Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="molonel" data-source="post: 3489291" data-attributes="member: 10412">That was extremely well-written, and very true. Part of the reason the Silmarillion isn't as interesting as the LotR trilogy is because it lacks the humanity and immediacy of the characters. It's all high seriousness and worldbuilding.The characters in the Silmarillion are more like tiles in a mosaic. Distant, larger than life, mythological.I wouldn't go so far as to say the story persists and succeeds in SPITE of Tolkien's worldbuilding, but the latter is simply a spice on the main dish. We care about the characters: Gimli's orc-killing contest with Legolas, Gandalf's love of fine pipe tobacco, Sam's cooking pots and spices, Merry and Pippin's foolishness.This is simply an anecdote, but my first longterm campaign in 3.X D&D demonstrated to me once and for all the problem with too much worldbuilding. My DM was (and is) a good DM, but I always felt like he was trying to write a campaign world for publication somewhere, and our characters were always getting in his way. He especially didn't like the fact that our characters were anti-heroes, and our plots always failed and bumbled like the Keystone Cops tripping over their own oversized feet. The campaign could have been so much more than it was. It could have been legendary and epic, and instead, in the final equation, it was just ... okay. There are people who love worldbuilding first and above-all, but I follow the advice of the screenwriter who, when pressed on the cruising speed of a ship in one of his shows by the sci-fi techno wonks, informed them the ship moved "at the speed of plot."</blockquote>

Verification