D&D 5E Wandering Monsters: You Got Science in My Fantasy!

[Kinak]

It's easy to equate fantasy races with science-fiction alien species, but I don't think they're the same thing.

Thanks for quoting this. I'd sort of glazed over it in context, but it's an interesting assertion.

He's arguing, in the rest of the paragraph, that Tokein's worldbuilding basically turns the races he uses into mythical archetypes. I'm not sure how good a job D&D has ever done of capturing those, but let's set that aside.

Tolkein, for all that he's given to the genre, isn't really special in that his creatures represent ideas. And that approach isn't limited to fantasy in the slightest.

Using fictional creatures as stand-ins for ideas, or symbols of those ideas, isn't something that started with Tolkien. It's a tool as old as oral tradition and continues strong to this day, in urban legends as well as the more traditional kind. Fantasy authors' worldbuilding is an undetectably tiny blip in the pool of symbolic creatures.

But, high-minded bickering aside, all you have to do to prove that "races as symbols" isn't restricted to fantasy is watch some Star Trek.

The difference between Middle Earth's racial symbolism and Star Trek's racial symbolism is just that one's racers were built on prior works and can't be copyrighted. The fact that you can call something an elf and every geek knows what you're talking about isn't primarily a testament to Tolkien's storytelling, it's a testament to the fact that you can call something an elf.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Remathilis]

Thanks for quoting this. I'd sort of glazed over it in context, but it's an interesting assertion.

He's arguing, in the rest of the paragraph, that Tokein's worldbuilding basically turns the races he uses into mythical archetypes. I'm not sure how good a job D&D has ever done of capturing those, but let's set that aside.

Tolkein, for all that he's given to the genre, isn't really special in that his creatures represent ideas. And that approach isn't limited to fantasy in the slightest.

Using fictional creatures as stand-ins for ideas, or symbols of those ideas, isn't something that started with Tolkien. It's a tool as old as oral tradition and continues strong to this day, in urban legends as well as the more traditional kind. Fantasy authors' worldbuilding is an undetectably tiny blip in the pool of symbolic creatures.

But, high-minded bickering aside, all you have to do to prove that "races as symbols" isn't restricted to fantasy is watch some Star Trek.

The difference between Middle Earth's racial symbolism and Star Trek's racial symbolism is just that one's racers were built on prior works and can't be copyrighted. The fact that you can call something an elf and every geek knows what you're talking about isn't primarily a testament to Tolkien's storytelling, it's a testament to the fact that you can call something an elf.

Cheers!
Kinak

I once posed a question to some various players of RPGs: Why isn't there a Space D&D? Not Spelljamer or DragonStar, where fantasy gets shot IN SPACE, but a legit generic mishmash of sci-fi tropes smashed together like how D&D smashes fantasy and mythology together.

The best answer I ever got was that sci-fi, at least as we see it, is fairly copyrighted. For example, I'd wager Vulcan is just as recognizable as Elf is to the mass population. If you created a sci-fi game with Vulcan as a race, you would probably have most people, not just Trekkers, know what the race is, looks, and does. But, Vulcan is copyrighted to Paramount and probably never will lapse into the Public Domain, so a generic Vulcan race in a generic sci-fi setting will never happen. The best you could do would be take some element of it (such as pointy ears or logical thought) and build a new race around it or file off the serial number and rename them (Logicans), which loses the "I already know what that is" moment you get when most players hear "wizard", "dwarf" or "barbarian".

Imagine if sci-fi was invented 100 years before it was and we could have an RPG with Vulcans, Wookies, Daleks, T-800s, Replicants, and Cylons all in there by name.

 

[Dausuul]

On re-reading the essay... it really is astonishing, and disturbing, how blinkered Wyatt's view of fantasy is. A world in which evil races have the potential for goodness is not "classic fantasy," whatever that means. (Mr. Wyatt, there's a fellow here with two scimitars and a magic panther who would like a word with you.) Evolution does not happen. Dwarves, elves, and halflings are "mythic archetypes." Fantasy worlds have "active, present gods."

