Is it low fantasy when a Hero can be overwhelmed by 10 mercenaries?

now thats just the DM setting up the Dragon

I guess Gundam is low fantasy.

It is hero and mercs of comparable levels.

Not necessarily, OP. Being a protagonist in a High Fantasy setting doesn't assure being especially powerful, or always encountering enemies that are always weak enough to fight. Those ten mercenaries can be the cream of the crop as far as the setting is concerned, or they can catch the hero when he's wounded (or sick, or drugged, or exhausted, or demoralized).

High Fantasy does not always mean Easy Mode; sometimes the opposite can be true, even in comparison to Low Fantasy.

Only if it happens in the real world.

Crossbows and bows guns sometimes too are a thing in low fantasy, not just clubs n melee-stuff.
i think you knew that but used the wrong word, happens. Dont want to argue, just to clarify

Eh, I don't think so. That's just a Hero sucking at his job. A hero is supposed to be someone who can change the world, be it based on cunning and tactics or sheer skill at fighting.

If he allows himself to be killed by 10 mercenaries, he wasn't cunning at all. If he loses in a fight against 10 mercenaries, he wasn't really a good warrior.
And no, it isn't all that unrealistic for a exceptionally good soldier to be worth more than dozens of common ones.

See: The Viking at Stamford Bridge, Tsuitsui Jomyo Meishu, Jack Churchill, Alvin York

"Low Fantasy" just means it takes place on Earth.

>If he loses in a fight against 10 mercenaries, he wasn't really a good warrior.

I for one am outraged beyond sanity when my favorite fictional characters are slain by no less than twenty five of the realms finest bladesmen, and even then he shall be revived by the caress of the sweetest maiden in all the land.

no your right I should have clarified as more physical stuff rather then melee. Things like fire pots and scalding oil too.

depends on the hero.

Trips are right. Everything else is meaningless.

...

Exactly. I mean, if the one who's supposed to be saving the world and whatnot can easily be defeated by a squad of footmen, why don't you just send your armies and crush the ultimate evil with your "superior numbers" and whatnot?
It makes absolutely no sense.

Also the hero must be a half dragon half asimaar half fiend half werewolf and have a +9001 Vampire Katana of Diagonal Slashing and when he whirlwind jutsu decapitates all the guard he turns slowly and his trenchcoat flutters in the wind and he give a wicked smirk as he tips his trademark meme trillby.

So you mean that someone being able to dispatch a squad of soldiers is inherently edgy mary sue teenage OC level?
Last time I checked, the last wildly popular "low fantasy" setting had shit like this all over the place. I mean, sure GoT is edgy because GRR is like an emo kid, but I don't see people bashing it for having "OP" fighters.

3pbp

>Alvin York
To be fair, I'm pretty sure no one told York he was in a high realism/simulationist game,so he went at it like Wolfenstein.

Depends how awesome the mercenaries are

Literally has nothing to do with high or low fantasy whatsoever.

Some high fantasy has the world based on Earthly limits of physics, and the tales are told by characters not capable of crazy shit but exploring the strange and magical world. Some low fantasy has no limit to what a character can do, and they can fight off alien demons from the voids of space with luck and testosterone.

Not really, most of modern fantasy settings are low fantasy. Practically in high fantasy setting heroes could be outnumbered, defeated and killed but they either avoid this situation and escape, big good guy shows up and scares away enemies or they end up captured and transported to BBEG realm or smaller bad guy working under him for plot development.

Mid-low. LOTR level, really.

Real low fantasy has the character die before the game even starts

And then Yazan gets btfo by a couple dumbass kids in the first few episodes of ZZ.

Are action movies low fantasy? 80's action heroes can take out small armies on their own, and most of them are on present day (past now) Earth.

Are you mentally retarded? Have you lost the ability to communicate in anything except memes and hyperbole?

There are dozens, even hundreds of examples of 'good' (Or at least, generally well-liked) fantasy settings where it is not only possible and conceivable, but has actually been the case that lone warriors have defeated overwhelming odds.

Tolkien did it. Hell, the Epic of fucking Gilgamesh did it. Are you seriously going to tell me that the worth of all literature involving this theme has been devalued by a jumble of buzzwords and nonsensical bullshit spawned from modern pop culture?

I once saw a movie were an old soldier killed like 50 dudes with one of those contraptions that throws metal pencils real real fast.

He had training though, years earlier some cop tortured him and he went into the bushes and fought them in a tunnel made of stone

So kinda like Russia using human wave tactics in WW2?

Doesn't High Fantasy mean just a lot of magic/space tech?

Oxygen deprivation mang.

High Fantasy means happens on an imagined world rather than Earth.

