The fact that its not in the Forgotten Realms makes me more likely to check it out. FR is really lame compared to Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, AlQuadim or any other old 2nd Ed campaign setting other than the terminally retarded Spelljammer. Planescape and Darksun were my favorites largely because they were so different. That and there were no goddamn drow.Orion Magus said:
Why can't fantasy RPGs be more original?
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Sounds like Fallout. Or Grand Theft Auto.Indigo_Dingo said:
This a great idea, though you could also just remove the luck gauge and let game mechanics determine whether you narrowly dodge the attack, become wounded or die on the spot. The armor you're wearing and the type of weapon used by the enemy could also determine the outcome of getting hit. These mechanics would also work in a point-and-click RPG, but in a more limited manner.Proto Cloud said:
How about a cyberpunk RPG where programs and viruses can be used to hack an enemy's computer-augmented brain, or to protect yourself and improve your abilities? Even that's a fairly conservative idea compared to some other things (nano technology warfare in the year 12,000 or something).Iori Branford said:
People have all sorts of good ideas, but I'm sure we'll still be staring at health meters and fighting orcs twenty years from now. Jade Empire and Mass Effect have been a welcome relief from the flood of Tolkien clones, but they're too simple and dumbed down. Fallout 3 is coming, but I have the nagging suspicion that it's going to go down the same path. When will someone make an RPG that's both original and complex?
We're talking about RPGs here and no I don't count Anne Rice as anything other than gay smut fiction which needs the framing of a narrative to avoid be classed as erotica.PedroSteckecilo said:
Anyway as anyone here actually read one of the Watch novels? Or seen DayWatch? That is urban fantasy, vampires are just blue-collar dark others with a vitamnin deficiency. Mages conceal dangerous magical weapons as simply weird bulbs for torchs. Hell they have one guy I nickname Truck-Mage because of his magical near-symbiosis with a truck.
If you want hackneyed Vampire Fiction try Laurelle K Hamilton's Anita Blake who is a bigger Mary-Sue than Anne Rice, and seeks to destroy commonsense and narrative suspense with even more enthusiasm.
Where the F*** do you think Gary Gygax and his buddies got the ideas about fantasy from? Do you actually hold the opinion that D&D came before LOTR? What about the legendary Hyde Park gatherings? Thousands of British hippies/dopefiends talking about Middle-Earth and hitting the bong. Like Hagel, who influenced a significant number of philosophers who are influential now, Tolkien could be consider the Grandfather/Father/God-Father of Fantasy, making it publically acceptable to read a story about magic and goblins, without being stigmatized as a demented simpleton that should be shipped off to Bedlam.Alex_P said:
In Rhyzome, you play as one of six races on a "planet" composed entirely of a gigantic tree, where the old gods clash with invaders from space, magic vs. technology. Along with that, the creatures and races of that world are entirely original. Look for it.
Gygax's D&D world was a mixture of Tolkien tropes and "low fantasy" tropes, inspired pulp fantasy writers like Howard (who pre-dates Tolkien).Eyclonus said:
Gygax himself claimed that he was much more into the "sword-and-sorcery" style than Tolkien's "high fantasy." Though part of that may have been a smokescreen (Tolkien's estate sued him -- one reason D&D "hobbits" became "halflings" in all the later editions), but even a cursory examination of Gygax's writing and his personal characters shows that he definitely favored "low fantasy" themes -- adventure, ego-assertion, "grey" morality -- even though his work looks very much like a "high fantasy" setting.
In general, Gygax borrowed liberally from pretty much anything he liked, crossing subgenre boundaries liberally. Expedition to the Barriers Peaks is the obvious example here -- the adventure is all about a crashed spaceship.
This kind of kitchen-sink mishmash includes a lot of Tolkien but is quite distinct. Especially in terms of thematic elements, I would say.
Like D&D, most modern schlock fantasy has a Tolkienesque veneer but is really something else on the inside.
-- Alex
You do realise that High-Fantasy is about not only magic and such, but also clearly defined moral boundaries, and Low-Fantasy tends to be about less magic and more about moral ambiguity and a cynical approach to situations which are often brought up in Fantasy? D&D doesn't have any of these, the "Neutral" alignments still impose moral restrictions like the clearly "Evil" and clearly "Good" alignments. Whilst GGG(Gary Gygax the Great) might claim he was more into sword & sorcery, D&D has much stronger links to Tolkien High-Fantasy then Howard's Pulp mythic-fantasy. And crossing subgenres requires more than just featuring a crashed Spaceship with a socially apathetic dwarf and a Gandalf pastiche.
Reiterated what I said, even those pulp-magazines pre-dated Tolkien, they did not hold the literary significance, at the time, that LOTR had.
And might I point out that D&D is only heavily influenced by Tolkienism if you play any of the billion or so settings that were created based off Greyhawk. There are some that obviously aren't Spelljammer for example. You could argue Ravenloft isn't but if you apply the tropes of high-fantasy it comes out like the emo version of Greyhawk.
