Elf edition.
Since a bunch of the old threads were basically nuked with the server transfer, I wanted to revive some of them.
General discussion of the fantasy genre.
>>44961>>Longer lifespan and slower growth/aging means higher XP thresholdsThis is the solution i've seen most often. It looks to be the best fit from a flavor and game mechanic standpoint, but on the face of it raising XP caps seems like bad game design.
The approach you can kind of extrapolate from Elder Scrolls is stacking minor elemental weaknesses until damage taken from most enemies seems to be fair in relation to offensive strength and human attributes. This approach definitely enriches character building, yet might not even the scales enough or be hard to justify lorewise.
Other tweaks might include having humans be more favored by gods (if they're a part of gameplay) or charismatic to members of certain races, locking in races for certain class/alignment combinations or giving a race more difficult sustenance requirements (see zangband's vampires, ghouls and golems).
>>44107>Wouldn't that just be the tallest ones or do you mean proportional to their bodies?The latter.
The thicker the shelf, the hotter the elf.
>>44961>How would you balance elves being immortal (or just very long-lived) in a game system where characters level up or get more skilled over time?What kind of game are you talking about? Like Elder Scrolls? What does living long matter? Not that many ingame years pass right? If you mean in a game that takes place over generations, like Chivalry, I'd just have it that the elves are just a lot less fecund. So you're stronger/more skilled, but losing characters hurts more.
In like an Elder Scrolls game I'd just balance the races by giving them various strengths and weaknesses on the stats like most games do.
>>45132Well if you have a video game where lifespan isn't going to come into play it'd really just be an immersion thing - why would the elves who are 400 years old not be vastly more skilled than the humans who are 30? But in a context where lifespan does come into play, either a video game or a tabletop game that takes place over decades, any characters with a longer lifespan would gain an innate advantage from being able to stick around longer and keep gaining XP. I guess you could make the shorter lived races tougher, but it'd be a little weird for that to be a standard difference between them.
>If you mean in a game that takes place over generations, like Chivalry, I'd just have it that the elves are just a lot less fecund. So you're stronger/more skilled, but losing characters hurts more.This is a good answer for games where you're managing large numbers of people as opposed to individual characters. Shorter lived races tend also to have flavor that gives them higher fertility, like humans or goblins typically breeding more than the typical dwarf or halfling.
Are D&D retroclones reactionary?
>>45131>The silly thing about Orc Discourse is there's usually always some other monster that just takes the place the orcs used to have, like gnolls, hobgoblins, orgres, etc.Just like burgereich "whiteness" discourse. I used to think Latinos were next up to become white, but now I believe it's Indians.
>>45131That's the weird thing, isn't it? The orc discourse is specifically about orcs. If I made a fantasy setting and described trolls as a race of savage monsters that live in caves and beneath the earth who come out to raid and terrorize the countryside, or described the beastmen as a race of twisted mortals who functioned as mortal demons, hating the sunlight and all that is good and grows upon the earth and plotting the destruction of all creation, no one would care. They're just fantasy monsters to act as baddies in your campaigns.
The discourse is about orcs ''specifically."
>>45137I dunno, I've seen discussions about it on tumblr where the issue is with the fact that there's an evil race that it's deemed morally good to destroy, and orcs just happen to fill that spot most of the time because of Tolkien.
Though I wonder if that's even true in lotr. Like it's presented as pretty uncomplicated because of the circumstances, but then there's the episode where sam and frodo infiltrate Mordor and there's a conversation between a couple of orks about maybe just bugging out and setting up somewhere else out of sauron's control. So like, in that respect orcs aren't all unthinking slaves, and if that's the case then in the logic of lotr there's capacity for good orcs.
>>45138I think they might dislike that broader idea, but I think it's specifically the orcs that trigger it. I think it may be because orcs are distinctively more human in appearance than other monstrous races.
For instance, I haven't heard anyone complain about the portrayal of the Garthim in the Dark Crystal because they're weird evil insect crabs. As another example, gnolls often fill a very similar roll to orcs in the fantasy settings where they appear, but don't seem to trigger the same conversations because they're weird hyena monsters.
