. I personally recommend The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (Amazon.com: The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: John Clute, John Grant: Books). I also recommend the Dictionary of Imaginary Places (Amazon.com: dictionary of imaginary places: Books), which contains entries related to hundreds of pre-D&D fantasy works, and has a ton of entries that can be used almost wholesale when creating a D&D campaign.

It is true that, when D&D came out, the hard line between science fiction and fantasy that now exists did not exist. For example, many planetary romance stories are clearly fantasies (and include supernatural/fantasy elements) despite taking place on other worlds.

Please do not fall for the idea that fantasy as a genre sprang up just before D&D, or was some weak and anemic thing. Certainly accept that the popularity of LotR and D&D combined caused a mushrooming of post-D&D fantasy.

And, while Hussar is correct in saying that people with an interest in fantasy cannot be assumed to have read R.E.H., Tolkein, Morris, Burroughs, etc., that is not the same thing as saying that they should not, or that those influences do not still reverberate through more recent fantasy novels.

One does not have to read Shakespeare to feel an echo of recognition when a modern author plays off Shakespeare, because Shakespeare has saturated the culture. Of course, when the Shakespearean reference is skillfully done, the echo is much stronger for those familiar with the original. The same is true for Howard, Burroughs, etc.

This link might be of some help for those without access to the aforementioned Encyclopedia (or better reference works): Ballantine Adult Fantasy series - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series was an imprint of Ballantine Books. Launched in 1969 (presumably in response to the growing popularity of Tolkien's works), the series reissued a number of works of fantasy literature, which were out of print or dispersed in back issues of pulp magazines (or otherwise not easily available in the United States), in cheap paperback form—including works by authors such as William Morris, Lord Dunsany, Ernest Bramah, Hope Mirrlees, and James Branch Cabell. The series lasted until 1974.​

D&D was first published in 1974.

That is one publisher, with one fantasy line.

My friends, there is far more than that, and it is worth looking into.


RC

 

[Cadfan]

Editted because screw it, its not worth it.