Wahoo vs. Traditional

[gizmo33]

Well D&D is more outre than the typical fantasy novel. There are a lot more monsters per adventure. A lot more magic items. In short, D&D is more wahoo than most, maybe all, fantasy fiction.

Right. I don't disagree, but the OP started to define what he meant by wahoo. I don't see how your definition answers the OP's original question.

In fact, he used the cantina scene from Starwars. Now I don't exactly know what made him choose this example, but the cantina is not some remote dimension or 10th level of some dungeon. It was a place that Luke drove to from where he lived. Luke lived in Eberron apparently.

There are more monsters and magic items in DnD than there are in Western or Romance novels as well. If you define this broad enough, you can then (rightly) claim that there are no differences between Greyhawk, Eberron, and Dark Sun in how they treat wahoo elements (compared to a Jane Austin novel or Wagnerian Opera). This may be true (from a strange perspective) but is not useful IMO. You could argue that the Earth is more similar to Mars than it is to Jupiter, but you could draw misleading conclusions from that.

 

[Doug McCrae]

In fact, he used the cantina scene from Starwars. Now I don't exactly know what made him choose this example, but the cantina is not some remote dimension or 10th level of some dungeon. It was a place that Luke drove to from where he lived. Luke lived in Eberron apparently.

Yes. It's a good and valid point that the life of a typical Sharn inhabitant is weirder than the life of a typical inhabitant of the City of Greyhawk. Greyhawk's 'minimum wahoo level' is lower than Eberron's. But it's also a good and valid point to ask how relevant that is, given that PCs in both settings will be leading equally strange, wahoo filled lives.

And it's also worth pointing out the sheer quantity of weird crap that's out there in Greyhawk. Greyhawk could be a lot less wahoo than it is, a lot more medieval. I played in a fairly low magic Greyhawk campaign for which Lord of the Rings was a major inspiration. The DM decided to get rid of a lot of the humanoids such as gnolls, bugbears and kobolds. I think he just used orcs, goblins and trolls. Looking at the encounter tables, Greyhawk not only contains every monster in the MM, but quite a few more such as xvarts, norkers, ogrillons, quaggoths, jermlaine, meenlocks and snyads (whatever those are). My God there are even flinds. Was there ever a less necessary monster?

That's not Tolkienesque. That's not medieval. That's a crazy funhouse zoo.

 

[rounser]

That's not Tolkienesque. That's not medieval. That's a crazy funhouse zoo.

Monsters with a lifetime measured in rounds != crazy wacky PC races assumed to be socially accepted and present all campaign long.

This is why Greyhawk is nowhere near as wahoo as Eberron or 4E.

 

[Mallus]

This is why Greyhawk is nowhere near as wahoo as Eberron or 4E.

Eberron and Greyhawk are both wahoo fantasy settings when compared to most of the source literature (Tolkien, Howard, Vance, Lieber) and other RPG's that are actually set in Medieval-like places, like Pendragon and Harn.

This might have something to do with the fact that D&D always took a kitchen-sink approach to fantasy, taking the cool stuff from many genre sources and blending them together willy-nilly.

 

[Desdichado]

This is why Greyhawk is nowhere near as wahoo as Eberron or 4E.

I dunno about "nowhere near" but yeah, nobody's arguing that Greyhawk's less wahoo than Eberron. That doesn't make Greyhawk non-wahoo, though. Not by a long-shot. Eberron was already my example of a high wahoo setting, right from the original post.

Greyhawk is hardly the other endpoint, though. I used Hârnworld.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This might have something to do with the fact that D&D always took a kitchen-sink approach to fantasy, taking the cool stuff from many genre sources and blending them together willy-nilly.

Yeah. I know a lot of people see D&D as always having been a toolkit from which the DM is expected to pluck what's appropriate. The expectation is, I think, that, like my old Greyhawk DM, he would use a very reduced set of monsters and magic items, and maybe disallow the freakier classes like the monk.

I never saw D&D that way because I was influenced by what I read in the scenarios and setting books, in the 80s that would have been Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Mystara. All these sources seemed to be totally wahoo in the sense that there were lots of different monsters and lots of magic items. The mainstream settings were never Tolkienesque/medieval in the way that Birthright was. I mean, seriously, the sheer variety and quantity of monsters in all the vanilla D&D settings is totally bonkers.

Also the encounter and magic item tables in the DMG use the full range, suggesting the default setting is wahoo.

I recently read Vance's Dying Earth books for the first time and I thought - that's D&D! It's a closer match for the D&D default setting than anything else in fiction imo. The world is a very weird place. Travel is insanely dangerous. Journey for a few hours through a forest and you meet four different monsters. There are tons of magic items. Science and magic blend together. Cugel's rod that fires 'blue concentrate' seems clearly to be a technological item from an earlier era. It even runs out of charges like a D&D wand. (The concept of charges itself is technological rather than traditionally magical, no magic items in Lord of the Rings ever run out of charges.)

 

[FireLance]

Monsters with a lifetime measured in rounds != crazy wacky PC races assumed to be socially accepted and present all campaign long.

This is why Greyhawk is nowhere near as wahoo as Eberron or 4E.

What makes a race "crazy wacky" or "wahoo", though? The only common factor I can see in elves, dwarves, halflings, and possibly gnomes and half-orcs is that they are simply minor variations on the basic human form (no horns, tails, or scales). Is it only a matter of how they look, then? Personal preferences aside (your preferences, I mean), in a fantasy world, what would prevent humans from getting along with intelligent creatures that look significantly different from them?

 

[AllisterH]

I dunno about "nowhere near" but yeah, nobody's arguing that Greyhawk's less wahoo than Eberron. That doesn't make Greyhawk non-wahoo, though. Not by a long-shot. Eberron was already my example of a high wahoo setting, right from the original post.

Greyhawk is hardly the other endpoint, though. I used Hârnworld.

Using the TSR published "Generic" campaign worlds, going from "this is basically medieval era to wahoo I'd go" where the definition of wahoo is "how much does the non-medieval tropes affect the peasant farmer"

Birthright - Dragonlance - Greyhawk - Forgotten Realms - Eberron

 

[Doug McCrae]

Regarding encounter tables:

Maybe they are for PCs only. Maybe NPC travellers experience a far less monster-infested world. The PCs are like protagonists in adventure fiction. Their lives are full of coincidence, danger and implausible happenings. When they get on board a ship, it's attacked by pirates. And a sea monster. Even though voyages are normaly uneventful.

This would, I think, be a non-simulationist interpretation of the encounter tables.

 

[FireLance]

Using the TSR published "Generic" campaign worlds, going from "this is basically medieval era to wahoo I'd go" where the definition of wahoo is "how much does the non-medieval tropes affect the peasant farmer"

Birthright - Dragonlance - Greyhawk - Forgotten Realms - Eberron

Ironically, if the definition of wahoo is "wierdness or uniqueness of the PCs", Birthright goes right to the other end of the scale. We're talking about a world where the PCs are infused with a small bit of the powers of the previous pantheon of gods and can actually develop abilities that turn them into monsters (or at least, creatures that appear decidedly non-human).