>>45135>Are D&D retroclones reactionary?lol
No they are just updating an old ruleset to be more accessible with better formatting and such.
>>45137>>45138Orc discourse is
usually about orcs and only orcs, but
sometimes it broadens to the more general concept of evil or monstrous races. You even sometimes have people making arguments about how certain creatures being framed as "monsters" instead of just another species (especially intelligent monsters that aren't "races" like beholders) is weird and gross. Which has a point, since the games and other media usually treat being an extinction event for the "bad creatures" as a good thing. This is arguably rooted way way deeper in the ideology of fantasy than any particular "bad race."
>>45144Here's the thing, fantasy creatures having wildly different mindsets and motivations to our own is partially what makes them feel like a fantasy creature. This goes all the way back to ancient mythology and folklore where fey creatures would have significantly different mindsets, motivations and a sense of morality to humans. For example,t hey typically show little or no value for mortal life, but will treat games and riddles like the most sacred of laws.
If you don't have this, fantasy creatures start all feeling like variant humans.
>>45146That's true but if anything it's a testament to how boring an "evil race" or "evil culture" almost always is. Even if you make your orcs Yakubian monstrosities that only know evil, it's way more interesting to actually explore that dynamic and its pragmatic implications than to just have them be fodder for your sword and board heroes. It's also robbing the story of a lot of powerful emotions and themes if you simply reduce the enemy to acceptable and disposable targets when the characters might have mixed feelings or at least more interesting motivations for why they fight these enemies.
There's also a vast and wide open space you can explore in the realm of "their psychology is different from humans." Star Trek did this significantly better despite usually still being unrealistically reductive and silly (which is more an issue of doing alien-of-the-week instead of spending more time developing the worldbuilding).
>>45150>the Undead had taken up the mantle of very evil baddies that the orcs dropped.And they do far better job at it too. Orcs lack the cool factor as villains, they are just violent "ooga booga Grog smash" cavemen.
Concerning the shifting fantasy attitude towards orcs, I think its because even when they are supposed to be unambiguous bad guys, they get depicted as evil people, with culture and individuality, rather than evil monsters. Even back in the begining, Tolkien noticed the moral dilemma implied in that.
>>45166Yeah it's another casualty of covid. The puppets required the puppeteers to be in very close quarters that would violate regulations (most puppets required more than one operator). It's a shame. It was extremely impressive from a technical perspective and the puppets manage to feel like characters and carry a show without regular human actors. They only used a marginal amount of CGI to make minor tweaks to the faces and lip sync IIRC. Other than stuff like backgrounds and erasing puppeteers of course. It really helped sell the idea of an very different/alien world.
It was also pretty on the nose about class struggle. Unlike most fantasy where the status quo is good, it's explicitly a system of domination and exploitation. This is more clear than in the original movie - the show depicts and discusses the Skeksis appropriating surplus, which is identified in-universe as an injustice and explained to be the material basis of the class society. IIRC that's just the first episode. It's a feudal system not a capitalist one of course, so it's not
that radical, but class struggle is still fundamentally the driving conflict of the show.
>Clap! Snap! the black crack!
>Grip, grab! Pinch, nab!
>And down down to Goblin-town
>You go, my lad!
>Clash, crash! Crush, smash!
>Hammer and tongs! Knocker and gongs!
>Pound, pound, far underground!
>Ho, ho! my lad!
>Swish, smack! Whip crack!
>Batter and beat! Yammer and bleat!
>Work, work! Nor dare to shirk,
>While Goblins quaff, and Goblins laugh,
>Round and round far underground
>Below, my lad!
>Fifteen birds in five fir-trees,
>their feathers were fanned in a fiery breeze!
>But, funny little birds, they had no wings!
>O what shall we do with the funny little things?
>Roast 'em alive, or stew them in a pot;
>fry them, boil them and eat them hot?