>Not winning 300 v 143000
>Or 3000 v 30000
>""realism""

It's high magic

But Dorf Fort is called low fantasy and it isn't on Earth.

Yes, in high fantasy hero gets overwhelmed by 10 housecats.

>But Dorf Fort is called low fantasy

Incorrectly.

Mid Fantasy, then?

You said it yourself.
>it isn't on Earth.

High Fantasy.

So it's impossible to set a low fantasy on another world?

One guy versus 5 people works as well.

20% magic is a fuckton. A world where one in five people is magically capable would be so vastly different from real-world societies as to be practically unrecognizable. I'd say even 1% is borderline high-magic.

According to that guy, no.
But I check the wiki and it seems more about amount of fantastical/nonsense stuff than it being literally Earth.

Yeah.

I meant yes, it's impossible.

>But I check the wiki and it seems more about amount of fantastical/nonsense stuff

That would be a meaningless definition.

It means about how close it is to actual realism.

>hero = good warrior
Not necessarily, user.

This is such a dumb definition, though. It tells you absolutely nothing relevant about the world because you can take literally any setting and just say "oh yeah by the way this takes place in a distant mythical prehistory/post-apocalyptic far future".

Right, literally meaningless.
How close something is to realistic would be a scale, rather than a binary low or high. Then you'd need to quantify just how fantastic a fantasy element is. Do Orcs make a setting high fantasy? Do Wizards?

>It tells you absolutely nothing relevant

It tells you whether it occurs on our world or another one.

>How close something is to realistic would be a scale, rather than a binary low or high. Then you'd need to quantify just how fantastic a fantasy element is. Do Orcs make a setting high fantasy? Do Wizards?

Yes, obviously this isn't a binary distinction. But things like orcs and wizards make a setting MORE high fantasy (or "high magic" if you prefer) than a setting without orcs or wizards. Being on a continuous scale =/= meaningless.

>It tells you whether it occurs on our world or another one.

This is the thing that's actually meaningless. The fact that Middle-earth happens to be the actual real world 10,000 years ago makes absolutely no difference to anything that happens in the setting and is in general completely irrelevant. It's like if you classified settings based on whether the author's last name starts with a vowel: sure, that's a clearly-defined unambiguous binary classification, but it's also completely trivial and doesn't say anything interesting or useful about the setting.

>Being on a continuous scale =/= meaningless.

That's the thing though, it NOT a scale.
It's High Fantasy or Low Fantasy.
It is binary.
So if I have a setting with Orcs and Wizard is it High Fantasy or Low Fantasy to you?

>This is the thing that's actually meaningless.

It is not, you may find it to be of limited utility but it does in fact tell us one thing, which cannot be said for the stupid definition you would have it be.

If something lasts 1 day, is that a long time or a short time?

Remember, "long"/"short" is binary, so clearly there must be one absolute answer to this question or otherwise those terms are meaningless.

By your definition some of the settings considered iconic staples of high fantasy (Middle Earth, Wheel of Time) are low fantasy, while A Song of Ice and Fire is high fantasy. Your definition is shit and does not correlate to the accepted uses of the phrases whatsoever.

How are there people posting in this thread without the ability to read and/or use Wikipedia?

Guess what, people actually concerned with measuring length have come up with scales.
If you were to go and buy a length of rope you wouldn't ask for just long, you would have an exact length in mind.

What is long and what is short varies depending on context. One day is a long time to sit on a toilet, one day is not a long time to travel around the world.
What is High Fantasy and what is Low Fantasy meanwhile only has the context of describing a Fantasy setting.

You definition is still meaningless.

>Your definition is shit

It's correct and actually has a meaning unlike the garbage you're trying to push.
Why should ASoIaF be low fantasy in your definition?
If all we do is base it on the amount of magic shit flying around then are undead, dragons, giants, gods and wizards simply not enough? What if we added Orcs? Would it be High Fantasy then?
What if there were flying boats?
Where's the tipping point?

By definition all of those are high fantasy.

>How are there people posting on the internet without the ability to read and/or use Wikipedia
Fixed

Wikipedia isn't especially clear here. Within the course of a single section, it claims that 1) high fantasy takes place on worlds that aren't earth, and 2) Middle-earth is a classic example of high fantasy. Those cannot both be correct.

Yeah, how long a time period is depends on what you compare it to. Similarly, how high fantasy something is depends on what you compare it to.

>If all we do is base it on the amount of magic shit flying around then are undead, dragons, giants, gods and wizards simply not enough?
Depends on how common/influential these things are. If they're there but rare/inactive like in ASoIaF it's probably low fantasy. Can there be things that are more low fantasy than ASoIaF? Yes, but there aren't too many - that's exactly what I mean by saying that ASoIaF is "low fantasy".

