The Possibility of "Too Fantastic" Fantasy

[DandD]

Yes, of course. And I'm happy for your promotion.

 

[Reynard]

Ah, the internet, where professionals get disparaged by amateurs that have never proven themselves capable of writing professionally, nor meeting a deadline, nor even making a company think they're worth hiring.

DandD has a point (I can't believe I just wrote that).

I have done professional game writing and I can tell you, unequivocably, that getting hired initially was due precisely to "who you know". It's fairly common in any industry. just look at American idol (again, i can't believe I just wrote that): there's talent out there everywhere, but the talented don't always have access to the people or places that will get them the right opportunities. Sometimes, it is simple economics -- you might have the awesomist, most well written adventure or supplement ever, but if companies aren't hiring (try and get d20/OGL work right now) it doesn't make a lick of difference.

At the same time, I agree with you -- fans tend to take ownership and they will crticise with only their personal preferences and/or experiences as a backing. The two things aren't necessarily connected -- I have known gamers I would trust to make a new edition of D&D in a heartbeat, and seen the works of well regarded professionals whose work I won't touch with a 10 foot pole.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Alternatively, you bring back anility score pre-requisites for classes. The Paladin gets hella rare in that case (as does the ranger, the druid, the monk and a few others).

You mean the system that rewards me for getting lucky and having higher ability scores than the other players by also allowing me to play a more powerful character class than the other players'? I'm not so down with that.

Here's the thing though, even if you want to assume no prereqs and people have as open an opportunity to join a PC class as the PCs do (a bad idea, IMO), but you figure that either everyone rolls 3d6 for their stats or has a "standard array", things like powerful clerics and wizards aren't much of an issue. Bishop Bob the 10th level cleric of Whatsertown can still only cast 2nd or 3rd level spells, is relatively weak in many areas because of low stats and doesn't have access to nearly the range of items or options that PCs do because he doesn't go trolling around in deep, dank, monster infested holes.

True, but I think that 3e has much better resources for this. (For instance, the PrC system allows you to make paladins properly awesome and rare without the double-whammy random-ability score problem I referenced earlier.) I'd rather just use the heroic-nonheroic divide implied in the 4e design discussion and give my NPCs weaker overall abilities relative to level. The Iron Heroes NPC classes currently work this way, and (for instance) I adapted the Adept class to use those rules, giving me NPC spellcasters who are technically "10th level" but have fewer than 10 HD and spells of a level much lower than 5th. But your approach does seem to work just fine!

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Personally, I too prefer a world with a strong "mundane" default... but I think it's hard to justify given D&D's assumed campaign demographics and given all the monsters, magic, and other crazy stuff that the game contains. In order to make the mundane work, you have to pare down a lot. I do this IMC, but unless they want to alter D&D to look more like A Game of Thrones, Conan, or Black Company, I think it's hard for the designers to do this when putting together the skeleton of the "implied settting."

You know it's interesting.

I would never have thought of Game of Thrones or Black Company as being 'mundane' default.

GoT - seasons last years, civilizations are tens of thousands of years old, there's a wall made out of glacier and castles built around geothermal features or insanely high cliffs and mountains. There are alien creatures with shrieking swords who move with the cold. The foundation of the next to last regime's political mandate? Dragons.

Black Company - mages are military specialists, cities contain tombs in which horrible beasts are stored, insane ancient magic users pick you up from port with city ships, and you fight grim battles for mile high towers beneath skies turned into flowing arrays of colorful terror by the high level mage fights that surround you. The main character of the first book ends the series as a magic dispensing demi-god construct designed to monitor and maintain a plain of interdimensional portals.

Now thinking about there are certainly 'mundane defaults' common to both settings. Humanity is the dominant PoV races in each. Magic items are rare-ish to very rare. Proficient magic users are slightly rarely than literacy itself. People can get wounded and be out for a while. People, even signficantly bad ass people, can die in combat and treat that as a real risk. Monsters are pretty rare.


The point of which, I suppose, is that it is perfectly possible to have both 'fantastic defaults' and 'mundane defaults' as co-existant themes or strains of the same setting.

Heck, two of the underlying assumptions of Conan - which I would certainly peg as 'mundane default' - are explicitly 'A Wizard did it' and '...the answer is, CTHULU! Roll for SAN, your world is DOOMED!'

 

[SSquirrel]

And another thing: If this "move away from Earth mythology" stuff actually worked, then Planescape and Dark Sun would still be in print.

I love them both, but there must be a reason why they haven't survived and, say, FR (heavily based on stereotypical D&D fantasy, the type which the core D&D game used to specialise in) has.

