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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Krensky" data-source="post: 4820365" data-attributes="member: 30936">Fundamentally wrong. Shanarra is high fantasy and has no gods of note. The D&D novels are, generally, high fantasy and have gods on both sides. The Deed of Paksinarrion has Gods on both sides and while Paks is empowered by her god Gird (she is a Paladin, after all) she wins because she endures and is rewarded afterward with healing and more work because of her faith. I stopped reading a few books in, but I don't recall any Gods in the Wheel of Time (other then the characters, that is). The defining differences between Sword and Sorcery and High Fantasy are: Seeking adventure vs having adventure thrust upon you, episodic vs serial, ambiguous morality vs good/evil, personal conflict vs world threatening and that HF is draws more from legend and typically is a form of Campbellian Bildungsroman.Genre is defined by theme, tropes, and trappings. Invented races, magic, wizards, monsters, etc all being "common place", although not necessarily to the hero, are all characteristics of HF. They are not characteristics of  Sword and Sorcery.  Except that none of those (well, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly sort of is) are really westerns. They're samurai films with deserts and guns. Fundamentally they have more in common with Erol Flynn then And yet he wrote Greyhawk, which is High Fantasy.Elves, dwarves, magic, monsters, black and white morality... It's HF. Gritty, bloody, absurd HF sure, but it's still HF. Then again the PCs are assumed to be looking for adventure, fortune and glory. So it's S&S. But it's also HF. It's a mismash of both with Sword and Planet, classical legends, science fiction, strange Japanese toys and a pile of other stuff tossed in. D&D is it's own genre of Fantasy, which is closest to HF. No matter what the edition.As I saiud above, numerous HF stories have no Gods or have good Gods who are essentially powerless because they're opposed by bad Gods. Moorcock has good, bad, and indifferent gods. Conan has cruel, indiffernt gods, malevolent gods, and at least two good gods.It's not a poor reading, it's a mechanistic crtique. At the core, Conan survives because he made Howard money. Conana can't loose, because Howard's editors would not buy a story that had that happen, because it would anger the readers and Howard would starve. Primary characters are far more likely to die in HF then S&S.Although I don't like 4e, does not have anything of the sort.You're wrong. The game tells you how to figure out how tough an encounter will be. It recomends you make encounters within certain range so the PCs aren't blithely wading through schlubs or getting slaughtered by things outside their league, but it doesn't stop you from sticking Orcus in the last room of Keep on the Shadowfell. It then goes on to tell you what sort of treasure is appropriate so as not to break the game system. Again, outside of the RPGA you can break this all you want. Neither of these are plot control, however. Adventure! has plot control, Houses of the Blooded has plot control. 4e does not have plot control.How does that relate? I'm pretty sure 4e has random encounter tables. It's less swingy, because in WotC is of the opinion that most people like things that way. From what I've seen in the way of house rules for 3e, rewrites of d20</blockquote>

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