So why is Sword and Sorcery so popular in RPGs?

[Templetroll]

Says you! Watership Down the RPG was a big hit with our group!!!

Sorry...I couldn't resist.

Kane

Bunnies and Burrows was da bomb!

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Power: The standard RPG player is it in to satisfy his power fantasies, which are of the sort that best suits a rootless, amoral mercenary out for himself. Superheros, spy games, and science fiction have the power but it's often of a nature that can be put down or taken away with reasonable effort- and it's often of a nature that's easy for everyone that matters to acquire.

I don't understand this opinion. I see no evidence that it's true - not even among the hack-and-slash "What's roleplaying?" dice monkeys.

 

[scourger]

Sword and Sorcery works for a few fundamental reasons:

1. Autonomy: The standard sword and sorcery character is a rootless, amoral mercenary out for himself. He wants lots of gold, personal power, and the priviledges that those two things brings to his life. This is far easier to pull off in D&D and its clones than any other RPG.
2. Power: The standard RPG player is it in to satisfy his power fantasies, which are of the sort that best suits a rootless, amoral mercenary out for himself. Superheros, spy games, and science fiction have the power but it's often of a nature that can be put down or taken away with reasonable effort- and it's often of a nature that's easy for everyone that matters to acquire.
3. Ease: No requirements to be good, no need to know anything about the real world, no responsibility or accountability to anyone else, and no need for anything more than a dungeon to loot and some things to kill makes sword and sorcery gaming very easy for novices and casual gamers to get their game on.

These three reasons are while Howard, Vance, and Lieber are the root of D&D- and (as much as I would like it to be otherwise) not Tolkien and Lewis.

Yes. And magic. Don't forget the power trip of being a spellcaster or swinging a magic sword.

 

[The Shaman]

I'm the exception to the rule on this one, I think - though I played more D&D than anything else, my favorite games back in the day were Boot Hill, Top Secret, and Traveller. Now I'm a Thoroughly Modern Shaman - I would enjoy playing in a C&C game at some point, but most everything that I want to run is contemporary or historical.

I enjoy straight historical or modern espionage/military games very much - our Modern military game is one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played, thanks to the excellent players and their characters, and three of the five Modern games that I've run so far have been no-FX. I do think that a good historical or modern game should include a decent amount of research to get the feel of the period and to get rid of as many anachronisms as possible, but at the same time the GM can take some substantial liberties as well - for example, while Wing and Sword, our PbP military game, follows the basic timeline of the Algerian war, I have included a couple of adventures that diverge from the actual history of the period. I want to capture the feel of the time and the place, but I also want to run a fun game, so stretching the historical truth a bit is no problem as far as I'm concerned.

I also like the odd horror or modern monster game as well. I tend to limit the FX elements however, making them forces in the shadows to be confronted or avoided rather than the more overt approach of something like Urban Arcana. Our recently concluded M&M game of Victorian Africa exploration featured adventurers who were all 'normal' but incuded encounters with a couple of monsters and a sinister witch doctor - Bobitron's Sidewinder: Recoiled PbP game is another one that I enjoy very much.

 

[Turjan]

Real sword-and-sorcery is actually a pretty rare beast in rpgs. The aforementioned orc etc. have no place in s&s, where the opponents really are mainly people. Rpgs have really created their own genre of fantasy.

I understood that orcs have no place in s&s. I just wanted to point out that even "normal fantasy" can encompass different styles of play, from freeform "everything goes" to political campaigns with relatively uniform, well defined opponents.

 

[Gundark]

I read a dork tower comic strip about this. The group was tired of playing standard fantasy and try their hand at a modern game. The punchline of the comic was that the game was more or less the same (instead of flaming swords they had flamethrowers). You take fantasy adventure A and modern adventure B and boil the adventures down to it's core there really is no difference. Between the structures I mean. You could take any fantasy adventure and turn it into a modern one and visa versa.

 

[WayneLigon]

Honestly, I think it was because D&D was first and caught on; for many, many people it was the only RPG they even knew about for years. If the First Big Thing had been Traveller, we'd be on these boards talking about the morality of Hiver larva abandonment, Aslan political systems and bitching about how T3.5 screwed up the laser rifle fire rates.

 

[arwink]

Honestly, I think it was because D&D was first and caught on; for many, many people it was the only RPG they even knew about for years. If the First Big Thing had been Traveller, we'd be on these boards talking about the morality of Hiver larva abandonment, Aslan political systems and bitching about how T3.5 screwed up the laser rifle fire rates.

To say nothing of arguing about how we'd make hexadecimal stats accessible to new players.

 

[Shadowslayer]

Real sword-and-sorcery is actually a pretty rare beast in rpgs. The aforementioned orc etc. have no place in s&s, where the opponents really are mainly people. Rpgs have really created their own genre of fantasy.

So you're suggesting now that fantasy and "real" S&S are two separate genres? Please enlighten me on the difference. LOTR was not sword and sorcery?

 

[mhacdebhandia]

LOTR was not sword and sorcery?

Of course it wasn't!

Sword and sorcery is in the vein of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote epic fantasy.

Very different beasts.