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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 9560028" data-attributes="member: 6801252">Discourse in the 'larger' tabletop roleplaying space is often concerned with what sort of stories or types of game play a given system is good to emulate, and inevitably these discussions often pare down into very mechanical examinations of those systems and how they intersect with particular stories and sub-genres. Some common debates in this vein include:This specific subset of debates is I think most interesting in the Heroic Fantasy genre-- your DND/PF sure, but it also pertains to your Dungeon Worlds, your Fabula Ultimas, your ICONs, your 13th Age, Fantasy Age, Burning Wheel, and so forth. 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. In the weeds of the Pathfinder community, we often discuss whether the game's meta allows for highly themed casters which have become the norm in a lot of fantasy fiction consumed by the community; a key element of this debate concerns whether new character options need to be made to support Pyromancers as opposed to Sorcerers Who Cast Fireball a Lot especially since the game's very satisfying tactical learning curve actually encourages casters toward variety, and the breakdown of what satisfies who is itself interesting.These debates here and elsewhere have been percolating in my head, especially since these arguments are in some ways niche-- the majority of players are pretty adamant about sticking with Dungeons and Dragons, much less interested in switching games based on their current specific fascinations, especially since those fascinations may not pertain to the whole group. So without further ado, let's get into the actual thesis of this thread: the case for the Common Denominator Setting as it appears in Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying Games. A Choice CutRemember when I said those two specific questions concerning the Witcher and Game of Thrones were going to be important? The wording of those questions is what we in the business call foreshadowing, and it's time to fire that gun. Lets break down the elements of the "I want to play Game of Thrones" Cow: A lot of my thinking revolves around E being only one of the possibilities for what the player means when they say they want to do Game of Thrones, it is possible for example, that they don't really care as much about the lack of magic in Game of Thrones, but are interested in the politics. It's also possible they do care about the lower magic, but don't need it to go quite as far-- a party wizard might be acceptable, provided the rest of the world acts like a rarity. You can sort of parse all the permutations for what they could mean when they say they want Game of Thrones, and people are often more specific. Think about the Witcher portion in the same lens, do they want a character who exists in the dark and sordid (but higher magic) world of the Witcher, or do they want a character who feels like Geralt would, investigating monsters for a specific method of taking them out regardless of the setting's tone, or do they simply want a character that feels like their build in the Witcher III, or with something approaching his backstory and emotional vibe? The point here, is that you might be noticing that some of these elements, both in our discussion of A Song of Ice and Fire as a genre example, and in playing a Witcher as a character type, is that some of what we might mean is going to be mutually exclusive with elements of other fantasy stories, and others won't be, at least not with the same elements. You can have interhouse politics scheming and brutality in a very high magic setting, where the houses are elven wizards of incredible power (or Drow, to call back to the R.A. Salvatore books)-- you can have an extremely low magic setting that gives that faux-realistic medieval vibe, without the brutality and backstabbing of A Song of Ice and Fire. You can't have a character who comes from a dark paranoid, and fundamentally broken world like that of the Witcher and expect to have that character's cynical bias reinforced when they exist in the optimistic-by-default assumed milieu of Fabula Ultima's High Fantasy expansion; you can certainly have a gruff monster-hunter-by-trade spellsword who uses alchemy and an encyclopedic knowledge of monsters if that's what you meant. The Common Denominator 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. This common denominator setting is what we generally recognize as the Dungeons and Dragons / Pathfinder Milieu in the current day, they embrace high magic because that allows them to create specific character options that 'rope in' character types from a high variety of high magic media, while lower fantasy character types can be included so long a they don't continge on a lack of magic in the world around them and the player either accepts some degree of background wuxia lore to keep themselves up or suspends disbelief on that point. This is partially an outgrowth of roleplaying games being multiplayer experiences, the common denominator setting is often a natural compromise between your desire for Tyrion Lannister and his need to navigate the succession, with Amy's desire to play an Aes Sedai, Steve's desire to play Goku, and Sarah's deep and abiding love of cthulu mythos stories. But what's interesting, is that we're seeing the Common Denominator settings become more and more of a genre in and of itself, <a href="https://wanderinginn.com/" target="_blank">being the lifeblood of newer genres of literature such as LitRPG</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVrzN-r4MKA&pp=ygUYZ3VpbGQgcmVjZXB0aW9uaXN0IGFuaW1l" target="_blank">in a never ending torrent of anime of mixed quality</a>, and of course in video games <a href="https://baldursgate3.game/" target="_blank">licensed for ttrpg</a> <a href="https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/start" target="_blank">and</a> <a href="http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/" target="_blank">otherwise</a>. This makes sense in some ways, each of these works tend to present world in which multiple sub-milieu exist-- the Wandering Inn is fantasy lit that features Witcher-esque Hunters, DND Style Adventuring Parties, Interhouse Politics and Brutal Warfare, a Hogwarts-Esque Magic Academy, among other things, and tends to navigate between them via different perspective characters and geographical locations that are themed accordingly to the different composite elements. World of Warcraft has a similar conceit, the tone in the new <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpNeW2NlkXQ&pp=ygURdW5kZXJtaW5lIHRyYWlsZXI%3D" target="_blank">Undermine</a> is very different relative to the tone of say, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9B7dsyU0lc" target="_blank">Dragonflight's launch</a>. All of these are products of the culture descended from TTRPGs, and its been interesting, because traditionally a lot of RPG players use RPGs to emulate non-RPGs, but now the Common Denominator settings have been taking on a life of their own.None of this is to say that specificity is objectively bad, just that I've been trying to nail down in my head where the market as a whole appears to differ in it's conceptualization of the elements they want out of a story or game, whereas highly specific games often work by subtraction, it seems like the market prefers accretion, simply prizing the addition of an element more than the subtraction of an element in the curation process. Taking into account the profusion of new media that takes place in the extended family of DND milieu, I would say there's been an overall movement toward Common Denominator settings in fantasy fiction and in Tabletop Roleplaying Games.</blockquote>

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