High Fantasy

Ominous

@Wizz
Yeah, he swings from "artistic, philosophical sort" to "misanthropic, badwrongfun neckbeard" pretty quickly.

Runescryer

@Runescryer said in High Fantasy:

@Ominous The big advantage to WoT is the same advantage of LotR: a wonderfully detailed and awesome world to play in.

The big downside to WoT is the same downside to LotR: All that detailed world-building was done to cater to a small group of characters who pretty much do every awesome thing possible, so there's nothing really for the players to do that could recapture that epic tale feeling you had when reading the series.

The only real option is to create an alt-universe, IMO

There are ways - and there have been games which took advantage of them - to get around the issue. The easy way is to set it in a different era; go back fifty years and go at it. Unless you want Tarmon Gaidon to happen within the MU*'s timeline you don't even have to worry about the prophecies, since they will eventually come true anyway, or you can have them be about something else.

On A Moment in Tyme we did something similar at some point - we thought plot was getting a bit stale so we created a What If? alternate timeline where Lews Therin Telamon wrestled control and took over Rand's mind at an early point, which basically meant we tossed the events in the books out and just did our own thing. @Seraphim73 might be better able to tell if that was successful or not since my perspective was from driving this, but I recall people having fun.

IMHO any game based on original material needs to unshackle itself from the exact events and characters as soon as possible. The focus needs to be on the PCs, not what the canonical protagonists are going to do; they can still be used for the cool factor now and then ("OMG I'M IN A ROOM WITH LUKE SKYWALKER OMG") but if it's overdone then that, too, becomes trite and loses its coolness factor.

As for WoT, it has a great magic system where both male and female characters have super amazing yet different things they can do, a complex and detailed magic system, built-in politics and a bunch of interesting NPC enemies you can have to spice things up with some paranoia as well as brute force.

For the most part, I agree with you on all that. However, in my experience, there's a good chunk of players, possibly even a majority of players, in RPG's who want to be the stars of the show, and if there's a more powerful/famous/better NPC, there will be complains as to why they can't be as powerful as or do the same things as Luke Skywalker/Superman/Rand al'Thor/whoever, even if it's an alternate timeline/universe game. And that's where the 'no' line has to start being used and some players start to toss complaints about Staff being a bunch of tyrannical Nazis engaging in favoritism, probably because they're TSing with a character who is tangentially related to the issue at hand.

To summarize the summary: people are a problem

Arkandel

@Runescryer Staff are the problem in the situations you describe. People are the symptom.

Thenomain

@Arkandel said in High Fantasy:

@Runescryer Staff are the problem in the situations you describe. People are the symptom.

You say that like staff aren't people, staffer.

Arkandel

@Thenomain It sounded catchier than players.

(You'll say staff are players also, pfft)

Seraphim73

@Arkandel Elseworlds games can be fun. But you have to be very, very careful with how far elseworlds you go, or else you can't describe the game to new players easily any more. Recently, I've run into this with Star Wars games: "Well, we started playing during the Clone Wars, but some different things happen, and now the Jedi are still around, but a bunch of them died, but some of them joined the Empire... and anyhow, we're now three years into the Dark Times, but nothing is particularly recognizable," but I think it actually started back on A Moment in Tyme, which is what @Arkandel is describing. I had fun, but I mostly ignored whatever Rand was doing as far as I could and just caused trouble with my Children of the Light.

Now, of course any game that uses an existing story as its setting has this problem, but there are some where the actions of canon characters can send things really awry really fast. I would actually prefer that a game not unshackle itself too far from established canon. Change the details, sure, but keep the general story the same, so that new players have familiar landmarks to orient themselves on.

Arkandel

@Seraphim73 What I like about elseworlds is that while you can change the cast you are still keeping the rules.

It basically depends of course on the reasons you picked whatever setting for in the first place but IMHO if it was for the cast of characters itself then probably it wasn't a great pick for a MU*.

But if it's to keep WoT's channeling system, Sanderson's : Allomancy/Feruchemy/Hemalurgy, maybe Butcher's Dresdenverse creature types... then you can definitely get away with a whole lot and still get a treasure chest full of toys to play with.

Tennyson

@Wavert I'd love to get my hands on the Beleriand code and reopen it. The game had some awesome descs done up. Sadly the site is down. Not that it had been active in years.

Wavert

@Tennyson

Fuuuck, that's a tragedy.