Quote from: CRKrueger;908045Tits always win.

As Ian McShane said, I don't know the big deal is, it's all just tits and dragons.

Quote from: CRKrueger;908046Eh, people who say that are whiny little bitches.

That's a value judgement, not an economic one.  TV is aimed primarily at women, and the truth is that people who watch character drama do so because they want that emotional investment to pay off.  It can't pay off if those characters keep dying at random.  There's a reason soaps like One Tree Hill, 90210 or The Office bend credibility to keep the same set of people in the same place for years on end.

Quote from: daniel_ream;908055As Ian McShane said, I don't know the big deal is, it's all just tits and dragons.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

Quote from: daniel_ream;908055That's a value judgement, not an economic one.  TV is aimed primarily at women, and the truth is that people who watch character drama do so because they want that emotional investment to pay off.  It can't pay off if those characters keep dying at random.  There's a reason soaps like One Tree Hill, 90210 or The Office bend credibility to keep the same set of people in the same place for years on end.

Part also of the reason I heard, was because it was all bone-grindingly depressing.  There were no personal victories, none of the liked characters actually had good moments, was all doom, gloom and soul-crushing despair and seriousness.  You need levity to break up the tedium.

I agree with Hite. I think that "complexity" maps pretty well to "capacity to be interesting" and I think it's pretty clear that the real world is more complex than any imaginary setting.

However... That isn't to say this makes the real world the ideal setting for RPGs. Complexity is not always a great thing. What GM has complete knowlege and understanding of our own world? Sometimes you want the freedom to be able to make things up rather than research them.

Also, for me personally setting in RPGs functions most productively as backdrop. I want it to make sense but I REALLY do not want to have to absorb a bunch.of setting detail (real or imaginary) to play a game.

Quote from: Manzanaro;908335I agree with Hite. I think that "complexity" maps pretty well to "capacity to be interesting" and I think it's pretty clear that the real world is more complex than any imaginary setting.

I don't think you do agree with Hite. Hite's claim is "No invented setting is as interesting as the real world." His claim is not, "No invented setting has the capacity to be as interesting as the real world."

The question is, do you find the real world more interesting as a setting?

QuoteI want it to make sense but I REALLY do not want to have to absorb a bunch.of setting detail (real or imaginary) to play a game.

Since you don't want to absorb the detail of the real world, it is clear that you don't find the complexity of the real world as interesting as something with less complexity. Like most people in the thread, you are disagreeing rather than agreeing with Hite.

Fucking dude has been waiting 2 months for me to post. lolz

Quote from: Madprofessor;907762I don't know if this is quite fair.  Good authors barrow, steal and reinvent, and history and our imaginings about history are the primary source for every fantasy story and setting that I can think of.  Martin's only crime here is that he is ridiculously popular.

Hey, I'm not criticizing Martin. I think he's great (the first three books anyway). And I love historical fiction, so it all works for me.

The point I'm making is that it felt so fresh to his audience today because they hadn't read anything like it. And they hadn't read anything like it because we have a generation of readers now who are largely ignorant of history and historical fiction. Not just the details, but the dynasties, bloody feuds, the cruel and arbitrary nature of war, etc. Martin himself often recommends history and historical fiction books to his fans, but I get the impression they just aren't interested.

I bet if somebody re-wrote Shogun today and gave it a patina of fantasy it would be a big hit. But I don't see readers today rushing out to read Shogun itself. That's why while I agree with Hite that history is more interesting than fantasy, the pop culture market says otherwise. To say something is historical is to turn off a big part of the market, especially those under 40.

Quote from: daniel_ream;907953The overwhelming majority of people I know who watch/read GoT have no idea what the War of the Roses or Hadrian's Wall is.

Same here. I've come across many instances on fantasy fiction and gaming forums of people slamming an author for including an element that 'rips off' Martin, when it's just something lifted from history.

Quote from: Haffrung;908371The point I'm making is that it felt so fresh to his audience today because they hadn't read anything like it. And they hadn't read anything like it because we have a generation of readers now who are largely ignorant of history and historical fiction.

And who apparently never read books by other authors like Glen Cook who did similar things before Martin. Le sigh.

Quote from: Bren;908385And who apparently never read books by other authors like Glen Cook who did similar things before Martin. Le sigh.

I wouldn't be surprised if you were to remind about Ken Follett, but Cook? :confused:

Quote from: JesterRaiin;908387I wouldn't be surprised if you were to remind about Ken Follett, but Cook? :confused:

Why Glen Cook?

Well his first book in the Dread Empire series was published in 1979, the eponymous first Black Company novel in 1984. Cook did gritty, historically inspired, fiction with flawed protagonists who might just die in the middle of a book more than a decade before GoT saw print and ten years before Pillars of the Earth. Martin is known to be a fan of Cook and Steven Erikson cites the Black Company as the primary influence on his Malazan series. And I like Cook's writing, most especially his less lighthearted, historically inspired books. I can take or leave his Garrett stories.

Quote from: Bren;908393Why Glen Cook? (...)

Hmmm...

In comparison to Martin's butchery (or Follett's, for that matter) Cook seems a bit, well... "Lightweight" in gore.

Quote from: Haffrung;908371Same here. I've come across many instances on fantasy fiction and gaming forums of people slamming an author for including an element that 'rips off' Martin, when it's just something lifted from history.

