The Possibility of "Too Fantastic" Fantasy

[Ruin Explorer]

IMO it doesn't make sense to say that humans are open and accepting of dwarves, elves, halflings, gnomes and half-orcs, but not of tieflings and dragonborn. If the former are accepted because they are common in the campaign world, then shouldn't the others be accepted if they are common in the campaign world? It's okay for someone to say that he won't use them because he doesn't like them, or because they don't fit the flavor of the campaign. I think its a little ridiculous when they make claims that these races objectively could not be accepted by the human populace, or that they (as opposed to other non-humans) make the game unrealistic.

I agree completely, though I think that's kind of at right-angles with what I'm saying. I'd find humans likely to be more accepting of, say, Tieflings, than Elves, if the Tieflings are more human-like in terms of basic motivation/emotion, society, and so on. Equally, Dragonborn could be different enough to achieve a kind of society separation, and predictable/understandable enough that they achieve a very distinct place in a multi-species society, where again, Elves, being all flighty and wierd, might never really fit in. I kind of like integrated societies. I just think the whole 4E "more fantasy = better" thing is a little bit mindless. What really bugs me, I think, is that in all the good fantasy settings I've seen where non-humans are not completely marginalized, the attitude of "the more bizarre it is, the better!" doesn't seem to be present, and humans ARE still the majority race, generally speaking. Things like the Malazan books and Planescape use their fantasy elements carefully, rather than splashing them everywhere.

I suspect that what we've seen thus far in the previews is not as prevalent as it would seem. The previewers are giving us a taste of the new coolness, in the same way that movie teasers/trailors show more violence (or funny) bits per minute than the movie will. I could be wrong, but I doubt it - and hope that I'm not.

I will be including some magical terrain in my next campaign, but I expect it to stand out against the predominant mundanity of the whole. I hope that's the case with the new FR as well as published scenarios.

Yeah, I hope so too. I just don't think it will be so. Still, as there's no fixed setting, it's not going to "ruin" anything, just maybe make me avoid pre-gen adventures a bit.

 

[rkanodia]

Unfortunately one of the iron laws of role-playing games is that the likelihood of cat-people appearing in a setting or game is directly proportional to the number of expansions that setting has had.

Give the cat-girls time. They'll be along eventually.

Though, really, is a cat-person any more fantastic than a dragon-man or a spiky guy with horns and a tail?

I keep saying that D&D should have displacer beast people by now, and I'm not sure whether I'm for or against them.

 

[iskurthi]

I keep saying that D&D should have displacer beast people by now, and I'm not sure whether I'm for or against them.

Anorexic catgirls with tentacles might be taking things a bit too far. There are certain things that are just indecent.

 

[The Little Raven]

PC races are a different kettle of fish to monsters.

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.

The Plane of Shadow isn’t particularly mythological, but is generic in a way similar to how the elemental planes were – as in, there’s a solid theme to it like “this place is firey, everything’s about fire here”. Pretty strong trope, although arguably a bit arbitrary…why shadows, but not tapioca pudding, for instance?

The Realm of the Dead is mythological, which is what the Shadowfell is. The land where the dead wait before moving on to their final reward. You can walk in and attempt to bring people back from that world, just like Orpheus tried to bring Eurydice back from Hades (hint: don't look back).

Arguably they would have been better kept as “something elf”, because “eladrin” sounds contrived.

And moon/star/high/grey/sun/whatever elf isn't contrived?

Again, I ask why GW can use this name and WOTC can’t? It’s better than Eladrin. Oh right, trademarks.

And because they don't want to just yank something from Tolkein, wholesale, like GW did. After the spat over hobbits in OD&D, it's been best to avoid that when you're the most visible member of the industry.

How much of it was for crunch munchkin reasons skewing the data, though?

That's an assumption that people like dragon-stuff simply because it's "OMG OVERPOWEREDLY KEWL," which is frankly insulting.

And if the game needed PC dragons, give them PC dragons.

Dragons would require their own set of classes and such to replicate to full 1-30 experience of playing a dragon, so while it's a great idea (and one I'm tinkering with), it would have displaced a lot of things in the core books.

Three comments: The core shouldn’t lend itself to needing to be banned, it should be generic enough that it didn’t make you reach for your banhammer.

But it always did, because I was always banning gnomes, half-orcs, and half-elves.

Secondly, these races will be turning up all over the shop as NPCs in published adventures and settings, and will need to be weeded out manually.

Well, maybe you should avoid core adventures if you feel they'll be too much hassle to modify to your standards? It's no different than having to remove every annoying gnome NPC from a module (which is common, because it seems like every gnome NPC shows up to serve as comic relief).

Thirdly, this is the thin edge of a huge ideological wedge regarding the content of the core.

Yeah, it's all about personal preference. You may like gnomes and half-orcs... a lot of people don't, as attested to by WotC saying "Feedback has told us that gnomes and half-orcs aren't that popular."

A race or two can be removed maybe, but what other hardcoded flavour cannot be removed so easily, like coupling ice and acid together, say?

We've seen nothing that says "ice and acid are coupled together." We've seen references to a wizard tradition that focuses on those two things, but that's not the same thing in the slightest.

The difference is that there was less specific impetus to have to ban stuff. You could just eyeball the list of races, think of the mythology you could tap for your own world’s elves and put a new spin on, and just include them.

