Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;443186Fantasy is king because you can do it cold (no preparation) and stupid (no prior knowledge).  

What you can't do a Western cold? A superhero adventure?

D&D confused the well out of me first time I played it. Aren't evles and goblins pretty mucht he same thing? What's a cleric doing here? What do you mean he can't use a sword? Why exactly is there so much treasure underground with a variety of monsters  spread evenly in discreet rooms?

Seriously, after many years of gaming and computer games the language of D&D might come naturally to some, but please let's not kid ourselves and say that it's the simplest, most accessible genre.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;443186Fantasy is king because you can do it cold (no preparation) and stupid (no prior knowledge).  This is not true with Science Fiction.  Dungeons are king because dungeons limit action in the exact same way that a board does.  This is not so with other environments.  Medieval Europe is king because all of the visual language of Fantasy finds its most successful expressions in that era and the fiction it spawned: Arthur, Robin Hood, Charlemange, Ivanhoe, William Tell- all leading, in time, to Howard, Lewis and Tolkien.

That's it, in a nutshell.  We can point to the post-Alexander world, to Rome, to American Westerns and so on for influences and ideas that contributed to that unique creation that is the post-D&D fantasy paradigm but none of them hold a commanding presence in our collective mind than those aforementioned.  Those are the three pillars that make D&D (and any RPG that wishes to follow its trail to success, either in concurrence or reaction) the success that it is in fact.

It's odd though as Conan in particular isn't medieval at all. Conan is wondering around in an unconvincing ancient civ about 10,000BC .

And I for one hate dungeons and couldn't wait to get out of them and get on with other adventure options. I always thought they were totally unrealistic even when I was 11.

Soylent Green, you're talking rules, not setting.

I admit, I hate dungeons. I limit them to small excursions into a tomb or something. I'd much rather explore a wilderness area.

In this case, though, there is a considerable overlap. Clerics who can't use swords are a product of the rules and an element of the setting.

Quote from: danbuter;443195Soylent Green, you're talking rules, not setting.

I disagree. The selection of races and classes available to the players is as much as much rules as it is about the (implied) setting. Likewise the focus on dungeons is pure setting.

Anyway the point is there is a lot of obscure lore inherent in D&D which veterans gamers take for granted. There is no question fantasy is king when it comes to roleplaying, I just disagree with the statement that it is  "because you can do it cold (no preparation) and stupid (no prior knowledge)" - I think that only applies to people who already have already done a lot fantasy gaming.

Further thought. It's not simply fantasy that is king, it's D&D specifically (and assorted clones).  Runequest, Warhammer and Palladium might have their devoted followers, but these games play in the same league as Vampire, Star Wars or Call of Cthulhu.

Quote from: jibbajibba;443194It's odd though as Conan in particular isn't medieval at all. Conan is wondering around in an unconvincing ancient civ about 10,000BC .

Dude, Arnie's films were some of the best fantasy of the period- not a good as Krull, but not the total shit-fest that many others were.

Quote from: Soylent Green;443191What you can't do a Western cold? A superhero adventure?

Western: Insufficient niche for a team-based hobby.  For all intents and purposes, everyone's a Gunslinger and the common man finds that boring as fuck.

Superhero: Marvel? DC? Wildstorm?  Which continuity?  What subset?  Far, far too many questions that need answering before you can get on with the fun part- and that's also boring as fuck for the common man.

QuoteD&D confused the well out of me first time I played it. Aren't elves and goblins pretty much he same thing? What's a cleric doing here? What do you mean he can't use a sword? Why exactly is there so much treasure underground with a variety of monsters  spread evenly in discreet rooms?

Seriously, after many years of gaming and computer games the language of D&D might come naturally to some, but please let's not kid ourselves and say that it's the simplest, most accessible genre.

No, by then Elves, Dwarves (etc.) and more were known qualities and quantities with distinct identities that common men quickly and easily grokked.  We had the icons; we played them; we enjoyed them and we didn't worry much about why Clerics couldn't use swords.  This has only gotten stronger with time.  It's why the D&D-paradigm dominates.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;443225Western: Insufficient niche for a team-based hobby.  For all intents and purposes, everyone's a Gunslinger and the common man finds that boring as fuck.

Superhero: Marvel? DC? Wildstorm?  Which continuity?  What subset?  Far, far too many questions that need answering before you can get on with the fun part- and that's also boring as fuck for the common man.

No, by then Elves, Dwarves (etc.) and more were known qualities and quantities with distinct identities that common men quickly and easily grokked.  We had the icons; we played them; we enjoyed them and we didn't worry much about why Clerics couldn't use swords.  This has only gotten stronger with time.  It's why the D&D-paradigm dominates.

All of those statements only make sense from where you are standing now.

In the mid 70s the western was dying as a movie genre but the TV had Maverick, Alias Smith and Jones and the movies from the Wild Bunch, the spaghetti westerns to Butch and Sundance were still very much at the forefront.
I think the only thing that the western Genre lacks is the concept of 'special powers' that was on one of those lists of what makes a good RPG. A team of outlaws, a team of marshals, a cattle drive, a wagon train, a bunch of Christian zealots riding arround judging folks, a bunch of dispossessed Soiux there are huge optiosn which is one of the reasons the western Genre has made an RPG come back (albeit with a dash of hocus pocus).

Only a superhero geek would ask about what sort of Superhero world we were going to play in and the differences between DC and Marvel are far smaller than the differences between D&D and Runequest.

Elves and dwarves were not well known quatities until the LotR Tropes as powered by D&D made them like that. if you had asked most people in the70s what elves were like they would have said they were short guys that made toys for Santa and a dwarf was a guy that you paid 2 bits to see in a carnival.

