Quote from: Old Geezer;766742And the bug creatures are just monsters in different skins.

That's how I feel about a HUGE chunk of what's in the average Monster Manual... blue goblin, red goblin, silver goblin... yawn. But the bugs we're talking about have a decent bit of character/complexity/culture to explore. You can make friends, sort of, with at least one faction... learn some of their secrets.

QuoteThat's one of the huge differences between computer games and TTRPGs.  Computer games are much better at impressive visuals, but TTRPGS are much better at complex interactions between PCs and NPCs.

Agreed, which is why I think a good chunk of WoW's content is kind of wasted on the railroady videogame format where it can't really reach the potential it would have in a TTRPG.

Quote from: Old Geezer;766738But I sat down and read this thread in one go, and honestly, it seemed like a lot of the time you weren't actually reading what was being said.

Considering that the discussion starts by dismissing other gamers as "hidebound," "retreading the same old dungeon cliches," that shouldn't be too surprising.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;767581Considering that the discussion starts by dismissing other gamers as "hidebound," "retreading the same old dungeon cliches," that shouldn't be too surprising.

I've already admitted my attitude was pretentious and I've been re-examining my assumptions in light of the discussion. How many times do I have to surrender in one thread? Fine, I'll also say my wording in the first post was thoughtless and undiplomatic.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;767607Fine, I'll also say my wording in the first post was thoughtless and undiplomatic.

It's also honest. The "wording" isn't the problem - your contempt is.

And then you turned petulant when you discovered that other gamers responded to your 'creative ideas' with, 'Yeah, that pretty much sucks donkey ball-sweat.' The rest of the thread was you lashing out over your hurt fee-fees.

ShipLock, if you come away from this thread with anything, I hope it's the understanding that gamers who use familiar tropes aren't necessarily doing so by rote, and that a referee's or designer's first priority is to create a setting or an adventure that the players want to play, not to demonstrate how 'original' they are.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;767702It's also honest. The "wording" isn't the problem - your contempt is.

And then you turned petulant when you discovered that other gamers responded to your 'creative ideas' with, 'Yeah, that pretty much sucks donkey ball-sweat.' The rest of the thread was you lashing out over your hurt fee-fees.

ShipLock, if you come away from this thread with anything, I hope it's the understanding that gamers who use familiar tropes aren't necessarily doing so by rote, and that a referee's or designer's first priority is to create a setting or an adventure that the players want to play, not to demonstrate how 'original' they are.

That's a good point.  A lot of the old tropes are useful because they let you start playing right away without a massive "data dump."  Even Tekumel had a "foreigner's quarters" where mysterious strangers would approach you in bars and hire you to go on an expedition into the underworld beneath Jakalla.

Or as C.S. Lewis said, "It is the duty of the artist to take us to new areas of thought and feeling, but they must start in a place we understand."  or words to that effect.

1) The dungeon game basically is geared to being first and last a fun "just a game," only incidentally -- if at all -- a faithful simulation of anything. Insistence on verisimilitude or literary fidelity has become fashionable, but it tends to raise needless barriers to fun. It's like demanding that caped crusaders or giant mecha must be sensible.

The same holds for D&D hit points. If you must over-think the thing, then do it with your "groovy fun" thinking cap on. Otherwise, play sommething else instead of torturing yourself (and others with your belly-aching).

2) For inspiration, try going beyond increasingly incestuous "genre fantasy." The displacer beast was inspired by a story by SF grand master A.E. Van Vogt, a representative of Golden Age weirdness only a little behind Cordwainer Smith. The magic system, ioun stones, and some other things, drew on Jack Vance, who created many more bizarre milieus than just the Dying Earth. (Try "The Moon Moth" for one.)

Michael Shea, very much in the style of Vance and Leiber, has a pretty flavorful underworld in "The Fishing of the Demon Sea," and I heartily recommend all his tales of Nifft the Lean.

Robert Silverburg's The Man in the Maze (1969) is just one of many SF "dungeon" prototypes, and rather tame as those go, but of course has interesting psychological elements. His Majipoor is definitely not just another stop in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

The Guide's compiler, Diana Wynne Jones, has herself written such tales as Howl's Moving Castle.

Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore and Warren Ellis come to mind as just a few reasons one might find some comicbooks worth reading.

Urth of the New Sun, the Glittering Plain, Perdido Street Station, the Drawing of the Dark, etc., offer interesting material more or less in the "sword and sorcery" genre itself, but why stop there? Try John Crowley's Little, Big or Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood.

Gygax and/or Moldvay may have mentioned Abe Merritt (The Face in the Abyss, The Moon Pool, "The People of the Pit," etc.); John Bellairs (The Face in the Frost); Philip Jose Farmer (World of Tiers, Riverworld, etc.); William Hope Hodgson (The Night Land, The House on the Borderland, etc.); Dennis Wheately (The Devil Rides Out, etc.); Robert Heinlein (Glory Road, The Number of the Beast); Jack Chalker (Well of Souls); Clifford D. Simak (City, Goblin Reservation, Where the Evil Dwells); Piers Anthony (Xanth); Hugh Cook (Wizard War series); Winsor McCay's Little Nemo; Roger Zelazny; Lord Dunsany;  Clark Ashton Smith; H.P. Lovecraft; James Branch Cabbell; E.R. Eddison; Fletcher Pratt; C.S. Lewis; Andre Norton; C.L. Moore; John Myers Myers; Mervyn Peake; Wonderland, Oz, Doctor Dolittle, Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, the Arabian Nights, and others.