>Burn, burn tree and fern!
>Shrivel and scorch! A fizzling torch
>To light the night for our delight,
>Ya hey!
>Bake and toast 'em, fry and roast ’em
>till beards blaze, and eyes glaze;
>till hair smells and skins crack,
>fat melts, and bones black
>in cinders lie
>beneath the sky!
>So dwarves shall die,
>and light the night for our delight,
>Ya hey!
>Ya-harri-hey!
>Ya hoy!
.
>>45390Hard magic is okay in an RPG context where you need well defined rules and numbers to make the game work, but it typically feels too rationalist in a fantasy narrative. I think magic is supposed to be somewhat mysterious.
This is one of my problem with the new Warcraft lore. Originally, the various forms of magic were mysterious and generally unrelated to each other. Then they retconned and reworked it into this stupid hard magic system (pic related.)
This is just one of many things that has ruined the setting, but this was not a fucking improvement.
>>45390Actually, Tolkien had a magic system in mind and concrete ideas about how various magical things worked, he just kept it deliberately vague in his published books and tended to go over them mostly in letters and notes. For instance, he says in a letter that each mortal life has a certain lifespan allotted to it, and magical life extension worked by stretching that lifespan out, and as a consequence it sort of gets thinner and, well, stretched out. In the book, Tolkien only vaguely alludes to this, like when Bilbo reaches the great age of 111, and yet doesn't seem to have aged at all, and later remarks to Gandalf "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."
In addition to this, there's also the fact that most "hard" magic systems kind of operate like an alternative version of physics, while Tolkien's magic system wasn't anything of the sort and seem to be based on Neoplatonism like a lot of the rest of the book. Like in one part of the book, the Hobbits mention that the elves have magic like Sauron does, causing Galadriel to be somewhat taken aback that they think that the power of the elves and the power of Sauron are the same, but concedes that to those unfamiliar with these things, it would all seem to all just fall under the umbrella of "magic." In a letter, Tolkien explains that the power of the elves comes from the ideal of beauty, while the power of Sauron come from the ideal of control and is related to a type of evil he calls "The Machine." Which is all very different from most other magic systems which, like I said before, tend to be more like an alternative form of physics, while his magic is essentially emanations of Platonic ideals, made all the more obtuse that he deliberately keeps it all vague and mysterious in the books themselves.
Recently I watched two low budget 90s LOTR TV adaptations, one Finish, Hobitit (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHFKdgjEugs), which presents the story almost entirely from the perspective of Frodo, and the Russian Khraniteli, which adapts only the first book. Neither in a language I understand. They are both basically theater productions, with Hobitit being a more competent one, doing the best it can with its non-existent budget (although they could picked shorter actors for hobbits so that Frodo isnt taller than Aragorn). That also makes it a less interesting one, just not much going on. The only notable thing which made me laugh is when Gollum showed up, because he is literally just a naked fat bald guy, acting like he is tweeking on meth. Also Aragorn's wig makes him look like he is in 80s hair metal band. And Boromir has sort of punk look going on, dressed in black, shaved sides of head with a tattoo on one side. The actors should have been switched, Boromir has much more serious, royal aura to him.
Khraniteli on the other hand has a lot going in it. It is like a 2 hour long LOTR shitpost. Has weirdly psychadelic quality to it. "Effects" and costumes are laughable, greenscreen (or whatever the Russian 1991 version of it is) is abused even when there is absolutely no need for it, performances, I dont even know how to describe them, funky electronic music used as a Nazgul theme, just everything.
>>45649That blog made me check out Rings of Power S2, and it officially crossed into so bad its good territory, if only it was a feature film length and not 8 hour long season. It is so blatant that whatever the declared budget is is fake for the purpose of tax evasion, writers not giving a fuck, editors not giving a fuck, special effects artists not being given enough time to polish the turd, awkward performances, the scenes arent even lit properly, what a disaster.