Excuse me? No. There's so much more to fantasy than Lord of the Rings clones. There's the savage, lost-world fantasy of Robert E. Howard and the more gonzo fantasy of Michael Moorcock. There's the mystic, symbolic fantasy of Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea. There's Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fantasy. There's Roger Zelazny's Amber stories (which should be required reading for anybody who wants to write plane-hopping adventures). There's George R. R. Martin's grim and violent epic. And that's not even touching on urban fantasy.

None of these contains elves'n'dwarves, few contain any innately evil races, and their take on gods and the origins of the world varies widely. I don't necessarily expect D&D to embrace them all, but anyone who's working on shaping the fiction of D&D should at the very least have read most of them.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think one problem stems from part of the gaming population wanting to have a "vision from the outside" of the fantasy world, which is basically what science does in the real world. They want to treat the fantasy world as if it was a possible alternate real world, and they want to have scientific-like knowledge of that (even if only at gross level of details). There is nothing wrong with that, but it obviously puts a huge pressure on the designers. Anyway, it's not the only way.

There is another part of the gaming population that doesn't care, because they are only interesting in getting immersed in the game, the story, and the fantasy setting too, but at the same time they assume the perspective of the characters living in that fantasy world. They don't need a "vision from the outside" because the "vision from the inside" is all they feel they need. Imagine an inhabitant of the real world during the middle ages, they thought they knew that the sun orbited around the earth, therefore as far as they were concerned the sun indeed orbited around the earth.

Me, I am happy enough to have played mostly with gamers of the second kind. The only times I remember we had a player bring up complaints about monsters ecology not being realistic enough, the game grinded to a halt and spoiled our fun.

 

[Kinak]

The best answer I ever got was that sci-fi, at least as we see it, is fairly copyrighted. For example, I'd wager Vulcan is just as recognizable as Elf is to the mass population. If you created a sci-fi game with Vulcan as a race, you would probably have most people, not just Trekkers, know what the race is, looks, and does. But, Vulcan is copyrighted to Paramount and probably never will lapse into the Public Domain, so a generic Vulcan race in a generic sci-fi setting will never happen. The best you could do would be take some element of it (such as pointy ears or logical thought) and build a new race around it or file off the serial number and rename them (Logicans), which loses the "I already know what that is" moment you get when most players hear "wizard", "dwarf" or "barbarian".

I think this is fundamentally right.

That said, I'm watching Star Trek with my wife now (we're halfway through the original series). It's striking how much of the original series could be lifted. Most episodes involve new races or race that nobody remembers the name of anyway. There's the occasional Klingon or Romulan appearance, but we're at a total of two or three each out of fifty-odd episodes.

Stepping back from the IP, it'd be fairly easy to make a game that lets you play ST:TOS. You might have to replace Spock with an android, but there's certainly some precedent of that

From there, the trick would be pulling in the elements you need to play everything else. That's harder, but I think it could be done with some clever reuse of assets. I mean, you're already in for a benevolent space republic and a mirror universe evil opposite, who's to say it's not run by creepy psions? Having a race of immortal timetravelers would be bread-and-butter Star Trek, they're just not the people whose adventures you usually follow. And, of course, who knows what's beyond the edge of explored space?

I think that last question is what really could make a "generic" sci-fi setting tick. Series like Doctor Who and Star Trek don't really have settings like you'd find in RPG supplements. They're more just the slow accretion of canon. And, if you make the game about building that canon in an organic manner, you don't really need anyone's IP. In fact, using existing IP for that is sort of counter to the purpose.

So, anyway, I think it could actually work if done correctly. The pieces the game uses as its baseline would have to be chosen carefully, but there's enough public domain sci-fi ideas that you could populate a D&D-sized collection of playable races... which is really more than you need already.

Imagine if sci-fi was invented 100 years before it was and we could have an RPG with Vulcans, Wookies, Daleks, T-800s, Replicants, and Cylons all in there by name.

