Thinking Too Hard About Fantasy

[jasin]

This is something I posted to rec.games.frp.dnd.

The context: I posted a suggestion for a setting that was only one isolated city surrounded by hostile wilderness (Viriconium, The City and the Stars, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind...) and surprisingly (to me) many people brought up the question of food supply.

Keith Davis wrote:

> >> What do they eat?
> >
> > What is it with this question? Between here and Circvs Maximvs,
> > something like five different people asked that.
>
> Because suspension of disbelief is often easier if most of the setting
> is believable. It's usually easier to cope with a few unlikely things
> than a lot of them, at once.
>
> That said, I read today something that made me think about this. It
> seems most fiction now follows that rule. Things have to mostly make
> sense. The author posited that this takes a lot of the wonder and
> imagination out of the stories.
>
> For speculative fiction, I think it's appropriate -- the purpose there
> is *usually* to explore how things might be if a few changes are made.
>
> For fantasy though, it is quite appropriate to handwave things that
> doesn't particularly impact the story. Weird just *is*. Go with
> it.
>
> I'm trying to revise my campaign notes to do this. Don't worry too
> much about how things would *really* work, just make them fit for the
> purpose of the story.

I find this a very interesting topic.

Eberron seems to me a prime example of what the person you mention
mentions (awkward construction... ). Unlike, for example, our own
Earth of ages past that is Middle-earth, or the vague neverlands of
fairy tales, Eberron is set on a specific planet, with specific
continents, with moons, with a ring around it. The elves that live there
aren't the personifications of the capriciousness of nature or of the
higher (or lower) principles in man or anything like that, they're a
species of intelligent creatures. The magic isn't mysterious and scary
"because it's... <whisper>magic!</whisper>", it's commonly used for
practical purposes "because if you do this, this happens". And so on.

Now, IMO, Eberron pulls all of this remarkably well, and I love it as a
setting... but for me it is mostly in spite of these tropes, rather than
because of them.

I would contrast Eberron with Perdido Street Station, which despite
being non-at-all-Tolkienian magic-punk fantasy as different from generic
"old skool" fantasy as I ever got, it prioritizes mood over what makes
"in-game" sense. New Crobuzon is a dirty, slimy Plane of Shadow
reflection of industrial London not because Mieville posits a situation
where such a city could and would naturally arise, but because he wanted
to immerse us in the dirt and slime of a Plane of Shadow reflection of
industrial London. (Eugh.)

For fantasy, I prefer the latter approach, and I think that much is
jeopardized by, as Hong would put it, thinking too hard about fantasy.

Ultimately, fantasy, especially D&D fantasy, doesn't make sense; that's
why it's fantasy. By working too hard to make it so that it does, it
drifts away from the reason it works to the extent that it does, from
the emotional kicks and archetypal imagery in it... and it doesn't make
up for that with intellectual kicks (like good SF does), since it still
doesn't really make sense.

BTW, this whole rant shouldn't be taken as at all disparaging of people
who asked what the people in the City eat, or in general people who want
their fantasy to make sense. This is a matter of taste, and even if one
agrees that thinking too hard about fantasy is bad, no one single
question indicates thinking too hard, and the question of what they eat
sparked some interesting ideas (Soylent Green, soil-purification
earthworms, ritual cannibalizm...). But this is something I've been
trying to articulate for some time, and now Keith's post reminded me, so
that this seemed like a good place to rant.

So, thoughts, anyone?

 

[DragonLancer]

There are aspects of fantasy and D&D that I feel people pay far too much attention to. Where food comes from is just one of them. We're playing a game here not working on an acurate adaptation.

 

[Aaron L]

I like my fantasy to at hang at least loosely on a framework of logic. And if I want something to happen just because I think its cool I'll either backtrack from what I want and try to come up with a logical reason for it, or I'll make it a magical occurance.

 

[Someone]

An old adage says that you can ask the reader (the player in this case) to believe the impossible, but not the improbable. You can stablish a scenario as strange as you want, but once in it you need to keep its internal logic, however different it´s from our own. As a player, I´d have trouble that a city can survive without food, unless there´s an explanation for it.

There´s a limit however on how picky would I be: if said explanation is "they hunt", I wouldn´t go on thinking on the ecological implications of that and how a relatively large city would empty the surrouding forest of game in a very short time. There are better things to do at the table than that.

 

[Hussar]

I don't ask that my fantasy settings be realistic. I just ask that they be realistic enough for me to ignore it.

Here's an example from Scarred Lands. In the SL setting, Shelzar is imagined as a kind of Middle Ages Bagdad with trading houses and the like. It is the center of commerce for the continent - all trade flows through it, that sort of thing.

Great idea, drips with plot hooks.

