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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5380272" data-attributes="member: 3820">That's what I'm generally going by, yes.This is true, but -- and this is the sticking point for me personally -- a player should not be beholden to defend non-magical yet fantastic feats by pulling out real-world examples as a matter of course. If that's what a group likes to do, a la Howard, awesome. But it's not a universal feature of fantasy fiction, and it's definitely not a universal feature of the myths and sagas that are often inspirational. I don't think the author of Beowulf looked for a historical example of someone who swam a stormy sea for a week before he attributed a feat like that to Beowulf, and he didn't attribute the task to godly blood or whatnot. As long as one isn't limiting "fantastic" to what is provably possible in the real world, sure. Otherwise one is modeling not all three characters, but a certain perception of all three, in much the same way that modeling a scientific interpretation of Beowulf is a slightly separate goal than modeling Beowulf in the spirit of the saga's presentation.The black-and-white statement was against the idea that fighters have to be mundane and non-fantastic. I would emphasize the wording "have to be". At no point did ProfessorCirno say that fighters cannot be both: only that the idea that they must be is a poor one. I simply agreed: if fighters have to be mundane and non-fantastic, the ability to do a Fafhrd is sharply curtailed, and frequently not nearly as much fun as reading the stories. Or probably not as much fun as Leiber had writing them.Yeah, exactly so. The strength of a trope is familiarity: if dwarves are earthy guys interested in gold and beer, then players don't have to do any homework to figure out how to get on a dwarf's good side, they can act with the confidence that offering gold and beer is a good start. Tropes can make it easier to get to the heart of the fun in a game, get things rolling faster. (Or they can slow it all down: "you have to earn your fun" is a regrettable gaming trope in itself, though thankfully not universal.)Gaming identifies tropes differently than literature does, as we tend to identify tropes in gaming as things that repeatedly come out in play. The cemetery example is a little tenuous because it's questionable whether the cemetery is the trope, or the cemetery as the source of trouble. I'd guess it's the latter -- that the stereotype comes from the assumption that undead are a common occurrence in cemeteries. And it's just as easy to change the incidence of undead as it would be to get rid of cemeteries as a concept.Like you say, if you look at any trope long enough you can probably figure out its strengths and weaknesses. Then you can hit the players where they want to be hit, while still being creative.</blockquote>

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