Who are Howard and Leiber?

[S'mon]

Plus, if you run with this 1% assumption, then the likelyhood of any adventuring group coming together becomes very, very small. I'm no math wiz, but, even I know that the chances of 6 people who all come from 1% of the population, coming together in the same place and the same time AND all having similar enough outlooks to want to work together is pretty bloody slight.

The reason you're wrong here is the simple one that like-minded people always tend to congregate together, whether they are police, military, criminal gangs, bail bondsmen, nurses, volunteer workers or any other group. Taking professional criminals as an example, they frequent the same bars, have the same interests, similar aptitudes. Obviously they sometimes come together to form groups and even large networks.

 

[The Shaman]

By Tolkienesque, I would say, low magic abilities on the part of the protagonists, magical items exist but are fairly rare - sure the Fellowship had a fair bit of loot, but, looking at the Hobbit, there isn't all that much.

Beater, Biter, the Ring - three powerful items in a pretty short story.

Monsters are fairly rare (while yes, there's orcs and goblins, actual MONSTERS aren't all that common).

Worgs, ents, giant intelligent spiders, dragons, ringwraiths, the Balrog, Shelob, the dinosaur-like mounts of the Nazgul, trolls, lycanthropes (such as Beorn), giant eagles, animal spies - again, I don't see the lack of monsters, particularly when compared to the Conan stories. (And that's without getting into the Silmarillion.)

Hussar, I do take your point - what is in core D&D is quite different from what's in Tolkein, or Howard, or LeGuin.

As far as quantity over quality goes, well, I'm willing to stack up the best of the 21st centuries fantasy authors against Howard any day of the week. Let's face it, great prose Howard is not. I'll see your Howard and raise you a Mercedes Lackey, or CJ Cherryh or Donaldson or Pratchett.

Howard's purple prose is appropriate to the story he wants to tell - he wasn't writing Ulysses. As far as Lackey et al., I'm only personally familar with CJ Cherryh, and I find the language to be pretty pedestrian - nothing that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck like Howard. This is a matter of taste of course, and so it's not something that can be compared with any rigor.

The authors of today are most certainly not lacking in skill or creativity.

Again, this is a question of taste, but I can say after looking over title after title, the amount of derivative, repetitive plots and characters, coupled with inoffensive prose good for all time zones didn't wow me.

For every Howard or Tolkien, there's a hundred other short story authors lying forgotten in the pages of the pulp books.

That's what makes the classics, classics - they stand the test of time.

You're saying that DnD has had no effect on the popularity of fantasy as a genre. That the rise in popularity of DND and other RPG's has had no effect on Fantasy as a genre.

No, that's not even in the same area code as what I said, and I'll thank you to not put words in my mouth...er, post.

What I said was your premise that the growth of the fantasy genre is a phenomenon related directly to the influence of D&D needs some more convincing evidence. Correlation (two things happening simultaneously) is not causation (the change in one is not dependent on the other.) Do I think it's a potentially significant influence? Yes. Do I think you can look at the two in isolation from all the other factors that affect the popularity of fiction genres? No, I don't.

Well, I'd point to R.A Salvatore and Weiss and Hickman to show the mistake of that. Best selling authors whose work has been derived straight from DnD.

Would Dragonlance have been half as popular if it was published in the 60's? I don't think so. Would a certain dual wielding DROW made the best sellers list without DND? Not a chance. No one would even know what a drow is without DnD.

Please forgive my choice of words, but it's late and I can't think of a more appropriate way to put this:

This is a nonsense argument.

First, you can't prove a negative, so saying that somthing couldn't exist is meaningless. Second, it's a weak semantic argument: Drow wouldn't have existed without D&D, so stories about dark-skinned earth fairies that want to take over the surface and take revenge on their kin couldn't have been written before the game was developed?

The fact that Salvatore and Hickman are popular can be attributed to the style of writing without regard to the inspiration - see the aforementioned example of Steel and Sheldon. If you have data that show that everyone who reads those books is a D&D player, then I think you may be on to something - however, I'm willing to be that there are many readers who read the books but never play the game, or have tried it but don't play it regularly, yet read the stories anyway.

