In this post,

Snowden wrote: This may be something that belongs in a new thread, but I would really like to hear more about such "non-stock" fantasy; I for one haven't read Pollack, Lessing, or Donaldson, and I don't think I've read the LeGuin books (or stories?) you're referencing.

This is going to increase my to-read list significantly isn't it? A few other interesting non-traditional fantasy / SF worlds not mentioned:

His Dark Materials, by Phillip Pullman. The world of His Dark Materials seems a bit Victorian in broad relief. There isn't any explicit magic, per se, and I suppose one could question its credentials as a “fantasy series” but nobody I know of whose read the books really has any doubt. The devices and such present definitely give the world a rather weird science / Victorian steampunk flavour. Oh, and people have Daemos—animal-shaped familiars. Their shape tends to reflect the nature of the person, and is set from puberty (they are capable of shapeshifting, prior to that). Overall, a cool world; I've long wanted to run a game wherein half the players play people, and the other half play those people's Daemons.

Most any fantasy-ish novel by Neil Gaiman. Playing off “hidden world” story archetypes, Neverwhere introduces the reader to London Below—an entire city built in the subway tunnels and alleyways and, basically, the cracks of the London we know (London Above). The world is rather more feudal, a bit more gritty, and completely invisible to the vast majority of London Above residents. There are a number of other Below cities, as well, pretty much one in any large-ish city we know of. American Gods populates the world with living, physical incarnations of various gods, given life by the peoples who believe in them, and dragged across the ocean to the new world by the same. Coraline is Victorian gothic fantasy, in which a little girl opens a door to a mirror of her house, where everything seems a little more pleasant (and, naturally, isn't) and everyone has buttons for eyes. And then, obviously, Sandman.

Homo Zapiens (or, in Russian, Generation P), by Victor Pelevin. A modern-day tale of a fellow who gives up poetry and goes into advertising following the fall of the Soviet Union. The fantasy elements in this one are somewhat subdued, but there's a definite connection to Sumerian mythology.

Rob Carriere wrote: I occasionally get annoyed that "all" fantasy RPGs are about Tolkien, Howard, or Leiber. I'm not necessarily suggesting that anybody should play in any of these settings (although I do in fact believe that many of LeGuin's short stories would make cool one-shots), but I am suggesting that something is missing when none of these settings, not even the Donaldson, can be adequately handled by of the major fantasy RPGs out there, including the ones styled as "universal".

Rob: thanks a lot, those sound interesting; Pollack and Donaldson don't sound THAT far away from "traditional" fantasy fiction to me at first glance, though!

John: maybe we can agree to disagree, but I think the D&D/non-D&D distinction is in danger of missing the forest for the trees. Although there are substantial differences between them from a fantasy gamer or reader's perspective, I think in the big picture all of these games are essentially derived from the same tradition of fantasy writing -- the adventure narrative. When I encouraged Rob to start the thread, I was hoping to hear more about "fantasy" writers who had taken a more speculative approach. It sounds like Lessing might be a good example of what I was wondering about, along with "The Gate To Women's Country" by Sheri Tepper which it reminded me of.

Snowden wrote: John: maybe we can agree to disagree, but I think the D&D/non-D&D distinction is in danger of missing the forest for the trees. Although there are substantial differences between them from a fantasy gamer or reader's perspective, I think in the big picture all of these games are essentially derived from the same tradition of fantasy writing -- the adventure narrative.

Snowden wrote: When I encouraged Rob to start the thread, I was hoping to hear more about "fantasy" writers who had taken a more speculative approach. It sounds like Lessing might be a good example of what I was wondering about, along with "The Gate To Women's Country" by Sheri Tepper which it reminded me of.

Addressing my post, John Kim wrote: Is there somewhere you are looking to go with this? What would you say is missing? More generic and/or universal fantasy RPGs to handle a wider range of fantasy? Or more non-stock fantasy RPGs?

My own take on this depends quite a bit on whether we're talking about Nar or Sim or Gam design.

With Nar design, I don't see why something akin to Vincent's "How to design a town" in DitV couldn't be constructed in a relatively freeform way to handle a wide range of potential fantasy settings. Then you'd have a Nar system akin to his, and you construct setting situations that fit well. It may not have been done much, but DitV is proof-positive that it could be done.

With Sim, however, I think it's a very different beast. I think that a really coherent Sim design has to incorporate the setting from soup to nuts, which means that a piecemeal universal construction method isn't really going to work. It'll be sort of like those Doom skins, where you transform the buildings and the monsters to look different, but it's the same game inside. (I realize the Doom parallel dates me, but there you go.)

Gam I still don't understand well, but it does seem to me potentially possible to generate a universal method that would produce the same Gamist game with different situations and challenges dependent on setting.

As always, Sim is the odd man out on this one, I think.

Is this topic-drift? I'm still not exactly clear on what the question is here.

Interesting!

Note on Donaldson: "The chronicles of Thomas Covenant" would be interesting to play. It's too good to be classified as traditional fantasy.