Or, if playing particular settings, not use them entirely. Hell, if I played Birthright, only humans would remain relatively intact, as every other race is completely different from the PHB standard.

Now you have to stop and think about it, because not everything fits as much by default in your “average fantasy setting” anymore.

This is no different than any previous edition.

There have always been D&Disms in D&D, but I don't see that as an invitation to add more to the core when they could perfectly easily just be saved for a supplement.

You don't see it, because you don't seem to think that player-supported popularity is a reason to include things, just your personal ideas on what constitutes "average fantasy."

 

[Afrodyte]

Speaking for myself, the level of fantastic I'm able to get into depends upon the medium. The more unreal something is, the more I need a visual to really comprehend it. When only described verbally, it's hard for me to wrap my head around a setting where things are drastically different from what I'm used to. I think that's why I could never get into settings like Dark Sun or Planescape. It's too hard to fully envision exactly what my character is experiencing.

Come to think of it, even in more mundane settings, I prefer pictures over descriptions.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I just think the whole 4E "more fantasy = better" thing is a little bit mindless. What really bugs me, I think, is that in all the good fantasy settings I've seen where non-humans are not completely marginalized, the attitude of "the more bizarre it is, the better!" doesn't seem to be present, and humans ARE still the majority race, generally speaking. Things like the Malazan books and Planescape use their fantasy elements carefully, rather than splashing them everywhere.



Yeah, I hope so too. I just don't think it will be so. Still, as there's no fixed setting, it's not going to "ruin" anything, just maybe make me avoid pre-gen adventures a bit.

You know, I'm really glad you mentioned Malzan, because that's is a data point I've been thinking about a lot lately in the context of this discussion.

I think that in the last few years fantasy has become more fantastic. Sure there are things like the Song of Fire and Ice - though even that's debatable - that keep the fantasy down low, but Malazan, WoW, and China Mievelle's work all really throw it in heavilly. I'm not saying they use that weight carelessly, but they use it a lot.

Stuff like Harn doesn't really seem to be the way things are going anymore. It's there certainly, and I don't think anyone can take away the excellence that was/is Ars Magica in terms of really developing a magical version of mundane society, but even that...

I just don't know if we're really capable of world-building in a mundane mode anymore. The fantastic tradition of DnD is over 30 years old now, and over that time it's been wildly influential and heavilly refined. The genre itself bears the weight of that.

Mieville, WoW, and Malazan are all heavily acclaimed creative worlds that were built out of DnD. Even the Song of Ice and Fire is written by a guy who spent years building superheroic shared world out of his DMing experiences.

People may complain about DnD fantasy novels, but I think that complaint rings more and more hollow with each new acclaimed author who really embraces and extolls the monstrous and fantastic.

I'm not saying that we have to follow the avant garde in all that we do, but I am saying that I think DnD itself has made the generic a lot less so over time.

 

[Piratecat]

There were some unneeded insults and snarkiness earlier in the thread; thanks for getting it back on track. As usual, please report any problems.

 

[Incenjucar]

Anorexic catgirls with tentacles might be taking things a bit too far. There are certain things that are just indecent.

I had those ages ago, back in the late 90s. I called them amotiae.

And then the furries ripped my idea off all over the internet, though they probably also have tauric versions.

That said, getting away from the X-rated things anthro displacer beasts may imply to many, they make for some pretty interesting combatants.

So much reach.

 

[Mephistopheles]

I think that in the last few years fantasy has become more fantastic. Sure there are things like the Song of Fire and Ice - though even that's debatable - that keep the fantasy down low, but Malazan, WoW, and China Mievelle's work all really throw it in heavilly. I'm not saying they use that weight carelessly, but they use it a lot.

Some good points, and it's possibly something that shouldn't be surprising for us.

If we take movies and look back over time we can see standards on how much is too much regarding sex and violence became more and more unrestrained as time went by. I guess with each new loosening of the restraint it becomes the new norm and over time the audience is desensitized.

Same thing with fantasy I suppose.

 

[rounser]

You don't see it, because you don't seem to think that player-supported popularity is a reason to include things, just your personal ideas on what constitutes "average fantasy."

Yeeaaah....or maybe you could try not pretending to be able to read my mind? You're at least as myopic as I am, but in a different way.

Look...basic human psychology here - the very point of tieflings and many other exotic races is that they seem cool when not everyone's a tiefling. Now they're everywhere, people will go looking for the next "more magical magic". Whatever is more rare will become the new cool. It's magic and psionics all over again (i.e. magic is too common and so psionics becomes "the new magic").

Oh, that and +2 to dex/int is much more useful than +2 to wis/cha. Probably skewed their data one heck of a lot. You don't seriously think people didn't have one eye firmly fixed on the statistics bonuses when choosing a 3E race, do you? It's many people's main reason for choosing the race they do. Perhaps even the majority reason by a fair margin, even if it's to choose a deliberately suboptimal combination as a "go against type" novelty.

On this board, I tipped the tiefling as "the next drow" a couple of years ago. At the time people scoffed, but how the wyrm turns. I don't mind them in the core, but think they'd be better served alongside the aasimar. And get called "cambion" (that's their proper english name) but now there's monsters getting called that for some reason.