Is DnD based on the early "Golden Age" fantasy works? Of course. There's no denying it. Does that mean that we should lock DnD into the same forms and ignore the wealth of information brought out by new fantasy authors? Of course not. Both the genre and the game evolve as new ideas and concepts are explored. You can't ever really go back.

One thing you can go back to, however, are my posts a few pages ago where I said the same thing.

D&D is a reflection of the current state of the genre and its influences, including its own not-insignificant contributions - it's Dragonlance and the Realms and the Wheel of Time and Lodoss War and Civilization as well as Thoth-Amon and Lankhmar and Lookfar and the Beornings. And though I don't like it, or play it any longer, it is right that it should be so, IMHO.

It's no longer enough to crank out a dungeon crawl in the middle of the wilderness for no reason other than to give the players something to kill. Dungeons need to have an ecology to increase verisimilitude.

May I suggest, Hussar, that your tastes are not necessarily the tastes of all gamers, that there are in fact some very good adventures that ignore ecological verisimilitude and yet are entirely consistent with their game-world. White Plume Mountain is not supposed to reflect an ecology - it's a trap- and monster-filled test for adventurers created by a crazy wizard using powerful magic to protect more magic. It's supposed to defy logic.

Twenty years ago, you didn't need a reason for that orc in the 10 foot room guarding a chest. No one cared. We do now. Because, as gamers, we've evolved and changed, and, well, become considerably more sophisticated....I for one, would never want to go back to the days when the DM could simple wave away any sort of nod towards realism and just plunk down 10 different kinds of humanoids in the middle of a ravine with nothing to eat, a half days walk from a fortress. As a DM, I would never want to present this to my players without a pretty good explanation.

Twenty-five years ago we weren't all writing or playing orc 'n' pie adventures, either - where do you think those ideas of how to design adventures, campaigns, and worlds originated?

 

[Hussar]

^ So you figure that a priest, a rogue and a paladin all find themselves in the same place frequently enough that the makings of an adventuring party doesn't stretch the bounds of random chance.

Does sound like the good start to a joke though:

A priest, a paladin and a rogue walk into a bar...

Seeing your example though, I can see why we have such a problem coming together on this. I've always designed my campaigns based on the mechanics, even in my 1e days I did this. One of my favourite homebrews was an outgrowth of an arguement with a friend of mine over who would win between clerics and wizards. A purely mechanical arguement led to a five year campaign under a number of different groups. But, I've never started from the point of view of, "This is the world as it is." rather than "How would the world be if X is true?"

In the end, it's more a question of personal preference. I have difficulty ignoring the impact of mechanics on a campaign setting. Obviously. I don't like the idea of ignoring the RAW and making the RAW shoehorn into a campaign setting. I would rather work from the other direction, simply because it reduces the amount of work I have to do.

IMO, when you start with a setting and then try to make it fit into a particular ruleset, then you wind up with a boatload of house rules and ad hoc reasons for the existence of various elements. I don't like that. It's not my style of gaming. Mostly becuase different settings would claim X and then completely ignore it. The 1% concept being a particularly obvious suspect. I understand where you're coming from, I just don't subscribe to those assumptions when creating a campaign setting. I would much prefer that an element fits with existing mechanics than make an exception for a particular element, particularly if the only reason I'm making that assumption is narrative based.

I'm not saying you're wrong S'mon. At least, not anymore . Just that the assumptions you start from are radically different than the ones I come from.

 

[S'mon]

BTW re authors, few of the higher-quality modern authors like Donaldson & Cherryh were at all D&D influenced - I'd say Donaldson and Cherryh's seminal work was in the 1980s, before D&D fantasy fiction became widespread, and Donaldson isn't really even very 'modern' in tone IMO. I haven't read Brust's Vlad Taltos novels so that may be an exception, but in general my impression is that D&D-derived fantasy fiction is of rather low quality, notably lower quality than fantasy fiction in general. Of course it can be extremely popular, eg Salvatore (and he certainly writes good fight scenes), but there's a reasonable case that D&D per se has harmed more than helped the quality of the genre, even as it has increased sales.

 

[S'mon]

^ So you figure that a priest, a rogue and a paladin all find themselves in the same place frequently enough that the makings of an adventuring party doesn't stretch the bounds of random chance.

Does sound like the good start to a joke though:

A priest, a paladin and a rogue walk into a bar...