>>45656Just to demonstrate how either insanely lazy, or more likely rushed and assembly line the show must have been shot, at the end of penultimate episode one of the main characters gets killed, and in the next episode he is back like nothing happened, not with any in-universe explanation or anything like that, the show just has such a poor continuity. My guess is that the script called for scene where the villain meets a hero on the battlefield, and defeats him. But when they shot that scene, I guess the director literally did not read the rest of the script, that this character in fact should not die here, and interpreted "defeat" as "murder". So you see a guy get repeatedly skewered in the chest, and then the next episode he is just fine. He is not wounded, nothing like that, the previous scene with him was simply forgotten about.
>>45674Indeed it's not medieval. Taking literally not even ASOIAF or The Witcher are medieval because the societies they represent are only aesthetically and superficially influenced by Europe: there's no confluence of Germanic migrations interacting with an old Roman power to create something new.
Someone probably studied this but it's a 'medieval' aesthetic made true by an stereotyped view of the Middle Ages that seeped into entertainment media.
>>45661Does that orc's armor have spines inlaid in it?
What a bizarre detail. Orc armor was chaotic in the Jackson movies, but it was all functional armor.
>>46240Nobody said he invented fantasy, just that he influenced the whole genre.
>>46241The fixation on distinct fantasy races with their own cultures and languages was original to Tolkien. Elves and dwarves exist in earlier myth and fantasy but Tolkien was the one who spelled them with the v instead of the f and almost all contemporary elves and dwarves take more after Tolkien's races than mythical/fairytale creatures.
>>46245>Nobody said he invented fantasy, just that he influenced the whole genre.But he really didn't. In what way?
>The fixation on distinct fantasy races with their own cultures and languages was original to Tolkien. No it's fucking not. Of course every fantasy race has their own culture in every fantasy work. Look at the OZ series. Look at the books they say
<Tolkien stated in a letter to the novelist Naomi Mitchison that his orcs had been influenced by George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin.[T 1] He explained that his word "orc" was "derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability",[T 1][17] and I'd say what was maybe new for him was he shifted the focus away from the traditional fantasy adventure format, where the hero, goes on journey, meets this strange creature, this magical character, etc. etc.(which The Hobbit fits more into that mold) and shifted the focus onto a large scale war. Like everyone says about the obvious WW2 allegory of LOTR.
>Elves and dwarves exist in earlier myth and fantasy but Tolkien was the one who spelled them with the v instead of the f and almost all contemporary elves and dwarves take more after Tolkien's races than mythical/fairytale creatures.<Minor spelling changeI wouldn't say that at all. His dwarves and orcs fit neatly with all previous portrayals and descriptions for the most part. And once again how silly it is to try and claim he has the trademark for what he tweaked from popular folklore and mythology.
And top of all that, not all fantasies are Tolkien inspired. There's a lot of fantasy out there. I won't repeat myself again but I hate this shallow media literacy that leads people to make grand sweeping statements about a genre they really know nothing about. Yeah it seems that way to you that the Beatles or Tolkien were completely original artists and all artists after them are copycats of them specifically, but if you had some media literacy you'd understand what work came out before them and at the same time as them, they were inspired by their peers, people today maybe more inspired by one of their contemporaries than them, but their work may share similarities with that other artist they weren't inspired by. To make these broad sweeping statements about the course of an artistic genre, you'd need to have like encyclopedic historian knowledge of literally everything that was coming out then, being written about, being talked about, etc. and even then, you can't really know what was the situation then just from whatever surviving documentation is around.
>>46254It's more like Del Ray's formula was an impression of Tolkien rather than being based on any kind of genuine understanding of Tolkien, which causes Del Ray "Tolkienesque" literature to actually differ significantly from Tolkien's actual works while maintaining surface-level similarities.
Which is important, since many critiques of Tolkien aren't actually critiques of Tolkien at all, but of the Del Ray formula. "Epic Pooh," for instance, is pretty much just a critique of the Del Ray formula, but is so inaccurate as a critique of Tolkien it makes you wonder if Moorcock actually read any of Tolkien's works.
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