Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5678691" data-attributes="member: 22779">I'll be honest up front.  I'm not a huge fan of fantasy as a genre.  I've read lots of fantasy, but, I tend to go more for SF.  I was thinking the other day about why that might be.  I like D&D after all, and I do like a lot of fantasy, so, why not dive right in?And it hit me.  Most of the fantasy I have read (and there are many exceptions here, I'm painting with a very broad brush) treats magic as a plot device.  The hero needs to kill the dragon, so, he finds/makes/is given a dragon killing sword/spear/lumpy metal thing.  Off he goes, kills the dragon and the peasant's rejoice.  In SF, OTOH, the magic (ok, it's not magic in SF, I know that, just work with me here) is part of the setting.  There's no quest for the dragon killing sword.  Everyone has one.  That's why dragons are so bloody rare.  Instead of being gifted by a cloak of invisibility to get past the bad guys, the hero's install a cloaking device on their ship that is pretty much readily available at any Star Home Depot.And, again, I know that I'm painting with a broad brush.  One of the things I hated about Star Trek was the fact that they often treated tech elements as plot devices - use it in one episode then totally forget about it the next.  Now, rolling this back around to RPG's.One of the big debates in D&D is how magic is treated in a setting.  And, by magic here, I mean fantastical elements.  It could actually be magic, or it could simply be stuff that can't really exist in the real world - flying horses, giant insects, etc.  Often D&D settings treat magic like a plot device.  The PC's have it, but, the implications of the fantastic are largely ignored.  You get world's where it's pretty much just like Earth, but with some extra bits glossed over on top.  Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and others all come out like this.  The fantastic is not strongly woven into the setting.There are exceptions to this of course.  Dark Sun, I'm coming to realize, really speaks to its fantastic setting (fantastic as in not real, not fantastic as in really cool).  Everything about the setting seems to flow from the implications of its base conceits.  Steampunk, and I'm going to stick what I've seen so far of Zeitgeist in here, also strongly leans on this.  The fantastic elements aren't plot devices.  They're woven straight into basic framework of the world.  In Zeitgeist, circles of gold block teleportation so walls often have gold circles built into them.  That sort of thing.It's something that's really captured my imagination.So, how about your game worlds?  Do you spend time exploring the implications of the fantastic?  Or, is your game world more traditional fantasy?</blockquote>

Verification