If it's an "adventurer bar", why not? :\ Similar people congregate in similar places. IRL groups of bank robbers, mercenaries, polar exploreres and bail bondsmen certainly manage to get together. Obviously the "you all met in a bar" cliche is overused. That doesn't mean there's anything implausible about groups of like-minded individuals getting together. IMC I tend to have PCs who know each other and have the PC group formed before the campaign began, eg in my latest campaign the PC party of adventurers was recruited by the PC priest Cambyses to explore the Lost City of Barakus. This took several visits to several bars and such, gathering information on like-minded individuals, etc - the kind of stuff that happens IRL all the time. The group continues to look out for potential recruits in inns & taverns, and occasionally finds some, even though adventurers are much less than 1% of the population in my campaign area.

 

[The Shaman]

Worgs, ents, giant intelligent spiders, dragons, ringwraiths, the Balrog, Shelob, the dinosaur-like mounts of the Nazgul, trolls, lycanthropes (such as Beorn), giant eagles, animal spies...

...oh, and I forgot the Watcher in the Water, and Old Man Willow, and Goldberry, and the barrow-wights, and ghosts, and mumakil.

 

[S'mon]

I'm not saying you're wrong S'mon. At least, not anymore . Just that the assumptions you start from are radically different than the ones I come from.

Yup. I do have a lot of house rules running 3e; my campaign world initially developed in 1986 running 1e and back then very few house rules were needed. As the world has developed and as the current ruleset has deviated from 1e norms, more changes have been needed. It has taken me a while with 3e to see what changes needed to be made to default demographics to fit my setting, and it's an ongoing process - eg 3e turned out to require far more NPCs above 1st level than 1e (or core 3e demographics), with fewer very high level NPCs (since 20th in 3e is far more powerful than 20th in 1e), in order to keep the right feel. I've settled on 12th in 3e being about equivalent to 20th in 1e in terms of power; with about 50% of NPCs 1st level, half number each higher level. But the important thing is that this is usually only relevant in PC-NPC interaction, eg how many mooks can the PC fighter kill, or what spells can the NPC wizard cast at the PCs.

 

[The Shaman]

I think a fundamental disconnect here is that I am the sort of GM who first decides the kind of campaign world I want, with little or no reference to the specific ruleset....I don't see the rules as a world-building tool....If I need to change the rules and the baseline D&D assumptions to get the milieu I want, I change those, not the setting.

I take the same approach - I create the world I want to play in, and tweak the rules as needed to bring it to life.

 

[Hussar]

May I suggest, Hussar, that your tastes are not necessarily the tastes of all gamers, that there are in fact some very good adventures that ignore ecological verisimilitude and yet are entirely consistent with their game-world. White Plume Mountain is not supposed to reflect an ecology - it's a trap- and monster-filled test for adventurers created by a crazy wizard using powerful magic to protect more magic. It's supposed to defy logic.

Might I perhaps suggest that the fact that you point to a 25 year old module is pretty much exactly what I said. If you published White Plume Mountain now, I highly doubt it would receive the reception it got back then.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Originally Posted by Hussar
As far as quantity over quality goes, well, I'm willing to stack up the best of the 21st centuries fantasy authors against Howard any day of the week. Let's face it, great prose Howard is not. I'll see your Howard and raise you a Mercedes Lackey, or CJ Cherryh or Donaldson or Pratchett.

You're comparing not apples and oranges, but rather poker and blackjack. The writers use all of the same tools, but the rules under which they must operate are VERY different.

Howard's stuff is clearly pulp influenced (no big surprise there!), which tended towards excruciatingly descriptive details on the surroundings and violence. Protagonists are monolithic, unchanging, iconic ideals, their worldviews very black and white, even if they walk along the grey boundaries. Their conflicts are easily defined. The heroes are to be admired and emulated...maybe even worshipped. We identify with them because we wish we could BE them.

Meanwhile Lackey and the others' work show more modern influences, especially the snarky Pratchett. They're more interested in character development and internal states than earlier writers. Cherryh spends equal time writing sci fi and fantasy, and it shows. Ditto Donaldson. The characters are often regular people thrust into unusual situations. We identify with them because we ARE them. Their worldviews are all shades of grey, their conflicts involve sliding scales of morality.