Quote from: Phillip;767711Michael Shea, very much in the style of Vance and Leiber, has a pretty flavorful underworld in "The Fishing of the Demon Sea," and I heartily recommend all his tales of Nifft the Lean.

I had a DM strongly influenced by Shea (and Vance). We had some incredible campaigns adventuring in surreal demon-haunted landscapes like something out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting enacted to a Black Sabbath soundtrack. We had a city of religious fanatics who fed passerby to their giant slime god, vampiric elves riding purple worms through deserts of bones, giants making wine out of fermented people, huge floating eyes burning peasants to cinders, packs of chromatic steel apes capturing people for use in experiments by a mad wizard, a pirate paddle-ship driven by a captive demon, and a city of shark worshippers ruled by a lich. Magic items included the mummified head of a pixie made you cast the shadow of a pit fiend, a set of glass-steel armour inlaid with thousands of tiny bones, ruby fangs of the darkling, and jade breast-plate that turned your skin green and your hair to chrome.  When you've drunk such heady wine, it's difficult to get jazzed about saving farmers from a band of goblins.

Haffrung, that sounds absolutely amazing.  It's exactly that kind of "heady wine" that I wish there was more of.

Phillip, that's an excellent bibliography of Weird fantasy.  I might add Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris books and M. John Harrisons's Viriconium sequence to the list; also Lord Dunsany and, of course, Michael Moorcock.

All I was ever trying to say in this thread was basically, "With such abundantly rich possibilities for fantasy, why limit ourselves unnecessarily?  With work and forethought, we can have well-designed dungeons and wild ideas!"

Quote from: Steerpike;767722Haffrung, that sounds absolutely amazing.  It's exactly that kind of "heady wine" that I wish there was more of.

Phillip, that's an excellent bibliography of Weird fantasy.  I might add Jeff Vandermeer's Ambergris books and M. John Harrisons's Viriconium sequence to the list; also Lord Dunsany and, of course, Michael Moorcock.

All I was ever trying to say in this thread was basically, "With such abundantly rich possibilities for fantasy, why limit ourselves unnecessarily?  With work and forethought, we can have well-designed dungeons and wild ideas!"

Favorites of mine, too! (I added Dunsany in an edit).

I'm delighted to see there's more -- and more widely available -- Vandermeer than the chapbook I bought years ago.

Michael Cisco is another I've been enjoying. The Vandermeer's led me to him. Trippy stuff. The protagonist of his first book is a golem, sent out to find a mysterious collection of words. Weird but playful stuff.

Having but started Dave Duncan's Magic Casement, my preliminary assessment is that he puts a creative spin on familiar things.

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Magic of Recluce series and David Drake's Lord of the Isles series have a similar quality.

The set of five Swords Against Darkness anthologies edited by Andrew J. Offutt is an excellent collection of sword and sorcery stories, some with pretty novel touches. He also co-wrote the Tiana/War of the Wizards trilogy with Richard K. Lyon, and contributed Hanse Shadowspawn to Thieves' World.

The Fantastic Swordsmen (Lin Carter, ed.) is a little sampler of classic tales, illustrating some of the creativity in the pre-frp genre.

Black Gate is probably the top genre-oriented magazine today. Besides new work, it has reprinted such stories as Charles Tanner's "Tumithak of the Corridors" (a 1930s epic in which the hero's quest is upward from the safety of the depths to the monstrous perils of the surface).

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is the premiere venue for the wider field of fantasy.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;767702ShipLock, if you come away from this thread with anything, I hope it's the understanding that gamers who use familiar tropes aren't necessarily doing so by rote, and that a referee's or designer's first priority is to create a setting or an adventure that the players want to play, not to demonstrate how 'original' they are.

I try to question my assumptions and learn from my mistakes.

Quote from: Old Geezer;767704That's a good point.  A lot of the old tropes are useful because they let you start playing right away without a massive "data dump."  Even Tekumel had a "foreigner's quarters" where mysterious strangers would approach you in bars and hire you to go on an expedition into the underworld beneath Jakalla.

Or as C.S. Lewis said, "It is the duty of the artist to take us to new areas of thought and feeling, but they must start in a place we understand."  or words to that effect.

Yes, I think that contributes to the enduring popularity of games such as D&D ánd Traveller, and the perennial interest in comicbook-superhero games. The basic ideas are familiar enough, but once we're started we can ring even more changes than with a Western, gangster, spy or war game.

By and large, the big commercial successes tap into genres already established elsewhere. Vampire, for instance, road the coattails of Anne Rice's novels.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;767861I try to question my assumptions and learn from my mistakes.

And how's that working out for you?

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;766460I'd just like to point out that in the wake of this thread's discussion I've been suffering from analysis paralysis as I try to put together a D&D setting. I'm second guessing all my "clever" ideas, wondering if I'm just being pretentious for no real benefit to the table experience.

Okay, which assumptions are you questioning? What mistakes do you think you made, and what did you learn from them?