Yeah, what Spuzzum said! Although I do feel the urge to elucidate...

You could look at it like this:

<code> Base Element---->Corollary 1---------------->Corollary 2-->Effect The Familiar---->Suspension of Disbelief---->Romance------>Retains players The Unknown----->Anything Goes-------------->Variety------>Aids DM </code>

The Familiar:

Everyone is familiar with the Swords & Sorcery genre, and with the cultural history that influences it. S&S games usually create their own distinct cultures; but the players will draw parallels to aspects of real-world history, whether or not the author intended or even realized it. You could plausibly come up with the most unique S&S setting ever developed, and someone somewhere would boil it down to something like this: "Well, one culture is like the Greeks except it hates all kinds of art, and the other is Viking-flavored, with a kind of Bushido code." This gives players a handle, even if only a simplistic one, on their characters.

Also, since most people who play games have at least a cordial attitude towards S&S, it makes a good "common denominator" for a game that will be interesting to a wide audience and also be pleasant for the creator.

The Unknown:

Relatively speaking, we don't often know many of the details of our own world. Does a stable currency system require the invention of the wheel and axle? Does a Baron outrank a Viscount? Could reliable clocks exist in a world without domestic pets? I have no clue, and neither do most people who will be playing. So the creator will be allowed a lot of leeway in everyday details, as long as there are some basic "reality checks."

The Unknown is also a good plot device. Not only is an S&S world new and unknown to the players, it's also usually thinly populated and largely unexplored by the fictional people within it. A frontier is a great place for the players because it's big and the competition is low, and it's great for the creator because it saves the trouble of explaining why no character in the group has ever before seen or heard of a Fardwark.

Suspension of Disbelief:

As players, we're willing to give S&S worlds the benefit of the doubt because we've had good experiences with them in the past, whether in games, movies, or print. We usually don't have an axe to grind with the creator. One of the great fundamental principles of psychology is: it's easy to suspend your disbelief if you're really being entertained.

An S&S world can even appeal to people who completely reject its premises. Playing an S&S world is like clicking on an implied End User License Agreement: "By entering this game, I acknowledge that the 'ground rules' of this world may be different from the ones I think I've discovered in the real world. I promise not to hold the creator liable for depictions of moral imperatives and supernatural occurrences that I wouldn't believe in real life if they walked up and shook my hand." A few of my friends are like this: "realistic" in philosophy, yet they love to read heroic fantasy.

Anything Goes:

As creators, we're drawn to S&S because we have lots of latitude. We can design an elaborate history a la Tolkien if we want. But we can also populate the most immediately important areas of the world first, and leave continuity details for later. If an author puts a public bikini-mud-wrestling match in a Wild West story, eyebrows will be raised; in a Swords & Sorcery world, it might end up as the game's introductory splash screen. And if anyone asks, all that's needed is an off-the-cuff rationalization like: "Because of the need to maintain harmony among a culture of multiple humanoid races, the severely restrictive 'blue laws' of Fanatia are relaxed or even flouted in certain designated areas of major cities."

Romance:

By "romance" I don't mean smooching, but romanticism as opposed to naturalism/pragmatism/whatever; a sense that things matter. It's not strictly necessary to a good fantasy world--as I recall, the sagas of Elric and Thomas Covenant can get pretty bleak at times--but it rarely hurts. Even in a world where courage, love, honor, and the like aren't emphasized, the setting itself is inherently romantic, simply by virtue of the fact that it isn't Earth.

I suspect some form of romantic license is almost a prerequisite for a game that players want to play. Even an abstract game like chess can be romantic, in the sense that you enjoy it only as much as you find it important to pay attention; you are good, the other side is evil, and if you don't care about your moves in a chess game, you're not playing--you're killing time.

Variety:

Run-of-the-mill equipment in a fantasy world is widely varied, in terms of weapons, magical items, spells, and many other things. If you're playing a modern-day espionage game, what weapons do you want? Large-caliber gun or small-caliber gun, automatic or double-action, maybe backed up by big knife or small knife, and billy club or brass knuckles. Maybe you can liven things up with nunchakus or garrottes or secret technology that makes up for the lack of magic, but still, as Spuzzum noted, you're necessarily a lot more limited in a non-fantastic setting. (In real life, my "standard inventory" is a wallet, a key ring, a handkerchief, and a pocketknife. None of them have any extraordinary powers, although there are several ways to make the handkerchief generate fear in a five-foot radius.)

Or look in any fantasy RPG bestiary for aggressive creatures. In our world, my unscientific guess is that you could probably count on your fingers and toes all the genuses that commonly attack humans without cause; the most reliable aggressors of the bunch would be humans themselves. Players rarely question the heightened violence of Nature in a fantasy world, because increasing variety in enemies results in increasing interest. Variety helps the DM because you can often create many variations on a basic type with little extra work.


Those are some of my thoughts, anyway.

I don't know. Why do people like to go fast?
Personal preference. There is always going to be something outweighing somehing else and that just happens to be the preffernce.


On 3/23/00 10:53 pm Gabriel wrote:

On 3/23/00 10:26 pm Manifacae wrote:
[Was Re: Re: Re: Re: I was doing that and....]
( HEY! THERE'S A TOPIC FOR YOU! WHY DOES EVERYONE LOVE
SWORDS/SORCERY MUDS?)
(SERIOUSLY THOUGH! WHY DON'T WE SEE MORE CYBERPUNK OR
VAMPIRESQUE MUDS AND STUFF LIKE THAT? )

They're out there, but as to why most folks enjoy Fantasy...

I don't have any good answers, but I'll run some searches through kanga.nu and see if I can't find anything.

Off the top of my head, it probably has to do with the Mythos explanations of human psychology - something along the lines of that we harken back to the days of old, and the tales that help shape our cultures stick with us. In five-hundred years these stories might be about our culture today, and there will be wild stories that mothers will tell their kids which tell moral stories that stick with them. Their holodecks will be the 1980's and they will all pretend to be punks with spiked hair battling it out with ancient anime creatures listening to Europe and U2 (in a futuristic and strange way of course). Sounds neat anyways :).

I thought maybe it was simply because of D&D establishing the genre, but even that's not right. Robert Howard was writing Conan & Krull stories in the 1930's and he wasn't the only delving into fantasy, just one of the more famous since they made a couple movies about it fifty years later.

Love to read some more thoughts on it, interresting topic :).

- gabriel

On 3/23/00 10:53 pm Gabriel wrote:
wow, someone went through last years posts and pulled this up?