Likewise a priest not using a sword makes sense but being able to use a flanged mace and wear plate mail was where the disconnect sits. Even if you ask people now what the Cleric class was trying to emulate you end up with some sort of kludge between a knight templar and van Helsing, both of who by the way would be quite happy to use swords.....

"Superhero: Marvel? DC? Wildstorm? Which continuity? What subset? Far, far too many questions that need answering before you can get on with the fun part- and that's also boring as fuck for the common man."

That's nonsense - by that standard, Fantasy Gaming should never have gotten off the ground.  It is far, far, easier to tell potential gamers age 10-25 in 1975-85 that the group is a team of superhero good guys and the "story" is to beat up a bunch of bad guys than to get them on board with all the fantasy tropes D&D uses.

Yeah supers is easy and always has been. When we played V&V for the first time, we just rolled up characters and got started. Continuity and setting were not considered any more than they were the first time we we played D&D.

Quote from: Esgaldil;443283That's nonsense - by that standard, Fantasy Gaming should never have gotten off the ground.  It is far, far, easier to tell potential gamers age 10-25 in 1975-85 that the group is a team of superhero good guys and the "story" is to beat up a bunch of bad guys than to get them on board with all the fantasy tropes D&D uses.

The problem is knowing the tropes and conventions of a genre, the problem is the open ended nature of RPGs. You play a character in a setting where his actions are adjudicated by a referee. Anything can happen during a campaign within the premise of the setting.  And knowing the conventions of the genres does not always help with you understanding the specific premise laid out by the referee. Particularly a first time referee.

As it turned out the maligned dungeon is the one of the few situations that quickly grasped by a novice player and referee. The choices for the player are easily defined by the layout of the dungeon maze, and it is clear what the referee has to do in order to create the dungeon maze. The fact it was dressed with elves, orcs, and dragons was incidental to the structure of the dungeon.

The combination of the clarity of the dungeon format and being the first RPG propelled D&D to a dominant position. As opposed to being a first among equals or supplanted by a later game.

So for an alternative RPG to gain traction it would have to offer a situation as simple to use, create, and understand as the dungeon maze.

And note that the early adventures for Traveller were also esstentially dungeon crawls dressed in sci-fi trappings.

Quote from: estar;443314The problem is knowing the tropes and conventions of a genre, the problem is the open ended nature of RPGs. You play a character in a setting where his actions are adjudicated by a referee. Anything can happen during a campaign within the premise of the setting.  And knowing the conventions of the genres does not always help with you understanding the specific premise laid out by the referee. Particularly a first time referee.

As it turned out the maligned dungeon is the one of the few situations that quickly grasped by a novice player and referee. The choices for the player are easily defined by the layout of the dungeon maze, and it is clear what the referee has to do in order to create the dungeon maze. The fact it was dressed with elves, orcs, and dragons was incidental to the structure of the dungeon.

The combination of the clarity of the dungeon format and being the first RPG propelled D&D to a dominant position. As opposed to being a first among equals or supplanted by a later game.

Well put, Rob.

As I said over in the thread about dungeon vs. wilderness vs. city, the glory of the dungeon is that it exists on the intersection between the immediatly  hands-on, which is very accessible, and the completely fantastical, which strikes a chord with many people and is particularly accessible to beginners.

I think this is a particularly distilled example of why fantasy worked out well as a default genre for RPGs. Superheroes yes are just as, if not more, familiar to the average person (and thus were an early and popular genre for RPGs), but superpowers are much harder to GM than fantasy - in comic books the limitations on a character are not what he can do, but what the writer is willing to let him do, the heroes are out in a wide world that is easy for their powers to break, etc. Remember also that the episodic string of scenes in a story took a while to develop in RPGs - D&D games are only create a story in a very broad sense, compared to superheroes who are very closely tied to how their stories are told, which has a lot to do with why there are so many comics/movies that parody or deconstruct that relationship. If a guy playing Conan doesn't hold himself to acting like he does in the stories, the amount of challenge that presents to the GM/the game is very limited compared to the challenge presented to the GM by the guy playing Superman.

And again for the players fantasy really doesn't require any kind of technical knowledge for the players. Earlier, Soylent talked,

Quote from: Soylent Green;443191Aren't elves and goblins pretty much the same thing?

The thing that makes fantasy easy is not that everyone can tell the difference between an elf and a goblin - not everyone can; the difference is more or less arbitrary - but that it doesn't matter if you can tell the difference. If you understand the idea of "a guy with a sword" and have a vague conception of "the olden days" you are all set. Everything else will just come up in play and the game will be none the worse for your ignorance. Fantasy is loosely familiar; even today I think there are very few people in the western world who have never been told a fairy tale or something of the like growing up - but you really need only the very loosest familiarity for everything to work out just fine. So the running D&D joke is that a dwarf is this angry militant scottish viking, right, but if a player knows what a dwarf is only from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, it's not actually going to cause a huge problem if the player rolls up Doc or Grumpy. The unfamiliarity can go out pretty well - D&D plays just as well or better if a PC knows next to nothing about the world around him (fantasy fiction and folklore protagonists are often pretty much fresh off the bus from nowhere) as the nuts and bolts of the outside world are pretty simple and easily taken a bit at a time.

Going back to the original post, remember Greyhawk was not so much a setting per se as a product of playing D&D, and its "generic" qualities come from D&D being open to players approaching it in any number of ways and rolling with it. If you have two players, one who only likes Conan and one who only likes Lord of the Rings, D&D results from the fact that you have Conan and Frodo at the same table, and it averaging out. If the players are fantasy fans, and willing, sure, it can be really fun and rewarding if the campaign tries to emulate Hyboria or some well-developed fantasy world of the players' own creation for that matter, but that's something experienced, dedicated, finicky players are mostly concerned about.

Good points, Cole.