View Single Post
Old 11-22-2010, 07:35 PM   #16
silvarilon
Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Posts: 144
silvarilon is on a distinguished road
Re: The Art of Seach - Categorization of MU*s

Ah, that makes sense. The actual LotR story, with minimal magic (that just happened to follow the stories of two of the four individuals that did wield magic) is a low-magic setting.

So a game with fireballs and chain lightning set in middle earth is soft. But a game with hobbits living in an agricultural community, and haggling over the price of carrots, or visiting the nearby human town to get drunk on half a mug of ale, is hard fantasy.

The existence of hobbits is fine for hard fantasy? Because they are essentially short humans? Elves? What about the more fantastic creatures, such as trolls that turn to stone in daylight?

In an earlier discussion you were talking about hard fantasy as a setting where things follow on sensibly from each other, regardless of the amount of magic available. So a world where everyone can teleport would likely not have a mail service or trained horses.

If we're defining based on the amount of magic, then instead of hard/medium/soft fantasy, maybe that should just be another axis. Level of magic: none, minimal, some, lots, extreme.

I'm happy to be categorized as anything, but I'm not sure I understand your logic here. If I self-categorize as hard fantasy, and take player complaints about inaccuracies seriously - why wouldn't I use the "hard fantasy" category? Unless a third party is checking the listings, why would I intentionally put my game in the "medium" category, if I believe it should be in the "hard" category?

Mmmm, adding subgenre probably helps with the hard vs soft fantasy/historical discussion.
If my subgenre is "medieval" and I say hard historical rigor then that probably implies that I'm talking about real cities and people, real technology, etc.
If my subgenre is "medieval fantasy" and I say hard historical rigor, I can't possibly be talking about real cities and people - otherwise it wouldn't be "fantasy" - so I'm probably talking about real technology, realistic items, appropriate time period for the items (no guns, steampunk etc.) - but maybe there are elves and trolls. And wizards with magic.

Then I could say my subgenre is "Round Table" and I have a high historical accuracy. Which would allow me to have knights (even though the legend predates stirrups...) and magic (due to Merlin and Morgana) and Fae creatures, but not orcs and elves.

While "Round Table" with low historical accuracy would allow the players to be wizards and warlocks, and to fight dragons and ettins and other D&D monsters.


Valid. But that effectively just reduces the "range" from all non-real-world games to be binary low vs medium.
Or forces us to create new categories.

Yeah, I'm of the opinion that - as long as there is a seperate variable for it - perma death shouldn't impact scientific rigor.

If I want a scientifically rigorous game, I can search for high rigor AND no perma death. If I see a game with high scientific rigor and perma death, well, I know what I'm getting into when I visit the game. So there's still no confusion.
silvarilon is offline   Reply With Quote