Or that the first set of novels/adventures totally butchered the initial setting and the second box set was atrocious probably had a lot to do with it in the case of Dark Sun TSR was also keeping what...9 different settings afloat in the 2E era? WotC had FR and Eberron. The other settings were all licensed. I don't count the extremely minor amount of Greyhawk content found in 3E. The Gazetteer was 1/20th the page count of either of the other settings, probably less.

I'm not saying being too out there didn't contribute, but it certainly wasn't the only reason.

 

[sinecure]

The OP makes a good point about fantasy needing a mundane baseline. It don't think it should be too mundane though. I think of it more like Hobbiton in The Lord of the Rings. Everything else that happens afterwards is so much cooler because you see it through the eyes of Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry. They don't know what Middle Earth has in it or why it's so important, but that's because they are the ones on the adventure.

This has the added benefit of what I think Wizards is doing with the points of light thingy. To make beating the bad guys that much more important, the good guys have to be well known. Their homes, their friends, and their families have to be worth saving. That's sort of the point of the LOTR movies, right? If everyone was a kickass hero, then the important things about life would get kind of ignored. I mean, even you guys who hate Anime can admit not every character in them are larger than life heroes. They have lots of different stereotypes. Spirited Away works because the bath house is larger than life like Gygax's dungeons, but world outside is historical Japan.

The other point I thought was good was about how magic should have effected a world so it becomes unlike our own. Like in Ptolus or Eberron the magic rules determine the world. I like Halruaa and it seems like the kind of place I would want to visit, but it does seem a bit hard to imagine. My best guess is something like Ptolus, but that very science fantasy for me. It's like a mega civilization from Macross. Not a D&D world. Maybe 4th edition will allow for that kind of play too? One where we pretend we live on city planets and death stars are magically grown creatures if you don't want electricity?

These two things are at odds for me, but maybe we need different games for each? I hear Star Wars Saga edition does what it does pretty well.

 

[WayneLigon]

Alternatively, you bring back anility score pre-requisites for classes. The Paladin gets hella rare in that case (as does the ranger, the druid, the monk and a few others).

Actually they don't become all that rare. People just cheat more.

With 3d6-in-order systems for PC's you get to see 'charcter evolution' in action: the mundanish PC's like the Fighter with a Strength of 12 or the wizard with an Intelligence of 14 and a Constitution of 6 die off very quickly. The lucky guy with the hot dice who has the wizard with an Intelligence of 16 and a Constitution of 16 tends to stick around and be more successful.

Now, for NPCs that's pretty much what I do. I don't assume they generate stats like PC's do and I don't assume they go through 'character evolution': many times they've encountered white-bearded town mages that have an Int of 14. He might be 12th level, but he's simply never been able to master the greater magics. Unless he is an artificer (small 'a'), he's not going to make stat boosting items for himself, and usually he couldn't afford them otherwise. Only adventurers have 15,000 gp laying around for stuff like that. This guy gets out of bed and goes to his high paying 5-6-gp-a-day job every morning.

 

[ruleslawyer]

You know it's interesting.

I would never have thought of Game of Thrones or Black Company as being 'mundane' default.

GoT - seasons last years, civilizations are tens of thousands of years old, there's a wall made out of glacier and castles built around geothermal features or insanely high cliffs and mountains. There are alien creatures with shrieking swords who move with the cold. The foundation of the next to last regime's political mandate? Dragons.

Black Company - mages are military specialists, cities contain tombs in which horrible beasts are stored, insane ancient magic users pick you up from port with city ships, and you fight grim battles for mile high towers beneath skies turned into flowing arrays of colorful terror by the high level mage fights that surround you. The main character of the first book ends the series as a magic dispensing demi-god construct designed to monitor and maintain a plain of interdimensional portals.

Now thinking about there are certainly 'mundane defaults' common to both settings. Humanity is the dominant PoV races in each. Magic items are rare-ish to very rare. Proficient magic users are slightly rarely than literacy itself. People can get wounded and be out for a while. People, even significantly bad ass people, can die in combat and treat that as a real risk. Monsters are pretty rare.

The point of which, I suppose, is that it is perfectly possible to have both 'fantastic defaults' and 'mundane defaults' as coexistent themes or strains of the same setting.

Heck, two of the underlying assumptions of Conan - which I would certainly peg as 'mundane default' - are explicitly 'A Wizard did it' and '...the answer is, CTHULU! Roll for SAN, your world is DOOMED!'

I was referring to the d20 game systems rather than the underlying literature, but your post is just too genius to ignore. I think that AGoT and Black Company actually are probably the ideal settings to discuss that unique balance between the mundane and the fantastic.

