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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3459277" data-attributes="member: 4937">Except that I've not only read a lot of works by British authors, I have quite a few on my shelf.  Right now I'd argue that the preeminent British sci-fi author publishing is Iain Banks, which makes for interesting counterpoint, because Banks is known for among other things, his intricately crafted and engaging settings.  (The premier British fantasy writer is probably Terry Pratchett.)  Do only 'great plodding nerds' like Iain Banks or Pratchett?  There must be more 'great plodding nerds' than those presumably admirable (in his eyes) people who prefer Mr. Hamilton's stuff.  Does Iain Banks write like a 'great plodding nerd'?  Should Iain Banks 'scare' me, as if his stories were written by someone mentally or pyschologically deficient because they have detailed and engaging settings that almost certainly couldn't have been crafted without someone doing a great deal of thought about a setting?  Should I think that Gene Wolfe is a poor master of prose because his works are so heavily dependent on thier settings?  Is he shallow and of little depth?  Should I despise Tolkien because he more or less invented world building as we now know it, and with it helped usher in the revival of epic prose and high fantasy and unintentionally to no small extent role-playing games (read his forward to LotR)?  Did these writers not know what they were doing?No, stretch back a little further.  What are we to make of the Illiad or Beowulf if we think world building is of little value.  Certainly, neither Homer nor the author of Beowulf thought of what they were doing as 'world building', but consider how carefully they construct thier setting.  Troy's ancient walls inspired 'great plodding nerds' to heights of revelry long before Tolkien and still do today, not because of the Troy that actually existed but because of the Troy that Homer invented.  Is Homer a poor story teller???  Would to God that I was that bad, that I could only communicate to people as distantly removed from my own culture as the cultures of the works of Science Fiction are from my own!  How about Victor Hugo?  Is he a poor story teller?  He doesn't engage in world building as we know it today, but he does craft everything that a modern world builder would have to craft as a vehicle for his stories. (Read him unabridged!)  The same goes for Alexander Dumas, or in the modern era Asimov or Heinlien and so forth.  This guy's opinion goes against all the evidence that we have of what it means to craft an enduring and beloved story, and he's so pompous about it that he finishes not just by declaring that everyone who disagrees is probably mentally defective, but in a fit of unintentional self-disclosure basically compares what they do to 'George Bush' - which I'd guess for someone of his mentality is as damning of an insult as his mind could conjure.In addition to the craft of story telling, we must in this context of this forum be concerned with the craft of game management and adventure creation.  And here, the goals of our art differ so markedly from the goals of a novel that we can dispense with most of what little insight Mr. Harrison's rant might provide us.  Because, while there is some value in suggesting that a story is about its plot and protagonists and central characters and the setting is but secondary to this, I think most of us would agree that the principle role of the DM as a creator is not to create the plot and protagonists but to allow the players to create the protagonists and to have a large or even the larger role in creating the plot.  To do this, nothing else serves but to give the players a world in which to move through - one that hopefully has the illusion of as few grey and unpainted areas as possible and iprovokes thier couriousity to explore it and even emmerses them in it emotionally so that they actually care about the outcome.  Don't expect Viriconium D20 or GURPS splatbooks any time soon.I agree with Umbran and others that this is not a binary issue.  But the problem is that in order to agree with Mr. Harrison, I'd first have to agree to some straw man definition of what it meant to engage in world building which a priori defined world building to mean 'at the expense of creating a story'.   And once you realize that his rant only works for a straw man, you realize just how shallow the peice is.</blockquote>

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