>Where's the tipping point?
There isn't one. When do you have enough grains of sand to make a "pile"? How many seconds, exactly, do you have to have before it's a "long time" to sit on a toilet? It turns out that not every category has firmly-fixed boundaries. Hell, even fantasy as a whole doesn't have clearly-defined boundaries. At some point it just starts blending into a similar genre like sci-fi or horror.

Not using either definition people in this thread are using. WoT is the only one that has commonly-used and powerful magic, while ASoIaF is the only one that doesn't take place on earth.

>Johny set sail from Portsmouth, England, hoping to travel to the new world, but he was ship wrecked along the way and found an Island filled with cannibals!

Low Fantasy.

>On the world of Midterra, in the kingdom Saracast which lies along the northern bank bank of the golden river the good King Gideon reigns

High Fantasy.

The terms came about when most Fantasy was of the first sort. Nowadays most Fantasy is of the second sort because the world has been discovered

>Those cannot both be correct.

Middle-earth is not earth, so it can be.

ASoIaF starts off as low fantasy and gradually becomes more high fantasy as the series progresses is the correct answer.
The setting as a whole is high fantasy but the story itself starts as low fantasy and gradually becomes more high fantasy.
The first book has virtually no fantastic elements aside from dragons in the past and the seasons. The seasons are its "One big conceit" in the first book. Once you get more than one or two big fantastic elements, then it stops being low fantasy.

It's the same general thing as hard sci fi. You're allowed one or two improbable things in hard sci fi and everything else has to be based in current science.

Show me Gondor on a map of Earth. Give me a globe with the Seven Kingdoms

middle earth is set in a mythological version of our ancient past. So is hyperboria.

Though by the 60's, low fantasy was synonymous with sword and sorcery and high fantasy with epic fantasy.
This is why conan gets called an early version of low fantasy and king of elflands daughter and early version of high fantasy.

There are no heroes in low fantasy. It's mercenaries all the way down.

>>Johny set sail from Portsmouth, England, hoping to travel to the new world, but he was ship wrecked along the way and found an Island filled with cannibals!
Literally not even fantasy.

Middle-earth a mythical prehistory of earth. Tolkien directly acknowledges this in his letters, and specifies that the events of LotR happen around 6000 years before the present day. He does remark "Many reviewers seem to assume that Middle-earth is another planet!", but says that while these events must have happened in a very different time he intentionally "kept my feet on my own mother-earth for place".

And no, it's not too rare for the continents of Middle-earth to be shifted around by various dramatic happenings. Gondor doesn't fit on a modern map for the same reason Numenor doesn't fit on a Third Age map.

And really, the fact that it's entirely possible to read The Hobbit and LotR without ever being aware that Middle-earth is Earth shows how pointless the whole "low fantasy = real world" definition is.

>it isn't on Earth.
>High Fantasy.
it depends on whether you're taking the literary slang or the videogame/RPG/wargaming slang

low/high fantasy isn't a hard set definition. It's an argument starter.

>Yeah, how long a time period is depends on what you compare it to.

It depends on the context it is being used in. High Fantasy and Low Fantasy has only one context.

>Depends on how common/influential these things are.

Again, not something you can actually define because it is entirely subjective.
>Well I was reading a Fantasy novel that was described as low fantasy but then an elf appeared! What the fuck?

You definition does not serve as a definition, it is meaningless.

>There isn't one.

Then don't use the binary option.

>It turns out that not every category has firmly-fixed boundaries.

Yet this one does and should. It is supposed to be used to help describe a setting. Your definition describes nothing.

>ASoIaF starts off as low fantasy

It starts with undead. Once again the quantity of magic shit fails to find any use.
ASoIaF is High Fantasy from the beginning.
You only become High Fantasy from Low Fantasy when you step into Narnia.

Depends on if the hero has time to cast a magic missile before he's dogpiled.

>If it's not set on Earth it's not low fantasy

>the correct definition is the wrong one

No. Those mercenaries could be fearsome demon knights, or have mastered Nine Yin White Bone Claw and No Dogs Under Heaven. It has no bearing on shit.

>Yet this one does and should. It is supposed to be used to help describe a setting. Your definition describes nothing.
It answers the question "is there a lot of magic/supernatural shit or not?" The fact that this is somewhat subjective (because "a lot" is inherently subjective) does not mean it's meaningless.

>It starts with undead. Once again the quantity of magic shit fails to find any use.
Do you genuinely not understand what people mean when they say that ASoIaF has less magic than, say, WoT? In ASoIaF you have to travel to the fringes of the world to find any magic at all, and there's barely anyone who can actually make significant use of magical power. In WoT there are cities full of people who can juggle fireballs and call down lightning. This makes WoT significantly more high fantasy than ASoIaF.

