[Rant] Is Grim n Gritty anything more than prejuidice?

[TheAuldGrump]

To me 'Grim 'n' Gritty' implies a fragility of life. Folks are going to die, and some are going to be PCs.

Sometimes I want high fantasy, sometimes I want dark 'n' dirty. So very little prejudice here. And to reverse it - Is Heroic High Fantasy anything more than a prejudice? Which given the quote that you opened with seems a more reasonable question - the prejudice shown was against GnG, not in favor of it.

The Auld Grump

 

[Gez]

I think Moorcock's Eternal Champions book are assuredly grim and gritty. It's all about damned worlds ravaged by chaos and tyranny (and how the only way to survive is through balance between order and chaos, a balance nobody wants). It's all about dramatic antiheroes that only live to see the fall of their civilization, the death of their loved ones, and the treason of their own swords. It's all about the futility of even trying to improve one's lot in life.

That said, these angsty, doomed antiheroes are still übertwinky munchkins demigods if written on a D&D character sheet.

I think there's a confusion between "grim & gritty" and "low power". While it's easy to have both, it's also easy to have high level grim and gritty, or low-level happy stories.

 

[Wayside]

A great post here, thank-you, but at least part of the objective of my rant is to get someone to give me a good understanding of what GnG does and does not mean. Cause if all it means is that you are critical of some tropes in DnD than that's one thing, but the aesthetic seems pretty meaningless except as a rallying cry.

If what you're saying here is that, for example, the Realms could be played grim 'n gritty, I completely agree. Grim 'n gritty doesn't necessarily have to exclude high magic, flying castles, dragons or anything of that sort at all (mine just happens to)--what it does have to do is make it all very lethal. In my game there is no healing magic and you can die of a decent knife wound at any level, but the amount of power characters can possess is actually beyond anything in D&D, and it's also nothing like D&D (the closest equivalent in an established RPG would probably be Mage: tA). I did conflate genre and ruleset a bit in my post, when I was responding to your comment about how 90% of fantasy novels are put together, but I meant that response to be separate from the rest. Absolutely, grim 'n gritty and high fantasy can coexist--just be careful where you toss those fireballs.

The issue of genre is one that could be gone on about for days, and I would do so happilly. And while I'm not being critical, in any sort of mean sense, when I say this, I do distrust the formula that someone reads books and not genres. Pretty much intrinsicly you have to do both. So what is it about the call to genre that you distrust? Is it simply that it seems to be monolithic? Or is there something about the very idea of a fantasy genre that seems false to you?

Reading always begins with an expectation or a set of expectations, I'll give you that. It's just basic hermeneutics. Whether these expectations are genre-related or not (in fantasy they're likely to be, I imagine), they're always there. But in singling out specific features of 'fantasy literature,' for example, in grouping these texts together according to what they have in common, you've already foregrounded what is least interesting about them, you've already created a sort of homogenous zone of 'fantasy' that you can travel over in any direction because you know it already, without even having to read it, because it's 'fantasy.' Just as a sort of example, look at the idea of 'Romanticism.' 100 years ago (well, technically about 105) there was no such thing--literary historians hadn't invented it yet, hadn't yet assimilated the very disparate texts we now think of as Romantic into a whole. 50 years ago, any schoolboy could have told you what Romanticism was. Now we've come full circle. In fact pretty much the biggest "scandal" (used loosely) of English departments in the last ~40 years was the argument over whether there was or was not any such thing as Romanticism, and if it did exist, just what exactly was it?

Anyway, my point here is only that genre comes after the works it describes, so to give it any sort of authority over them is backwards. It is absolutely possible to read without any idea of genre in your head. One doesn't need to know anything about tragedy to read Sophokles or Shakespeare, whom we all, in fact, probably read in highschool without really knowing anything about tragedy (or drama!) as a theoretical genre. 'Genre theory,' as such, is always after the fact, and to my mind a little illegitimate for that reason. And, to take this a step further, I regard the work of writers who take the 'genre' as anything more than the barest point of departure to be generally inferior. So, when I say that genre always comes after, I realize I'm being a bit of an idealist, because I also recognize that, in much or even most 'fantasy,' genre in fact doesn't come after, rather is the entire basis for the story. And that doesn't appeal to me at all, because the best books, whatever else they may do, should force us to reassess our idea of a genre, if not obliterate it completely. That is why, while I have certainly read a few fantasy books here and there, I find the genre, as genre, ultimately uninteresting.

 

[Odysseus]

The GnG style to have more real world problems compared to high fantasy.
More realism makes the rules easier as you compare them to real life more.
While high fantasy is more escapism. If your stuck in a 9-5 job all week and you rp at the week end. Odds are you want escapism , rather than deal with the same problems you have all week.