That would be a pretty wacky game

Then again, we're talking about an equivalent to D&D, which is pretty wacky in its own right.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Mistwell]

When you read "It's not fantasy!" it's not really an extreme leap to "It's not supposed to be part of a fantasy RPG!",

I think it is an extreme leap. Describing what is X genre, and what is Y genre, is not the same as saying X genre cannot have any elements of Y genre. There is a very long history of X genre having the Y genre elements, in fact, and his analogy was (as someone else mentioned) to chocolate X and peanut butter Y going well together.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think it is an extreme leap. Describing what is X genre, and what is Y genre, is not the same as saying X genre cannot have any elements of Y genre. There is a very long history of X genre having the Y genre elements, in fact, and his analogy was (as someone else mentioned) to chocolate X and peanut butter Y going well together.

You've got to infer something not there to get to that leap, hence it is an extreme one.

So let me lay it out for clarity's sake:

(a) If D&D is a fantasy RPG, and
(b) "Fantasy" is as Wyatt defines it in this article (for instance, no orc baby dilemma), then
(c) it follows that D&D must either not include the orc baby dilemma, or not be a fantasy RPG.

I dispute (b).

It's always possible that this is some sort of radical extremism, but I think it is also possible that this is not actually very extreme, but rather an observation of how Wyatt's definition is not accurate.

 

[Dausuul]

I think it is an extreme leap. Describing what is X genre, and what is Y genre, is not the same as saying X genre cannot have any elements of Y genre. There is a very long history of X genre having the Y genre elements, in fact, and his analogy was (as someone else mentioned) to chocolate X and peanut butter Y going well together.

What does it mean to say that something is "not fantasy," then?

 

[Remathilis]

That would be a pretty wacky game

Then again, we're talking about an equivalent to D&D, which is pretty wacky in its own right.

Any game where Conan, Merlin, Bilbo and Orpheus go out to fight Count Dracula and his army of uruk-hai is pretty wacky to begin with. Making a version where Spock, Obi-Wan, Flash Gordon and Starbuck fight Daleks doesn't seem so far fetched.

Still, in both cases you end up asking "Whose fantasy" or "Whose Sci-fi" are we talking about. Wyatt's article seems to want to explain a lot of D&D with either "A wizard did it" or "The Gods willed it" to simplify the storyline. Which is fine, lots of mythical creatures in our world were the work of God(s) and/or magic. (See: Minotaur, Medusa). So I have no problem with certain monsters being explained "magically". That said, it does get pretty boring when everything not found on our Earth was either the will of mad gods or wicked mages.

A do find it hilarious that Wyatte proposing limiting the "Cantina" effect after editions of goliaths, wildren, catfolk/tabaxi/rakasta, shadar-kai, illumains, spellscales, dragonborn, aventi, xephs, shardminds, warforged, shifters, genasi, and dozens of other PC races (and monsters). Yeah, its weird when you have 26 humanoid races in a bar in Waterdeep drinking, but QUIT PRINTING THE DAMN RACES if you want to keep PCs fixed in the world of elves and dwarves!

I don't even want to bother with the orc/goblin/kobold baby scenario. Its done to death. The simplest way to handle it is give monsters an alignment, allow the DM to deviate as needed, and then let him answer the damn question. Ususally/Always muddies the water unnecessarily.

 

[Mistwell]

So let me lay it out for clarity's sake:

(a) If D&D is a fantasy RPG, and
(b) "Fantasy" is as Wyatt defines it in this article (for instance, no orc babies), then
(c) it follows that D&D must either not include orc babies, or not be a fantasy RPG.

"c" in this logic stream does not follow from a & b, as it is missing a crucial linchpin. You'd have to establish that "Fantasy RPGs cannot include a Science element in them".

Here is an example: Star Wars is a sci-fi film, but it has plenty of fantasy and western motifs in it. Having those motifs does not make it not a sci-fi film. He's saying that you can introduce science elements in your fantasy game, but lets call them science elements so we know what the "core" of the product is, and we know when we are varying from the "core" of the product. He's not saying "never vary from the "core" of the product".