When you're running a game, or even just involved with any piece of fiction...

The only real limit for me is when it becomes boring or difficult to actually role-play the characters as real people.

D&D players are already used to this, but to me the whole point of the exercise is gone when you don't have to act human any more and can just solve every problem because you have epic magic or can take 10 arrows to the face and still beat a guy to death with his own leg.

I like low-magic, gritty high fantasy.

I'm not a big fan of final fantasy/wow high fantasy where everything is overblown and crazy fantastic, because it's impossible to relate to any more, and it almost never bothers following it's own internal logic so the feeling you get is just "why the fuck bother? Just give me a sword the size of a surfboard and lets get this over with so I can get back to my books."

When it starts to turn into DBZ

>low-magic
>high fantasy

When Dragons show up more than once in a campaign.

Or when wizards and magic are so common magic item shops exist.

Fucking this

Warcraft is a good example for me, fucking half the population can shoot lightning or fire. Anything where a large % of the population has access to lots of magic. That or when time travel starts getting heavily involved

Well, it's possible and has been done. Just have your average high fantasy world experience death/weakening of magic. Then you have high fantasy with low magic.

Im with this guy. When most problems can be solved with magic, thats too fantasy for me. I like problems to be as difficult as they are in real life; magic is only there to help menial tasks like light bonfires and make 3 gallons of water only for drinking.

>That weird thing where all the races not based on Tolkien are still called the "Tolkienic races" just because he was a bestselling fantasy author.

Are you trying to imply that Tolkien didn't invent orcs, elves (in their modern form that you see in generic fantasy) and hobbithalfings?

You definitely got hobbithalflings, but elves (in their modern form that you see in generic fantasy) come 99% from Poul Anderson, and have almost no resemblance to Tolkien elves.

>Disdain for plebs

High fantasy is a genre that has nothing to do with how shiny and spectacular the setting is.

Game of thrones is High fantasy. Lord of the rings is high fantasy. The Two of Swords or Savages are high fantasy, despite having 0 magic whatsoever.

High fantasy is just fantasy in a setting that's not earth or reached from earth, which disqualifies harry potter, narnia or dresden files, which are all low fantasy.

It's only illiterate Veeky Forums plebs who think that high fantasy means shiny and magical and low fantasy means gritty and edgy.

Low fantasy can be jam-packed with magic and dark as fuck, or barely have any magic and be cheery as a bunch of unicorns farting rainbows.

High fantasy can be so gritty that it's grit has grit of it's own, and still be high fantasy, or be supermagical all the time.

High fantasy is not the opposite of gritty fantasy, High fantasy is the opposite of fantasy that's set on earth.

It's not an uncommon mistake, but you're not less wrong just because you share your errors with more people.

0/10

I think they mean "low magic" rather than low fantasy.

What's wrong with the Fey Wilds?

If anything I feel like fantasy could be more fey-like, whimsical and enchanting instead of always trying to be as edgy, realistic and grimdark as possible.

Lorwyn was my favourite MTG setting for this reason.

They're both pretty clearly perplexed by the concept of high fantasy with low magic.

Didn't you get the memo user?
If something is nebulous, whimsical or otherwise not clearly defined it's dangerously close to freeforming or narrativism, and we don't take kindly to people who don't treat role-playing games like world of warcraft without graphics around here.

Laughincostanza.jpeg

>"Tolkien had them taller, more intelligent, more beautiful, and older than humans; in fact, he made them quite similar to the fair-folk, the fairies. The elves of the AD&D game system borrow two names (gray and wood) from the Professor's writings, and that is nearly all. They are shorter than humans, and not generally as powerful." (Gygax 1985)

Sadly I have the memo right here on my desk.

Veeky Forums is way too hung up on shit like 3.5 casters vs martials and other such nonsense that sometimes I feel like I'm reading the WoW forums with the amount of bitching about class balance.

Laughincostanza2electricboogaloo.jpeg

Gygax always dismisses how much he took from tolkiens work, he might as well scribble ORGINUL CHARATURS DONT STEAL in crayon on the bottom of every thing he writes.

That's weird, because he was very active at admitting what he DID take from. He straight up says that he took things like Treants and Halflings from Tolkien, but then goes on to say that his elves are taken from other works. All the evidence supports this too as the elves bare little resemblance to the aryan Mary Sue's of a mediocre author.

The more logical conclusion is that Tolkien cultists just see him everywhere, especially where he is not.

>he doesnt know Game of Thrones takes place on Earth

But where did orcs come from if not Tolkien?

take out your nearest dnd players guide and flip to the elves / eladrin pages, all the art work will feature elves as wood elves like figures and eladrin as your more typical high elf.

Physical description of an eladrin

Eladrin are of human height. They are slim, and even
the strongest simply look athletic rather than musclebound.
They have the same range of complexions as
humans, though they are more often fair than dark.
Their straight, fine hair is often white, silver, or pale
gold, and they wear it long and loose. Their ears are
long and pointed, and their eyes are pearly and opalescent
orbs of vibrant blue, violet, or green, lacking
pupils. Eladrin can’t grow facial hair and have little
body hair.
Eladrin children grow much as human children
do, but their aging process slows to a crawl when they
reach maturity. They enjoy youth and health for most
of their lives and don’t begin to feel the effects of age
until the middle of their third century. Most live for
over 300 years, and even at the end they suffer few of
the infirmities of old age.

that sounds pretty tolkienish to me, well except for the eyes.

