Heroic Fantasy and TTRPG: The Relative Utility of Common Denominator Settings

I think your description towards the end there is a good summary of how we got here but I think we're going to continue watching it crystallize into a primarily self-referential thing.
I don't expect it to crystallize. I expect it to continue to simmer as new things are added.
 

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I don't expect it to crystallize. I expect it to continue to simmer as new things are added.
I see those as parallel processes I suppose, the more works normalize the elements of it, the more new developments will be couched in those crystallizing elements, the interesting thing is what will be 'kept' from the denominator fantasy in each work such that it becomes increasingly standard in the category of fantasy.

One book that comes to mind in this vein is Orconomics (which is excellent) because it revolves around adventuring guilds, which are a staple I'm seeing crop up in litrpg, anime, and game circles, but it focuses in a lot on the actual economics of what adventurers do from the perspective that it's becoming financialized, the story dwells on it, but I wouldn't be shocked to see that become more frequent.

But future developments are hard to predict, from a TTRPG perspective, its been interesting to see Benders from Avatar more consistently creeping into the milieu, among other things.
 

In aggregate, I would submit that part of the popularity of what we broadly understand to be the conventional heroic fantasy milieu (and its permutations, generally itself but darker, and possibly itself with magitech) is that they representate the highest concentrations of tonally and thematically consistent elements derived from fantasy works that in their totality, are much less compatible with each other.
I happen to attribute a lot of D&Ds success to it being so generic which makes it accessible to a large number of people. At the same time, I figured out in 1991 that D&D could not emulate many of the fantasy stories I loved at the time. (I was trying to adapt Eye of the World which was the first Wheel of Time book). In many ways, D&D has grown less generic over the years and become it's own genre. Sometimes when introducing new people to the game, they find it difficult to make the same kind of character from their beloved fantasy sources.
 

I happen to attribute a lot of D&Ds success to it being so generic which makes it accessible to a large number of people. At the same time, I figured out in 1991 that D&D could not emulate many of the fantasy stories I loved at the time. (I was trying to adapt Eye of the World which was the first Wheel of Time book). In many ways, D&D has grown less generic over the years and become it's own genre. Sometimes when introducing new people to the game, they find it difficult to make the same kind of character from their beloved fantasy sources.
Yeah, D&D, in its noble quest to achieve maximum sales revenue, went beyond generic-fantasy-game. Now it's D&D-fantasy-game, which includes a lot, but it also permits a lot. So Frodo's gardener can be a Tiefling Warlock now.

Generic-fantasy-game (whichever that might be) should set the bar low and raise it based on player needs, not corporate needs.
 

Sometimes it's internally kind of funny, where a game Fabula Ultima purports to be a JRPG simulator (games to this day know for extensive Dungeons as the meat and potatoes of game play) but enthusiastically follows the trend (for better or worse) of being against Dungeons.
Most of the time spent in the final fantasy games was not in dungeons... at least not in the ones I've played (FFIV, FFVII, FFX, FFX2, FFCC, FXCCRoF, FFT, FFTA, FFCD, FFMLAK), but instead travel and grinding travel for XP.
And a few, the dungeons even are open terrain and not a classic railroady dungeon. (FFCC...)

The dungeons in FFIV were major plot points but not the majority of play. IME, both as player and watcher, FFIV, VII, VIII, and IX all seem to hold to that, as well, and several of the odd lame GBA/GBDS titles were mostly travel and town with no dungeons before I got bored.

The town sequences in many are just as much a time sink as travel.

And in FFX, the blitzball...

And some others, outside the FF line, such as Octopath Traveller, are likewise town and travel heavy.

Only in Chocobo's Dungeon has it been heavy on the Dungeon time.

And those are all ones adjusted to western sensibilities.

I'll note that MLAK is all about dungeons, but the player never enters one....
 

Most of the time spent in the final fantasy games was not in dungeons... at least not in the ones I've played (FFIV, FFVII, FFX, FFX2, FFCC, FXCCRoF, FFT, FFTA, FFCD, FFMLAK), but instead travel and grinding travel for XP.
And a few, the dungeons even are open terrain and not a classic railroady dungeon. (FFCC...)

The dungeons in FFIV were major plot points but not the majority of play. IME, both as player and watcher, FFIV, VII, VIII, and IX all seem to hold to that, as well, and several of the odd lame GBA/GBDS titles were mostly travel and town with no dungeons before I got bored.

The town sequences in many are just as much a time sink as travel.

And in FFX, the blitzball...

And some others, outside the FF line, such as Octopath Traveller, are likewise town and travel heavy.

Only in Chocobo's Dungeon has it been heavy on the Dungeon time.

And those are all ones adjusted to western sensibilities.

I'll note that MLAK is all about dungeons, but the player never enters one....

There's quite a lot, even in those titles: Dungeon for a comprehensive list, I was thinking of 3 myself.

Though I was partially thinking of other games and serieses: Dragon Quest, Breathe of Fire, Tales of, Trails, Persona/Metaphor/SMT, Breath of Fire, Bravely Default, even games like Dark Cloud.

Even pokemon' early gens were defined by crawls through locations like Mt Moon, Ice Path, Whirl Islands, and so forth, though thats stretching away from the fantasy theming-- Zelda is in the mix too but that stretches the 'RPG' part since most RPGs are not like Zelda.
 

I mean, if the argument that "generic fantasy pastiche" has taken on an existence of its own, and is now feeding its own descendant spinoffs and subgenres, I wholeheartedly agree.

The exact borders are of course blurry, and its definitions change as new popular media arises, but it is most definitely a thing. And a lot of media defines itself by borrowing most of the tropes but then modifying or adding something new to create a new flavor.
 

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