Note on original fantasy: William Horwood; "Duncton chronicles". Superb fantasy with moles in all major roles! Love and war! Loyalty and betrayal! Magic! And to top it off; the main character (mole) is crippled! I'd love to see a serious RPG-work on Horwoods books!

clehrich wrote:
With Sim, however, I think it's a very different beast. I think that a really coherent Sim design has to incorporate the setting from soup to nuts, which means that a piecemeal universal construction method isn't really going to work. It'll be sort of like those Doom skins, where you transform the buildings and the monsters to look different, but it's the same game inside. (I realize the Doom parallel dates me, but there you go.)

neelk wrote:

clehrich wrote: With Sim, however, I think it's a very different beast. I think that a really coherent Sim design has to incorporate the setting from soup to nuts, which means that a piecemeal universal construction method isn't really going to work. It'll be sort of like those Doom skins, where you transform the buildings and the monsters to look different, but it's the same game inside. (I realize the Doom parallel dates me, but there you go.)

I disagree -- the way i do sim games is to take as much of the setting out of the mechanics as possible. The structure of what causes what is generally pretty intricate and hard to represent mechanically, and so I find it works better to not try to do that at all -- I just leave the important stuff as English rather than die-rolling.

clehrich wrote:
I think this has long been a serious problem in Sim design, the lack of recognition of this necessary analogy between how players think and how their characters think, which supports their continuation and extension of the Dream. If you drop GURPS Magic into a game where the game-world magic doesn't run that way at all, you're asking the players to pretend they don't know about the mechanics. But sustaining the Dream is hard enough without this.

So I tend to think that coherent Sim design must incorporate the nature of the setting into the mechanics. Do you see? The upshot is that the universal-type system questions that Rob is grappling with will be more difficult to establish in Sim than in Nar or Gam.

clehrich wrote: I think this has long been a serious problem in Sim design, the lack of recognition of this necessary analogy between how players think and how their characters think, which supports their continuation and extension of the Dream. If you drop GURPS Magic into a game where the game-world magic doesn't run that way at all, you're asking the players to pretend they don't know about the mechanics. But sustaining the Dream is hard enough without this.

So I tend to think that coherent Sim design must incorporate the nature of the setting into the mechanics. Do you see? The upshot is that the universal-type system questions that Rob is grappling with will be more difficult to establish in Sim than in Nar or Gam.

neelk wrote: you set yourself up for endless aggravation every time there's an inconsistency between the two. (And there will be; bet your life on it.)

Chris, Neel,
You are most definitely NOT off-topic as far as I'm concerned!

I agree with the thesis that the problem can be solved by taking the issue out of the "rules" part of the System and dumping it into the "prose description" part. However, that is, in a to me very important way, sweeping the problem under the rug rather than solving it. The reason the prose description trick works is that we are using the collective opinions of the players as a resolution engine. In such a situation, the most the rules do is to establish priorities between these resolution engines (the "narration rights"). Works fine, except it's too close to freeform for me.

I have run a three-year game freeform in the past, capitalizing on exactly the advantages that Neel describes. While that worked quite well, it was too much work in that every silly dubious issue becomes a decision and one open to debate. As a concrete example, if character A fires a spell and character B fires a counterspell, I want the rules to contribute more to the decision process than "well, uhhh, you decide."

Moreover, even dumping the problem into the players' heads doesn't always solve it. When I pull a guy out of one of Donaldson's magic mirrors, I (or whoever has narrative control at the moment) need to stat him. Like, right now. Yes, I'm aware of the trick of partially speccing a character, but you're still bringing the game to a grinding halt at what should be a dramatic moment.



Neel,
I just looked at your Mage in HQ writeup. To me, that's superior to straight Mage, I really like the looks of it. However, it very clearly isn't straight Mage, and anybody coming to the table expecting Mage would have a legitimate right to be upset. In conclusion, I would argue that your write-up shows that you can describe cool settings in HQ, but it isn't evidence that you can successfully adapt an a priori setting to HQ, which was the proposed task.

Additionally, I think that your write-up still leaves a vast amount of space to judgement calls, which is precisely what I want to minimize.


Chris,
I think you pretty much nailed the issue I was struggling to articulate. Thanks. I get the Doom parallel, so I guess I'm at least as dated as you are. Wanna try for Pong? :-)

I think that any solution to the Sim-style design will have to do something about the soup-to-nuts issue, or the amount of work becomes untenable. As far as I can see that means that either,
- you take the whole issue out of the rules part of the system and accept the bad things that come with that decision as par for the course, or
- you accept a solution that is mostly generic with a few key custom elements (for example, GURPS with a custom magic system), or
- you find another angle to look at the problem that gives you decision power without erecting the entire world in the rules. (If I had an example here, I wouldn't have started the threat :-)

The third solution would be a magic bullet, but even the second one is problematic. Designing (e.g.) a magic system that will fit into GURPS, do what you want it to and not ruin the rest of the system is a very non-trivial task. It would be very helpful if there were guidelines, or, even better, supportive structures for doing such things.

SR
--