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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4623882" data-attributes="member: 2205">A few points: 1) If you're so invested in the past, why not infuse your games with history rather than myth.  I'd rather tell the story of Alexander than Hercules in my games  I'd rather have characters that were more like Lief Erikson than Thor.2) Joseph Campbell is extremely over-rated.  I think it's interesting to see how he and George Lucas exploited each other: Lucas exploited Campbell to give his Flash Gordon pulp and serial influenced series an implied gravitas that it didn't really need, but which made him feel a lot better about himself, and Campbell exploited Lucas to sell a lot of copies of a book that says very little of substance beyond, "hey, I think I've discovered that good stories have something in common."  Which, really, shouldn't have been very surprising to anyone in the first place.3) It's a mistake, in my opinion, to try and make gaming something that it isn't.  For many years, I labored under the delusion that I could make gaming better resemble a novel.  I suppose that's true up to a point, but beyond that point, the medium works against you and your game actually gets poorer rather than better as you attempt to hammer it into a form that the medium is not suited to provide.By the same token, a game can't resemble a myth too much, or it's not a very fun game.  It can't resemble Joseph Campbell very well either, because its fundamentally an ensemble cast, not the story of a single protagonist and his sidekicks.  If that's to your taste, you can of course infuse your setting with more mythic elements.  You can wrap all of your spells and magic items up in mythic flavor.  To say that the game itself doesn't provide this is somewhat disengenious; especially to claim that the game has lost this (the game never really had it.  1e was full of +1 swords and cure light wounds too, y'know.)  It's always been up to the DM to provide that kind of flavor.  And frankly, like I said, I'd be wary of going too far down that road anyway; chances are you'll just have your players rolling their eyes and telling you to get the point before too long.  Accept the constraints of the medium and optimize your game along those lines; don't try to make your game into something other than a game.Oh, and you might want to dial back the value judgement on what other people like a bit, while you're at it.</blockquote>

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