I should really ask on the off-topic forum but seeing as people were here I thought I'd go for the wider remit.  In gaming terms, vanilla fantasy is a familiar, low-context setting that makes gaming a lot easier than other settings.

How about wider than that?

Well, maybe it's an appealing backdrop for fairly standard dramatic situations. Pulp sf is similar - it's usually cowboys & indians type stuff with rockets and ray guns - in another thread someone mentioned Battle of the Planets which, as any ful no, is The Magnificent Seven in sf drag.

Ned

I've set up another thread HERE to discuss the non-gaming related attraction of fantasy.

Damn you!

Ned

hehehe

Thats totally on-topic.

Anyhow, yes absolutely. The low (or 'almost no') context just makes things very easy for people to get started. It's kind of like you are handing over the ability for players to presume certain things about your campaign whether they know or not. I don't like the term "vanilla" for this. Vanilla implies plain to me. In reality, the standard options are fairly detailed. What happens is some GM's want to remove those standard options and make it even more plain.

Also known as "This is a low-magic campaign.." or "no prestige classes allowed." Man, talk about plain.

I forgot the one campaign I played in where we determined that we need to buy some healing potions. So we were in a big city, and I just asked "Hey, who needs healing potions, I have an extra 300 gold. Standard prices, right?"

And then the guy started going on about how "This is a low magic campaign and there were no magic shops and alchemy was banned by the government because of the alchemical wars of blah blah blah blah..."

I mean, I don't care. I just needed a way to have our dudes avoid having to return to town between battles. Having something around like a healing potion does the job admirably, and it's expected that you'll have access to them. Normally.

So standard to me, is just what a casual reader would think from reading the rulebooks. Adding extra stuff in is no problem. Taking stuff away or changing the assumptions doesn't work as well.

Familiarity is gold in genre fiction, be it literature or RPGs, because familiarity (as noted above) means accessibility.  The less you fuck with the familiar, the more you're going to be able to get on with the fun.  Playing within those boundaries is actually quite challenging, and leads to great creativity for those willing to take up that task.

I like it a fair deal.

I don't necessarily want to eat it every day for the rest of my life though.  

In truth I've been getting a bit bored with D&D lately, and would like sometihng new.

Chiming in on Vanilla Fantasy (Van-tasy?:raise: ) as a quick starting point. It's like those boxy Scion micro- mini- van- thingies, a basic vehicle that you can modify.

One of my favorite authors was the actor and teacher Michael Chekhov. Many of his students worked in film, and in those days, there wasn't a lot of patience with "art".  Also, there usually wasn't a lot of time to prepare. Time was money. Most scripts and roles were generic. Part of his approach was to seize on an archetype (highbrow) or stock character (lowbrow). Where he made it come alive was in finding where the character differed from the stock type. Say the character is a "Tough Guy", or a "Good Girl". He taught his students to look for the moments when the guy wasn't tough, or the girl wasn't good. That made them unique.

So fine, start with the land of Vanillium. As Akrasia suggested, add sprinkles... and whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry (...mmm, maraschino cherry...). Find the places where it's not vanilla.

Quote from: Bradford C. WalkerFamiliarity is gold in genre fiction, be it literature or RPGs, because familiarity (as noted above) means accessibility.  The less you fuck with the familiar, the more you're going to be able to get on with the fun.  Playing within those boundaries is actually quite challenging, and leads to great creativity for those willing to take up that task.

  That's actually a very good point.  I think the key to understanding Fantasy as a genre is its absolutely unfettered commerciality.  In that respect it's a far less prissy genre than SF where innovation and artistic vision are what sustains a career.  In Fantasy it seems more a matter of balancing your output in such a way that people do occasionally go "Oooh... that's a nice idea" without ever going "I can't get my head round this".

  I think that's why it's such a hack magnet.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalIn that respect it's a far less prissy genre than SF where innovation and artistic vision are what sustains a career.

I don't think that's true at all!

Ned

Quote from: Ned the Lonely DonkeyI don't think that's true at all!

  I think it is up to a point.  You look at the longest serving SF writers and they're not, by and large, people who have been writing the same books over and over again.  There's less of a tendency towards the saga and returning to the same characters again and again.

  The prestige SF writers, the movers and shakers in the genre, are those that up to a point, change their output.

Quote from: Mr. AnalyticalI think it is up to a point.  You look at the longest serving SF writers and they're not, by and large, people who have been writing the same books over and over again.  There's less of a tendency towards the saga and returning to the same characters again and again.

  The prestige SF writers, the movers and shakers in the genre, are those that up to a point, change their output.

An increasing number of hard sf authors are leaving sf entirely to write technothrillers.

Greg Bear, Paul J MacAuley, I think possibly even Gregory Benford have all of late been writing books aimed at the mainstream market rather than sf.

Those movers and shakers are not the best sellers. The best sellers are those guys chrurning out Star Trek and Star Wars series. If you're comparing, say Jon Courtney Grimwood and Charlie Stross with Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks, you are comparing apples and apple-flavoured turds. I'm not sure who in fantasy is closer to those guys (Neil Gaiman? John M Forde?) but they aren't the top sellers either.

In essence, it's just as easy to "sustain a career" in sf by being a hack as it is in fantasy.

Ned

Quote from: BalbinusAn increasing number of hard sf authors are leaving sf entirely to write technothrillers.

Greg Bear, Paul J MacAuley, I think possibly even Gregory Benford have all of late been writing books aimed at the mainstream market rather than sf.

Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, too. With all those writers, though, I think it's more a change of label than a huge change in content. The line between near-future sf and techno thriller is actually quite narrow and easily jumped around.

Ned