The Possibility of "Too Fantastic" Fantasy

[jdrakeh]

Which is why they are awesome and beloved.

There's a reason Alice translates so well into horror.

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World building shouldn't be as big a deal using the PoL concept. You can define many PoLs, but there should always be plenty of darkness between them. It's Points of Darkness campaigns that can get restricting.

Sorry, I edited my above post after you responded. Apologies. I think I misunderstood what you were posting.

 

[jdrakeh]

As for design time, world building is ultimately it's own hobby, like miniature painting, so I wouldn't treat it as intrusive any more than playing video games or going for a walk are.

Except that you can go for a walk or play a video game without any preparation. Likewise, you can compete a walk of short distance in less than an hour and a video game in under a few. Building an entire world from the ground up in any kind of detail worth doing it is a great deal more time consuming.

 

[JohnSnow]

1001 Nights wasn't written for children, nor was Stardust. You're trying to set up a false dichotomy here by divding the established genre of High Fantasy (a genre that encompasses both most D&D worlds and lands such as Stormhold) into your own "For Adults" and "For Kids" categories based on your personal tastes. Verisimilitude is not required for High Fantasy to be enjoyed by adults, nor is the absurd just for children. That assertion is nothing short of deliberately insulting.

To further echo your point, I'd like to point out that laying a "fantastic overlay" on the "real world" is extremely common in literature aimed at children. The classic example of children's fantasy is where someone (or several someones) from the "real world" finds themselves in a "fantasy" environment. Some examples of this include many classic faerie tales, Alice in Wonderland, The Chronicles of Narnia, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, and of course, the Harry Potter novels.

By contrast, full developed alternative worlds are most common in literature that is, at the very least, aimed at teenagers. The level of "fantastic" in those varies tremendously, essentially depending on nothing more than the author's preference.

 

[Incenjucar]

Sorry, I edited my above post after you responded. Apologies. I think I misunderstood what you were posting.

Close enough.

It's just about how much something encourages you to think.

Heck, see: Midnight's Children. Totally wacky, magical story (knees of dooooooom! magic snot!), also so adult a story that it contributed to the author having a bounty on his head so he had to flee to America.

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jdrakeh: Going for a walk for an hour and world building for an hour both add up if you do them repeatedly, and both go nowhere if you do them only once.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

So, you're saying horned devilish-descendants and dragonmen would present something wholly unfamiliar to someone coming into a fantasy game, and that's bad, but presenting a new DM with things like an athach isn't? It's still a core assumption, assumed to be in all worlds just as much as the races are assumed.

As I see it, everything in the MM is opt-in. The DM has to actively decide to include certain monsters when building his world and his dungeons. Players should not assume that anything in the MM exists (though if they are told "the world is similar to medieval Europe" that does tell them to assume horses, oxen, hawks, etc). I do not read the MM as a campaign setting but rather as a list of options for the DM to use.

The athach in the MM is an opt-in element. Players should not assume that the world includes athaches, should not select it as a Polymorph form without first asking the DM if their character knows of such creatures, and so on.

The prestige classes in the DMG are opt-in elements (and explicitly described as so). No player should assume he has the "right" for his PC to become an archmage. The prestige class is something that the DM must actively choose to include in the game.

The playable races in the PHB, on the other hand, are opt-out elements. Because it is presented to players as "these are the options you have," players should expect that they are available unless the DM says otherwise.

I understand that 3E put more MM material in the players' hands (e.g. summoning charts), but as a player I would never expect that anything in the MM could be taken for granted. I would ALWAYS ask my DM about which creatures from the list are allowed in his campaign. And which creatures my caster is familiar with for Polymorph, and so on.

 

[Wyrmshadows]

1001 Nights wasn't written for children, nor was Stardust. You're trying to set up a false dichotomy here by divding the established genre of High Fantasy (a genre that encompasses both most D&D worlds and lands such as Stormhold) into your own "For Adults" and "For Kids" categories based on your personal tastes. Verisimilitude is not required for High Fantasy to be enjoyed by adults, nor is the absurd just for children. That assertion is nothing short of deliberately insulting.

I'm not trying to be insulting, excuse me if I came off that way.

Maybe I chose my words wrongly. What I am attemting to say is that fairy tale fantasy lends itself to absurdity, absurdity that children can, because of their relative innocence, embrace more easily that adults. Fairy tales do not require versimilitude as a rule and the absurd is expected. I would say without hesitation that a humanoid star is patently absurd. I would say that people made out of playing cards is absurd.

I personally enjoy fairy tale type movies/stories and enjoy them more now than when I was a child. However, I have no real use for them as a DM or a player however as I prefer my gaming fantasy to be more believable or in other words less absurd ( a relative state of course).

