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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 2484999" data-attributes="member: 6533">I think this is the essence of the difference I was trying to get at, but first let me apologize.At no point did I mean to imply that you were basing your opinion off a comparison that ignored what IH was in favor of what you wanted it to be.  I respect your critical faculties.  My only point was that I suspect you and I bring different knowledge sets to the game in terms of the RPGs we play and read.  Certainly we have a lot in common but I would describe my knowledge of Grim Tales, for instance, as paltry in comparison to yours. And where you have made comparison, and I am in complete understanding that they are purely illustrative, to mechanics that originated in Star Wars D20, for instance, my immediate points of comparison actually tend to be non-D20 rules sets such as Feng Shui or Exalted.As I said, over the course of the many conversations on this product I have come to respect your critical opinion and I think that though there are things I might disagree with you on on a very basic level as a fan of IH I'm very happy to have your critique around since I think it is a legitimate perspective.Now:My problem with Conan as a system is the very thing you bring up as a feature.  Every new change it made to the system was in regard to a specific question.  Each answer was tailored.This is not my preferred style of game design.  To me it feels too modular and grainy.IH does a better job precisely because it is not question specific.  The How and Why is only referenced to other parts of the system.  It feels more like a complete text and it's easier to get a picture of how the different parts of the system relate to each other than it is something with an organization like Conan where instead of letting the play style demonstrate itself it tells you what it's doing.For me it's the difference between a song that 'is' punk and a song that 'says' it's punk.  There's nothing necessarilly wrong with the second style and there's no reason that saying your punk invalidates your being punk, but the first one I think is more likely to be interesting on its own and more likely to change the nature of being punk productively.I read IH and I don't know what it wants to be, I know what it is.Essentially, this is a difference in how much you value elegance, the techinal idea that you incorporate several functions into the same engine rather than creating specialized components, in design.  If you don't like elegant design that's fine, it's not like it's a universally acknowledged necessary element, but it's sort of hard to deny that as a whole IH has a far more elegant design style than Conan.And I like elegance.It's also worth pointing out that I think the Conan OGL was trying to make the Conan stories a lot grittier than they actually are and that it sort of hurt them in trying to make a coherent game system out of it.  But that's a pure tangent from what we're talking about here.I'm sorry if I made this a lot more abstract than it is.A simpler answer to your question of what IH wants to be is that it wants to be Heroic Fantasy which means it's going to end up on the boundaries of most current gaming aesthetics rather than solidly within most of the more current camps which combine Heroic Fantasty with other aesthetics.Exalted, for instance, combines HF with Epics.DnD combines HF with High fantasy.Conan combines HF with Gritty fantasy.This is in the nature of Heroic Fantasy as it is, on many levels, an inherently satirical form and thus incorporates a broad array of elements, most designers therefore look to another aesthetic to provide some limitation on the content available.IH was able to avoid this directly by using the most Heroic Fantasy element of a High Fantasy game, the MM of DnD, to provide a cannonized standard of madness for the madness.It's an interesting project since RPGs tend to view themselves as literary and IH/Heroic fantasy is always going to be sort of liminal to that.  Some of Borges short stories would be the ones I would go to for the purest sense of that feeling, but equally I would add any reading of Leiber or Howard that was unaware of the direction those franchises would appear to take over the whole course of their work.  The sort of thing that produces excited authors producing excited pastiches rather than the sort of thing that produces satisfied critics producing insightful elaborations.  And, I would argue, the sort of thing that probably produced the works themselves.On the other hand, it's also the sort of thing that produced He Man.  So it's not like I don't appreciate someone calling out against the darkside.</blockquote>

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