>mediocre author

It's obvious that you're the troll here user.

How to tell this post is bait
> Uses the term mary sue
> Describes Tolkien as mediocre

Nice bait

Well memed, sir.

>Aryan Mary Sue
You haven't read Tolkien. I don't even need you to tell me anything, you haven't ever opened one of Tolkien's book in your life and talk shit about him solely because you're obsessed with Anderson and insist that things that are straight Tolkien rip-offs are from Anderson even if they didn't appear on his work at all

>correct usage of Mary Sue
You're doing it wrong, Mary Sue is supposed to be whatever you don't like.

Since I'm sure you have actually read Tolkien and aren't a butthurt memeposter, please describe what parts of Tolkien's elves strike you as Mary Sue

>springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm
Just for fun, I plugged in Feanor, his score is ri-fucking-diculously high.

Feanor and his sons caused most of the problems in the First Age. If he had handed the silmarils back, or not made them at all, or listened to the Valar who literally told him he had no chance of ever defeating Morgoth even if he was three times more powerful, the Two Trees would have been brought back to life and everything would have been bubbles and sunshine

Instead he got the Kinslaying, the Wars of Beleriand, got Quenya outlawed on Middle-Earth and all of his descendants systematically humiliated as per the Doom of Mandos, and indirectly caused MOST OF THE MAJOR CONFLICTS ON HISTORY because he couldn't be bothered to hand his shiny rocks to the Valar

He's also the only one of the Noldor who wasn't ever forgiven for the Kinslaying, and won't be until the literal end of the world

>being this antisocial
you don't have a very good social knack. tolkien inventing fantasy is an in-joke for Veeky Forums like coasters. if you try and point out the obvious things that everyone already knows, you'll get samefagged into oblivion for not having a clue.

Let's not forget that when all the other Elves (who by themselves also would score high on that stupid mary sue test) died that he fought a company of Balrog's and orcs all by himself, and needed the Lord Balrog to actually slay him. Who even then couldn't kill him outright, he had to be saved by his sons so that they could mourn his heroism and being special among special people.

>He's also the only one of the Noldor who wasn't ever forgiven for the Kinslaying
More things to make him special.

He was mortally wounded on that battle. I don't see your point.

Hurin and Turin pull off similar shit and they'e Men. Turin will even kill Morgoth at the end of the world. Will you also tell me that they're also Mary Sues due to being very strong despite being Morgoth's playthings?

>When things have no feel of volume and work on exaggerated cartoon physics, like a steampunk car that folds into a little cube.
>When the magic and fantasy is just a way to copy the modern world: magic TV, internet, smartphones...
>If everything is that annoying superficial brand of cooky-crazy, look at me I'm a whimsy fey, I wanna be in a burton movie. When you absolutely have to be tricked in triplicate by story and GM mandate because the faery-courts mere existence demands it.
>when stuff only moves because of pure plot and stuff just pops into existence frequently

Why is Malazan so praised even of Veeky Forums when it's so over the top high fantasy?

Dying tragically from a ridiculously strong enemy just to have everyone miss and mourn you is a textbook mary stu-ism.

They even recover him so his beautiful corpse can be preserved.

No, his sons rescued him from the battle WHILE HE WAS STILL ALIVE. He didn't manage to do squat to the balrogs and died shortly after. And nobody fucking mourned Feanor, half of Middle-Earth hated his guts at that point.

You're thinking of Fingolfin's corpse being recovered by one of the Eagles, and that was after Morgoth BTFO him, tore him to pieces and threw him to the wolves

Also: Do you think mythological heroes like Achilles were Mary Sues?

Come to think of it, Feanor didn't even have any corpse to recover. He just turned to ash.

Fingolfin was pretty based tho imo

When simple problems have ridiculous solutions. If I reach a point where the Wizard has enchanted cups of tea that pour themselves and tip themselves down his throat, or the Fighter has to kill a Goblin by raising his sword to the sky, lightning striking it and then he cuts the goblin in two, that's when I'm out.

When "because I can" overrides "Why should I do this?" in regards to the fantastical elements and feats characters can perform.

Something I liked when I read that scene was that the battering ram that was used in the siege of Minas Tirith was named after Morgoth's mace

This is about where I hop off.

Before I ever heard the phrase "Monty Haul", I ran my first long term DnD3 campaign... it was great fun up til level 15 or so, and then one of the players found the "wealth by level" chart.

They felt like they were missing out on a whole part of the game, so I started dropping tons of loot and made magical items much easier to buy in major cities.

Soon every character had one or more of these abilities--
>at least one ability over 22
>could fly/teleport/polymorph etc at will
>throw blaster magic around
>fire off arrows like a machine gun
>didn't have to eat, breathe, sleep, or otherwise attend to normal human functions

We had fun with it for a while (I remember they got a folding boat, and before ever using it as a boat, they tossed it off a battlement and unfolded it just to smash a few orcs), but it got bizarre enough that it made Star Trek technobabble feel grounded by comparison.

I thought it actually was Morgoth's mace.

I agree, or when there are so many different civilized factions living on the same planet that you can't even keep track of them anymore, like in Warcraft. How many different stupid species are there in WoW?

That's even better actually

Sadly, I just looked it up and it's not the actual mace, just named for it.