The Lord of the Ring contains less absurdity than the Wizard of Oz for example. Tolkien's works are high in versimilitude and this is what I am calling "adult" fantasy, not a value judgement but instead as a way of comparing such tales to those of Rumplstiltskin, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White or the Wind in the Willows.

Fairytales have more in common with myths than with modern fiction. Myths however are more complex than either fairytales or modern fantasy fiction and can be read as reprenting psycho-spiritual realities that transcend language altogether and so need to rely on metaphor to communicate their meaning.



Wyrmshadows

 

[DandD]

So, basically, all you say is that the Gamemaster and the players should talk beforehand and come to a consens, like always? Guess that's fine, in the end.

 

[Incenjucar]

The absurdity=children's thing is a fairly recent cultural thing. It's like how cartoons are treated. It's neither a universal nor a permanent distinction.

I blame the Industrial Revolution.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

One has one of the most famous miniature skirmish battlegame-lines, whereas the other doesn't, I guess, which is also the reason why so many people know it in the first place.

Also, according to Wikipedia, that Tekumel-setting reads like some kind of scifi-stuff set to become a medieval fantasy-world. Well, you shouldn't mix scifi and fantasy too much, I'd say, and Games Workshop realized that, which is why they officially separated the Warhammer Fantasy World from the Warhammer 40.000-Universe and let both franchise stand on its own.

Of course, Wikipedia does list that another factor contributing to the decline of popularity of Tekumel lies with TSR's lacking support.

Well, as always, I guess that there's more than meets the eyes.

Okay, so maybe these weren't the best examples. But many of the most popular settings draw upon things with which the audience is strongly familiar.

World of Darkness: Modern-day Earth plus supernatural entities.
Eberron: Pulp adventures (plus that "Roaring Twenties" feel for those with an interest in history).
Call of Cthulhu: Our Earth at various time periods, plus entities of cosmic horror.
Forgotten Realms: Lots of similarities to Tolkien and real world history (though it seems those are getting deemphasized in 4E).
Shadowrun: Near-future Earth with cyperpunk technology and many of the most popular fantasy tropes (again, lots of Tolkien influence here).
Exalted: Lots of anime and wuxia influences.

On the other hand, some rather creative settings were not exactly commercial successes, even apart from the above-mentioned Tekumel:

Planescape: While based on standard (at the time) D&D cosmology, it diverged very far from the common fantasy tropes.
Spelljammer: Again, too wildly divergent from standard fantasy to gain mass appeal (in my opinion, they should have emphasized parallels to the historical Age of Sai much stronger - including a "default setting" with multiple "core worlds" similar in culture to the powers of Europe and a "colonial rim" similar to overseas colonies of the former.)
Dark Sun: Again, very different from any tropes and stories most people are familiar with.


Those settings all had plenty of originality, but that alone wasn't enough to make them a continued commercial success - despite the fact that they had the marketing of the largest game company out there behind them and a large number of supplements. It should be noted that the last of the "lost settings" of the AD&D2E time - Ravenloft - fared good enough to be picked up by another company for a time. The reason for this is, I suspect, that Ravenloft is based on a rather more familiar source than those other settings - i.e. gothic horror - and thus was more accessible than the rest.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

As I see it, everything in the MM is opt-in. The DM has to actively decide to include certain monsters when building his world and his dungeons. Players should not assume that anything in the MM exists (though if they are told "the world is similar to medieval Europe" that does tell them to assume horses, oxen, hawks, etc). I do not read the MM as a campaign setting but rather as a list of options for the DM to use.

The athach in the MM is an opt-in element. Players should not assume that the world includes athaches, should not select it as a Polymorph form without first asking the DM if their character knows of such creatures, and so on.

The prestige classes in the DMG are opt-in elements (and explicitly described as so). No player should assume he has the "right" for his PC to become an archmage. The prestige class is something that the DM must actively choose to include in the game.

And going through these lists and informing the players of all decisions requires more time for everyone involved in getting familiar with the setting - which can be a disadvantage, as learning the politics and culture of the setting is probably more important for the campaign, but prep time for the GM and players alike is often limited.

Mind you, it's perfectly reasonable to exclude any of these elements from a particular campaign or campaign setting. But the designer should also remember that the published core rules (as opposed to later supplements) represent a baseline with which the players are likely to be familiar with. Thus, he probably should not only ask himself: "Do I really need this in my campaign?" but also "Is there a good reason not to have this in my campaign?"


For Urbis, I made the conscious design choice to inclue everything in the core rules for precisely this reason. Naturally, this will require some rewriting once 4E comes out - I'm currently working on inserting dragonborn, eladrin, and tieflings into the setting, for instance. But I think this helps making the setting more accessible, which is the main thing.