In all fairness, Martin is now the Tolkien, in that he's set the formula for popular fantasy.  Instead of bloody fantasy trilogies, now it's history with the serial numbers filed off.  There's a lot less originality in fantasy lit than people suppose.

In any case, I'm sure R.R. Martin, J.K Rowling, the writers and producers of Game of Thrones along with whoever wrote those sparkly vampire books surely cry themselves to sleep every night over what's said about their work on gamer forums on their mattresses stuffed with money.

Quote from: Bren;908385And who apparently never read books by other authors like Glen Cook who did similar things before Martin. Le sigh.

I like Glen Cook a lot (am working through his Garrett PI books at the moment) but he really scratches a different itch than Martin. Martin really works the soap opera angle in a way that Glen Cook doesn't really touch with cliffhangers, chapters that make you throw the book across the room, surprise reversals and all that. I've read The Black Company over and over again and The Dragon Never Sleeps is probably my single favorite sci-fi book but nothing Cook's ever read had my heart in my throat quite the way that, say, reading the Red Viper vs. the Mountain fight for the first time while staying up way too late in college reading just one more chapter.

Martin's vast web of characters also is pretty rare. A lot of series (like The Wheel of Time) have a core group of characters and then a big cast of tertiary characters but the sheer number of important secondary characters who you get to know enough to give a crap about is pretty damn big in his writing. However at this point he's really reached his limit for number of characters I can summon the will to give a shit about, lots of interesting little bit characters in the newer books like the Tattered Prince but it's hard to summon the will to give a crap about them at this point.

Still I do like little touches like it being possible to piece together an interesting and complete life story of characters like Bonifer Hasty who barely even qualify as tertiary (appears or is mentioned in every book except the first) from their appearances and mentions. I don't think any other books in existence would give you such a deep relationship web as Martin's books, it can get suffocating at times but that aspect is certainly unique.

QuoteI also know several GoT TV fans who stopped watching around the second season as the fantasy elements ramped up and they realized that there was no point in emotionally investing in any of the characters.

On the other hand viewership has increased every season (although only very marginally for the weak 5th season). How many popular TV shows increase viewership every year, year after year after year. While I have my complaints about the showrunners they're doing something right. How many other fantasy and historical dramas have tailed backs that up.

For Star Wars being Dam Busters, well it's just as much The Hidden Fortress and just as much a fairy tale and there are all kinds of elements that it's stolen from other sources (the Millenium Falcon is a hot rod and a tramp steamer! Tatooine is Casa Blanca! Flash Gordon everywhere!). It's generally a mark of something that's going to become really popular when a lot of people say (correctly!) how much it ripped off something else but can't agree on what is ripped off the most.

Now I've never seen Dam Busters or The Hidden Fortress but the broad genre stuff Star Wars is stealing is familiar to me. The same goes for ASoIaF/Game of Thrones. Even if you don't know what Hadrian's Wall is or who Warwick was a lot of stuff will seem familiar to you in a way that a lot of other fantasy dramas won't. And more importantly, just like Star Wars, it draws on a lot of different things at once.

Quote from: Bren;906836Are they?

Or did the prop department use real earth creatures because they couldn't book a flight to Degoabah. Does anyone on screen call those creatures by earth names e.g. "rats, king snakes, boa constrictors and monitor lizards"?

Now I wouldn't be surprised if some creatures include an earth-type name (probably in English) because words like hawk, bat, slug, worm, and goat are evocative for the audience in a way that bantha and taun-tuan are not. We see them depicted in the movie so we don't need an evocative name, but a lot of listed Star Wars creatures are first encountered in a book. So we get names like Akk Dog, Blase tree goat, Blenjeel Sand Worm, Clawbird, Colo claw fish, Condor dragon, Dashta eels, Dragon snake (which is from Dagobah and might have been what they used a boa to mimic), Duracrete slug, Felucian ground beetle, Firaxan shark, Glim worm, Goffbird, Hawk-bat, Jyykle vultures, Kath hounds, K'lor Slugs, Knobby White Spider, Kowakian monkey-lizard, Krayt dragon, Kybucks, Lava flea, Mygeetoan yaks, Nabooan tusk-cat, Nek Battle Dogs, Pylat bird, Rong boars, Shell Spider, the unforgettable Space slug, Spice spider, Stone mite, Storm beast, Swamp slug, Tunnel snakes, Wyrwulves, Yorik coral.

But so far as I can tell, none of those creatures is supposed to be an actual earth creature even if a couple look like earth creatures.

I disagree. Humans and the other animals I mentioned only evolved on Earth. How they got to the galaxy far far away might make for an interesting spin-off, should the powers that be at Disney pull their heads out of their asses and do something novel. Yes, it's a fanciful setting, but it is connected to real-world Earth. Aside from a few animals, you also have whatever species E.T. is appearing on Earth as well as on Coruscant. On top of that, he recognizes Yoda!

[video=youtube;ZUwIxLG2AGc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUwIxLG2AGc[/youtube]

Now, the crew that made the movies could have used fake creatures to play the crawling things in the cave, or dressed up real ones to look different (like putting a costume on an elephant for the bantha), but they didn't. They put those animals in the movies as-is.

As for your laundry list of critters, not only did I find taun-tauns, dewbacks and banthas much more evocative than anything on the list, it also shows that George Lucas has much more imagination than any of the writers following in his wake.

Quote from: CRKrueger;908045Tits always win.

As well they should. Especially Eva Green's.

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