Unfortunately, for me, there is one large stumbling block. If you look at the SL map, all the cities are arranged on a fairly circular continent with nothing in the middle. In other words, all the cities are on the rim of the wheel.

How can you be the hub of trade when you are on the rim?

I've been trying to work it around, but, every time I try, the geography of SL just defeats me. And it bothers me. I cannot think of any sort of justification for why city X and city Y would trade with eachother through Shelzar when both X and Y are on the other side of the circle. Shortest distance between two points and all that.

So, yes, I agree that one shouldn't look too hard at things. If you do, they tend to fall apart. However, they also shouldn't be so loose that I can spot the holes from 100 paces away either.

 

[VirgilCaine]

I don't ask that my fantasy settings be realistic. I just ask that they be realistic enough for me to ignore it.

Here's an example from Scarred Lands. In the SL setting, Shelzar is imagined as a kind of Middle Ages Bagdad with trading houses and the like. It is the center of commerce for the continent - all trade flows through it, that sort of thing.

Great idea, drips with plot hooks.

Unfortunately, for me, there is one large stumbling block. If you look at the SL map, all the cities are arranged on a fairly circular continent with nothing in the middle. In other words, all the cities are on the rim of the wheel.

How can you be the hub of trade when you are on the rim?

I've been trying to work it around, but, every time I try, the geography of SL just defeats me. And it bothers me. I cannot think of any sort of justification for why city X and city Y would trade with eachother through Shelzar when both X and Y are on the other side of the circle. Shortest distance between two points and all that.

So, yes, I agree that one shouldn't look too hard at things. If you do, they tend to fall apart. However, they also shouldn't be so loose that I can spot the holes from 100 paces away either.

QFT.

 

[Psion]

I'm all about striving for self consistency, beleivability, and well, depth, in a setting or other fantasy product.

What I am not for is the ever-so-popular "fantasy economics/sociology" lecture/thread/what have you. You know the one. Where certain pundits pass their personal assumptions off as inevitable conclusions of the system as it exists, whilst ignoring that the scope of the rules typically pertain to adventurers and not the world at large, in order to either bash a system or push off their particular view of it as the one true way.

 

[jasin]

So, yes, I agree that one shouldn't look too hard at things. If you do, they tend to fall apart. However, they also shouldn't be so loose that I can spot the holes from 100 paces away either.

Well, yes. In addition to being a matter of taste, this is also a matter of degree: no matter what people's stances on this are, I think everyone will agree that "thinking too hard" is bad, and "thinking too little" is also bad. But what's too hard, and what's too little, and what's just enough...?

IMO, there's a slight trend towards too hard (for my tastes at least), especially in homebrew worlds. ISTM that many home worldbuilders prioritize a consistent, functioning world over a world that really pushes their or their players buttons... and not necessarily by intent, but by going to far in extrapolating the consequences of their assumptions, and letting the consequences override the assumptions.

The most famous example would be Tolkien. I don't think this is very widely known, but towards the end of his life, he seems to have become rather dissatisfied with the Silmarillion cosmology. In Silmarillion the Earth is flat, and the Sun first rises in the West. And yet, Middle-earth is supposed to be our own Earth in some fogotten past. And our Earth is round, and the Sun has always risen in the East. So Tolkien went to work on another version of his creation myth, a round-Earth, Sun-in-the-East one...

Now, leaving aside the literary merits of the two versions, I find this somewhat sad... that he would abandon a touching story, a story that works, just because he couldn't make sense out of it rationally.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

It's a sensible question to ask, I think. If certain very basic questions aren't answered, or are answered in ways that don't make a lot of sense, you're left wondering if anything makes sense in the setting. I know that I've played in games where that were very difficult to figure out - largely because whenever something happened, I was left wondering if it was a "DM pulling stuff out of his butt" part of the game, or a "this part is meant to be logical" part of the game.

 

[EricNoah]

A little thinking can also lead to interesting situations.

I was building a dungeon in a dead-magic area. It was inhabited by humans and other humanoids. I did a mental walkthrough and realized that there would have to be non-magical light sources in hallways and rooms. I thought further and realized they'd need a storage room for torches; or better yet maybe they had oil lamps attached to walls. Thinking even further, I realized they'd also need someone to go around re-filling oil lamps and keeping them working and lit. That led me to create a low-level mongrelman servant (by the name of Grool) who could be found wandering the halls. In turn, when encountered, this led to fun role-playing -- Grool was none too bright, and assumed the PCs were just more minions. He also had a colorful patchwork cloak that the PCs borrowed from him, and a rogue used it to disguise himself as Grool to let him move about a few of the rooms without being noticed by the minions.

In this case, a little thinking was better than -- in the midst of play -- having to say ... "Oh, I guess the humans all carry torches with them."