 

[Particle_Man]

To me 'Grim 'n' Gritty' implies a fragility of life. Folks are going to die, and some are going to be PCs.

In that case, high level D&D is very Grim and Gritty, since the number of "Save or Die" spells and spell-like abilities dramatically increases. Really, the only thing you need to get rid of is magic that brings you back from the dead.

 

[Steel_Wind]

I think Moorcock's Eternal Champions book are assuredly grim and gritty.

I think there's a confusion between "grim & gritty" and "low power". While it's easy to have both, it's also easy to have high level grim and gritty, or low-level happy stories.

No no no no ...

Grim in the dark sense does not equal "grim n gritty".

There is no confusion about grim n gritty being low power. That is one of its distinguishing elements.

Elric summoning Arioch and wiping out armies is about as far from grim n gritty as you can get. It's a polar opposite.

The Hound getting slashed open in a fight only to develop a massive infection? That's grim n gritty. Tyrion Lannister escaping from prison and putting a crossbow quarrel in his father's guts as he sits on a garderobe? That's grim - and mostly gritty.

Thieve's Worls is grim - but not GnG for the most part.

It's a low magic less unrealistically heroic feel. The PC is a hero - but not a super-hero. That is the dinstinguishing element of those who look for that feeling in their game and game system.

And that's as far from the Eternal Champion series as one can get.

 

[SWBaxter]

That super-heroic is somehow in conflict with gritty fantasy, when really I've almost always assumed it was the point.

I suppose it depends what you mean by "super-heroic". Your later examples appear to cite anybody who's even mildly above average as proof of your point, when in fact there's a fairly wide range between somebody who's sufficiently competent to be considered a bad ass and some kind of super-heroic power level. What D&D has that most fictional fantasy doesn't is built in obsolescence of threats - D&D characters inevitably become powerful enough that almost all life-threatening challenges at 1st level are inconsequential at 10th level. Folks looking for grim-n-gritty games are usually saying things like "I'd like it if even highly experienced characters were cautious at the prospect of a 30' fall, or a guardsman with a crossbow pointed in their direction." In fantasy fiction it's quite possible to be a bad ass and still think jumping off the castle wall is a real bad idea, whereas to a high level D&D character it's purely a question of whether it's worth the hit points lost.

And that DnD is the primary originator of the super-heroic fantasy trope.

I don't know if that has any real bearing on a desire for grim-n-gritty; I can think of lots of fantasy where the protagonists became godlike, and I have no idea whether D&D inspired them or vice versa. What I do know is there's lots of fantasy where such an ascent to superbeing status is not part of the setting, and every now and then I like to game in that type of setting.

 

[Particle_Man]

I see two easy solutions:

1) Don't give players hit points beyond their first level hit points, no matter what level they attain.

or

2) Don't give players experience points. They stay first level forever and ever until they die.

 

[Dragonblade]

In that case, high level D&D is very Grim and Gritty, since the number of "Save or Die" spells and spell-like abilities dramatically increases. Really, the only thing you need to get rid of is magic that brings you back from the dead.

Exactly right!

There are two schools of thought on G&G. One school posits that G&G requires low levels, limited magic and high potential lethality. The other school posits that G&G merely requires a certain dark atmosphere and high potential lethality.

I am of the latter school. I played in a D&D game run by my friend SHARK that I would consider EXTREMELY G&G, yet, in his campaign I played a 40th level monk/sorcerer and had all the magic gear appropriate to my character level.

Yet, his game had an extremely dark atmosphere and we never fought anything with a CR of less than 15. And those were his mooks!! Every single fight, I came within a few hit points of death. I had to cast Wish pretty much every other round in order to heal myself just to stay alive.

In hindsight, his game was grittier and more lethal than any low level game I ever played in. And I loved his game for it. Why? Because it had all the G&G atmosphere but I had the cool options of a high level character. It was the perfect blend of G&G verisimilitude, combined with the escapist power of super-heroic fantasy.

Playing in a limited magic, low-level game just sucked in comparison. Not only are you just as likely to die, but without high level magic and items, there is less that you can actually do about it.

 

[JoeGKushner]

From what I get the feeling, it's not so much grim and gritty as reliance on outside magical items to be bad ass.

Yes, Raven, Captain, and others are bad ass, much like Conan and Solomon Kane.

However, stripped to the skin and thrown into a pit of alligators, they are still bad ass.

Typical 20th level D&D character in same situation with no spells memorized, unless it's a monk or monk variant, is alligator chow.

Maybe I'm wrong and people want the grim and gritty instant kill thing but I think it's all abou the magic and the balance built into the game of having that magic, especially in terms of healing.