Reiterated what I said, even those pulp-magazines pre-dated Tolkien, they did not hold the literary significance, at the time, that LOTR had.
And might I point out that D&D is only heavily influenced by Tolkienism if you play any of the billion or so settings that were created based off Greyhawk. There are some that obviously aren't Spelljammer for example. You could argue Ravenloft isn't but if you apply the tropes of high-fantasy it comes out like the emo version of Greyhawk.
Look at Gygax's favorite characters, like Mordenkainen or Gord: totally all about how great it is to be a self-interested "adventurer" in the spirit of the kind of protagonist you'd see in a story by Leiber or Vance. The whole alignment system started out as "Law" vs. "Chaos," not good and evil (strongly resembling Moorcock but supposedly ripped off directly from Three Hearts and Three Lions).Eyclonus said:
Gary's work does a singularly poor job of imitating Howard, but he does a singularly poor job of imitating Tolkien, too -- the stuff of later adventure fantasy is right there, however.
Nitpick: Spelljammer is practically Greyhawk in space. Well, okay, more like Forgotten Realms (the let's-make-a-setting-a-lot-like-Greyhawk-but-without-Gary's-copyright setting) in space.
Hell, no matter how "out there," every D&D setting is weighed down by the same set of vaguely-Tolkienish-vaguely-not kitchen-sink tropes. They're embedded in the rules and fundamental assumptions about how the game is played.
...
Anyway, I'm straying from my point:
It's not Tolkien that holds a stranglehold on fantasy. It's a weird bastardization of Tolkien that is like 30% Tolkien and 70% other random stuff, congealed over time into a static body of mish-mash tropes. D&D is the poster child for this kind of design.
-- Alex
Tolkien was a hack; there's no two ways about it. IMO, he was a substandard author. But I do have to give him a bit of credit; if it wasn't for him, a lot of the excellent fantasy novels we see today most likely wouldn't exist. Of course, a lot of the absolute crap novel out there wouldn't exist, either, but we have to take the good along with the bad.
We almost had a chance for a good fantasy/sci-fi RPG with the new Shadowrun game. Unfortunately, instead of making a cyberpunk/fantasy RPG with the property, they decided to make an online-only shooter. Way to screw a good thing, Microsoft! I have little doubt that they won't even bother taking the property and doing something worthwhile with it now, which is sad. One of my favorite Sega Genesis games was Shadowrun; it was an excellent console RPG for the era it was made in, though the SNES Shadowrun game was kinda lame. For those of you who don't know, Shadowrun is a PnP RPG set in an alternate Earth of the future, where magic and many fantasy races co-exist with hi-tech in a cyberpunk setting. It's one of my favorite PnP games, and even though it's been around for years, the setting keeps evolving, and staying fresh as a result.
On the luck-instead-of-HP idea; something similar was done in an action/adventure game many years ago, called Fear Effect. Whether or not you survived depended on how 'scared' your character got!
We almost had a chance for a good fantasy/sci-fi RPG with the new Shadowrun game. Unfortunately, instead of making a cyberpunk/fantasy RPG with the property, they decided to make an online-only shooter. Way to screw a good thing, Microsoft! I have little doubt that they won't even bother taking the property and doing something worthwhile with it now, which is sad. One of my favorite Sega Genesis games was Shadowrun; it was an excellent console RPG for the era it was made in, though the SNES Shadowrun game was kinda lame. For those of you who don't know, Shadowrun is a PnP RPG set in an alternate Earth of the future, where magic and many fantasy races co-exist with hi-tech in a cyberpunk setting. It's one of my favorite PnP games, and even though it's been around for years, the setting keeps evolving, and staying fresh as a result.
On the luck-instead-of-HP idea; something similar was done in an action/adventure game many years ago, called Fear Effect. Whether or not you survived depended on how 'scared' your character got!
I agree with the criticism of Tolkien as a writer--his style is massively uneven, his non-hobbit dialogue is ye olde wooden as hell, and and if he tried his Two Towers Gandalf ex machina in an RP, he'd be pelted to death with d20's by the other gamers.
He was a crap writer, but he was an amazing world engineer. Middle-Earth is one of the most coherent fantasy worlds ever created, much, much more so than, say, Narnia, and because of him, we have Dune, we have Earthsea, we have Star Wars, and we have a lot of bloated, shitty, three-volume fantasy stories by other people who can build a world but couldn't write their way out of a wet paper Hallmark card.
The implications of this extend into games as well. I think developers spend more time on the world than they do on the writing, perhaps because they spent their lives reading fantasy novels that focused more on the worlds than the writing. They've example after example of Tolkien-derived worlds, and read example after example of overly ornate, stereotypically charactered, badly written dialogue. And I think anyone who has tried to tell a story with any sort of self-critical eye will tell you that plot is easy, writing is hard. It's the fantasy equivalent of the great graphics/dumb gameplay issue that people complain about in FPS.