In Black Company, people know what a wizard is. They recognize the existence of other dimensions, strange monsters, and bizarre artifacts... *but* they're still, for the most part, ordinary Joes at heart. They inhabit a fantastical *environment*, but with an understandable culture.

This is actually where I think that fantasy can go off the rails... by becoming too culturally alien rather than too visually or environmentally fantastical. Living in a city that features a six-thousand-foot-tall windowless black basalt tower, or in the midst of a seventeen-year dire winter, or in a ten-mile-long submersible vessel cruising infinite underwater depths, are all things that can be visually striking and a far cry from Tolkien, but if we start with a baseline of familiar human psychological and cultural motivation, and *then* alter it to fit the events of the world and underlying circumstances, it can still be familiar enough to maintain that tension between the everyday and the special that's so important to any adventure narrative.

Starting with unfamiliar cultures and motivations, on the other hand, can take one off the rails quite quickly. Moorcock (one of the iconic literary inspirations for D&D, IMO) is interesting in this regard; in at least two cases (Corum and Elric), he starts with characters who come from cultures and mindsets that aren't easily cognizable to the reader. The only humans who show up in the entire first book of the Elric saga are the poor wretches being tortured to death by Doctor Jest. Working with that kind of world (which is sort of suggested as the tiefling default for 4e) can, IMO, be quite tricky.

 

[Spatula]

Here's the thing though, even if you want to assume no prereqs and people have as open an opportunity to join a PC class as the PCs do (a bad idea, IMO), but you figure that either everyone rolls 3d6 for their stats or has a "standard array", things like powerful clerics and wizards aren't much of an issue. Bishop Bob the 10th level cleric of Whatsertown can still only cast 2nd or 3rd level spells, is relatively weak in many areas because of low stats and doesn't have access to nearly the range of items or options that PCs do because he doesn't go trolling around in deep, dank, monster infested holes.

Yes, I think this is it exactly. In 1e/2e, powerful classes were balanced (or "balanced") by having very high ability score requirements, suggesting that such characters are rare in the world at large. In 3e, anyone can be any class... but you're going to suck at it unless you have good ability scores in the right order. There may be many NPC paladins, but most of them will basically be religiously-themed fighters with fewer feats. The "true" paladins (the 1e/2e power level kind) are still rare.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I was referring to the d20 game systems rather than the underlying literature, but your post is just too genius to ignore. I think that AGoT and Black Company actually are probably the ideal settings to discuss that unique balance between the mundane and the fantastic.

In Black Company, people know what a wizard is. They recognize the existence of other dimensions, strange monsters, and bizarre artifacts... *but* they're still, for the most part, ordinary Joes at heart. They inhabit a fantastical *environment*, but with an understandable culture.

This is actually where I think that fantasy can go off the rails... by becoming too culturally alien rather than too visually or environmentally fantastical. Living in a city that features a six-thousand-foot-tall windowless black basalt tower, or in the midst of a seventeen-year dire winter, or in a ten-mile-long submersible vessel cruising infinite underwater depths, are all things that can be visually striking and a far cry from Tolkien, but if we start with a baseline of familiar human psychological and cultural motivation, and *then* alter it to fit the events of the world and underlying circumstances, it can still be familiar enough to maintain that tension between the everyday and the special that's so important to any adventure narrative.

Starting with unfamiliar cultures and motivations, on the other hand, can take one off the rails quite quickly. Moorcock (one of the iconic literary inspirations for D&D, IMO) is interesting in this regard; in at least two cases (Corum and Elric), he starts with characters who come from cultures and mindsets that aren't easily cognizable to the reader. The only humans who show up in the entire first book of the Elric saga are the poor wretches being tortured to death by Doctor Jest. Working with that kind of world (which is sort of suggested as the tiefling default for 4e) can, IMO, be quite tricky.

Oh, I gotcha I don't know why I didn't immediately assume you were referring to the rules sets.

Yeah, I think the culture issue is a tricky one. On the one hand, you absolutely need familiarity. On the other, too much familiarity breaks verisimilitude.

A guy who lives for 2,000 years in the woods is going to be different from me in some fashion, it's just a question of degrees. You look at something like Bas Lag and it's really hard to tell if you can ever hit that happy medium. Cactus people are cool, and Cactus People as punks are cool, but you're never really certain if they are cool Cactus people.

And sometimes it's just a question of making something compelling even if it isn't believable. Spock, for instance, is still awesome even if he isn't maybe the best thing you can come up with from the premise of an extremely long lived, purely logical, pacifist race that is largely ok with heat and mates every seven years.