In the popular thread about bad role-playing and blaming tolkien poster apeiron mentioned:

"In D&D it gets harder and harder to make challenges without shattering suspension of disbelief. How do you have a maze when the wizard can cast teleport? Star Trek abuses this in the other direction. When transporters / shields / telempathy would solve the problem, guess what isn't working?"

so I permit myself to make the step...

Mixing reality and unreallity laws (like magic and theurgy) must take the blame regarding conflicts on common sense among the players of role-playing games. I mean, come on, fantasy concludes really buggy everytime you want it to. Why didn't Gandalf call the eagles first-time to fly the mission ahead? Why did the Orcs need the one-ring so badly as they showed quite some progress even without it?
Give me an exapmle of fantasy or supernatural and I could bring its sense down every-time with common sense reasoning regarding the simplest things. Reallity laws function their way. If you alter this you create a mess that you could not have it accepted unopposingly as common or catholic version. You have the orthodox version,the catholic version, the protestant version, the muslim version, the jew version, the ancient greek version (which was the easiest religion to accept to have I know, as the divine behaviour was projected upon our human experiences, leaving things random as that and this randomness going as far as what the truth is supposed to be - in other words projecting supernatural on the basis of natural itself).
So I dare to blame fantasy itself.
What do you think about that?

Hello,

Before proceeding with such a thesis, and before expecting substantive answers, you'll have to define "bad role-playing" very carefully.

It doesn't matter whether I (for instance) agree with you whether it's really "bad," but what does matter is that I and everyone else have some clue what you're pointing to as the specific effect of fantasy on role-playing.

If you could provide both a general statement and a concrete example, that will help this thread immensely.

I also respectfully request others (not an order, not a moderator comment) to wait for this information, in hopes that everyone else can see that without it, no real discussion is going to be possible.

Best,
Ron

Ron, apologies for not waiting. I just needed to say this.

No, I don't think you can blame fantasy. Fantasy is as able to be internally consistent as any other "genre". It can take a little more work, and it's maybe easier to screw up if you do it wrong, but there's no reason it can't be.

So no, I don't feel it's "fantasy's" fault. There are no bad "stories", only bad storytellers.

(and for the record, and kind of off topic...)

xechnao wrote: Why didn't Gandalf call the eagles first-time to fly the mission ahead?

xechnao wrote: Why did the Orcs need the one-ring so badly as they showed quite some progress even without it?