I really like the idea of the luck concept, and I also really like the concept behind Obsidian's Influence mechanism in KOTOR 2. I think the two of these ideas together in a game would make for some real interesting play. I also really like the multi-character approach and the Mood function in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. With these in place, I think the most archetypical orc-fighting, dragon-hunting, evil-wizard-defeating fantasy game could be made a lot more interesting.
He was a crap writer, but he was an amazing world engineer. Middle-Earth is one of the most coherent fantasy worlds ever created, much, much more so than, say, Narnia, and because of him, we have Dune, we have Earthsea, we have Star Wars, and we have a lot of bloated, shitty, three-volume fantasy stories by other people who can build a world but couldn't write their way out of a wet paper Hallmark card.
The implications of this extend into games as well. I think developers spend more time on the world than they do on the writing, perhaps because they spent their lives reading fantasy novels that focused more on the worlds than the writing. They've example after example of Tolkien-derived worlds, and read example after example of overly ornate, stereotypically charactered, badly written dialogue. And I think anyone who has tried to tell a story with any sort of self-critical eye will tell you that plot is easy, writing is hard. It's the fantasy equivalent of the great graphics/dumb gameplay issue that people complain about in FPS.
I really like the idea of the luck concept, and I also really like the concept behind Obsidian's Influence mechanism in KOTOR 2. I think the two of these ideas together in a game would make for some real interesting play. I also really like the multi-character approach and the Mood function in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy. With these in place, I think the most archetypical orc-fighting, dragon-hunting, evil-wizard-defeating fantasy game could be made a lot more interesting.
Why we still have standard-RPG settings?
I for example can't stand the Discworld franchise. I know a LOT of people who read it like they breath, but while I don't have have anything against irony, self-mockery, and a little tongue-in-cheek the discworld is just too much. Pretty much like Azeroth how it became in WoW. I don't know if there are ANY NPCnames that are not some forced "HAHAFUNNYLOL" references to the real world.
While for me this goes with jokes other people might not like games where all playable races have never been seen before, or where you have to use classes like "C*ckmongler, instead of fighter.
Hope I was able to make my point.
so long
UnterHund
When you create a franchise it is not so much about over the top originality but about how much the people are going to get into it. This quote pretty much sums it up.
I for example can't stand the Discworld franchise. I know a LOT of people who read it like they breath, but while I don't have have anything against irony, self-mockery, and a little tongue-in-cheek the discworld is just too much. Pretty much like Azeroth how it became in WoW. I don't know if there are ANY NPCnames that are not some forced "HAHAFUNNYLOL" references to the real world.
While for me this goes with jokes other people might not like games where all playable races have never been seen before, or where you have to use classes like "C*ckmongler, instead of fighter.
Hope I was able to make my point.
so long
UnterHund
I'd love an RPG (Preferably an MMORPG) with:
No provable existing gods.
A world of realistic size. (The game does not need to allow you to visit all of the world though)
Where "races" (which should really be called species) do not exist. (Or do in a more realistic way)
Where the world is not filled with random monsters.
No provable existing gods.
A world of realistic size. (The game does not need to allow you to visit all of the world though)
Where "races" (which should really be called species) do not exist. (Or do in a more realistic way)
Where the world is not filled with random monsters.
I've always thought that the best way for a fantasy RPG to be original is to take the accepted stereotypes and put a twist on them.
The Elder Scrolls does this.
The Elder Scrolls does this.
He's not a hack. A hack writer writes with economy of effort as a primary goal -- he or she is trying to produce a salable work quickly (at the expense of some amount of overall quality and polish). It's obvious that Tolkien took his time with his books. Now, a lot of that effort went into "world-building," but even the prose... it doesn't strike me that he was writing it fast and then forgetting it. I think Lord of the Rings is the result of him doing the best he could, not rushing it (whether "the best he could" is good or not is, of course, a matter of opinion).Malk_Kontent said:
-- Alex
Tolkien is widely regarded as among the top-three fantasy writers ever (him, Frank Herbert, and Isaac Asimov). It's just that the few people who hate him are the ones who speak up whereas the normal, sane individuals like you and me are dumbfounded by their odd opinions.j-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
Isaac Asimov was mostly science fiction (real scinence fiction not this science fantasy that everyone call's science fiction.) and if you read any of his work you will realizes he's boring as all hell. Plus the 3 laws of robotics are highly flawed.Eldritch Warlord said:
EDIT: Ok the foundation trilogy (plus 7, I think) could be called fantasy because of the psychic guys.
EDIT 2: I think he had a few with demons in them to.
Science fiction is a subset of fantasy.
A fantasy portrays a world that does not and did not exist (as far as we can tell).
Tolkien wrote in "high fantasy," that's basically the genre he created.
Herbert and Asimov wrote in science fiction.
But none of them wrote in worlds that actually exist, therefore they are all fantasy authors.
A fantasy portrays a world that does not and did not exist (as far as we can tell).
Tolkien wrote in "high fantasy," that's basically the genre he created.
Herbert and Asimov wrote in science fiction.
But none of them wrote in worlds that actually exist, therefore they are all fantasy authors.