Cite your sources on that statement

>starts with undead
Once again, you have "one fantastic element". If the presence of ANY fantastic elements make something high fantasy, then you're basically left with historical fiction and we might as well not even have a low fantasy genre.
Besides, they don't appear in the first scene in the books. The books end up being more high fantasy in the end but have a slower drip of fantasy elements in the beginning.
If we can't have fantastic elements, then does low fantasy even exist as a setting? If you have no fantastical elements "on-screen" for the first 100 pages and only three or four fantasy things by the end of the book, I'd say the book is low fantasy.

Do you consider conan to be low fantasy? Because that's been used as an example of what low fantasy is for over 50 years now. Hell, the whole "super realistic fantasy" is a more modern thing. In the 50's and 60's, low and high referred to the "power level" of magic more than it did how common it is. The term high fantasy started getting used a lot in its modern form in the 50's and basically meant epic fantasy until the 70's when people started getting burnt out on tolkienesque high fantasy.

Tolkien saying that he based Middle-Earth on a mythical reimagining of the history of Earth while ignoring all geography and actual history doesn't make it low fantasy. That's retarded.

>You only become High Fantasy from Low Fantasy when you step into Narnia.
So it's fine for earth to exist in a high fantasy setting as long as the story doesn't take place entirely on earth? If a wizard briefly travels to Mars does the story suddenly become "high fantasy"?

On some definitons of low fantasy, ASoIaF is that.
Its about a realm which is about to enter its high fantasy age again.
And I think thats why its amazing that HBO even tried to do it properly: The most amazing moments are always when Magic shows its gigantic "fuck you" finger and starts doing shit.

Not always

You are retarded.

Conan was never considered low fantasy by anyone but morons who didn't actually know what words meant that then bred and passed their ignorance on with their need children.

The borrowers is low fantasy, the indian in the cupboard is low fantasy, the old pulp novels with ooga bunga voodoo are low fantasy.

Just because you learned how to use words incorrectly doesn't make you right, it makes you defiantly stupid. Something that shocks no one, because there are a lot of you around.

>It answers the question "is there a lot of magic/supernatural shit or not?"

Except it does not. "A lot" is dependant entirely on taste. Therefore it is meaningless.

>Do you genuinely not understand what people mean when they say that ASoIaF has less magic

I understand. You can compare two settings and and find which has more magic, but that doesn't mean that one is therefore low fantasy and the other high fantasy.

>Once again, you have "one fantastic element".

So at what number of fantastic elements does it transition to high fantasy then? Personally I find the idea of undead to be pretty fantastic. More fantastic than jackalopes. So how should values be assigned in here? How many jackalopes in a undead worth? How many jackalopes does it take to make a setting High Fantasy?

>So it's fine for earth to exist in a high fantasy setting as long as the story doesn't take place entirely on earth?

Absolutely.

>who didn't actually know what words meant
low fantasy has no "correct" definition, and you are retarded for thinking so

That's just historical fiction if there isn't some fantastic gimmick thrown in.

>So at what number of fantastic elements does it transition to high fantasy then?
Once its the baseline.
Once you have living gods that could reshape the continents if they wanted to(but it might take some time).

The joke is always that in low fantasy, a demon invasion is a doom for a country. In high fantasy, said demons are so much stronger its doom for a continent.

>It's gritty, therefore it's low fantasy!

Horror tends to use low fantasy a lot, too. I gave children's book examples because they are what I know.

Most people mean sword and sorcery or sword and sandals or sword and laser when they say low fantasy, but because of ASoIaF people started calling hard fantasy low fantasy.

Most people find "high magic" and "low magic" more accurate and easier to understand.

That's not at all what he said, though. He intentionally set it 6000 years ago so that it would be at least vaguely plausible that all this happened without leaving any effect on earth's actual history. A "mythical reimagining of the history of Earth" sounds exactly like all the allegorical stories he was always complaining about.

What? The Conan stories are set on prehistoric earth. How is this anything but low fantasy, by your own definition?

If you have something like ASoIaF, which has less magic than most other fantasy settings, you can say that it's low fantasy. On the other hand, something like WoT with more magic than a majority of fantasy settings would be high fantasy. Terms like these are defined by comparisons to similar things.

>So at what number of fantastic elements does it transition to high fantasy then?
So at what number of seconds does it transition to spending a long time on the toilet then?

>Once its the baseline.

Once more, meaningless twaddle.
At what point does it magically become baseline?

>The joke is always that in low fantasy, a demon invasion is a doom for a country. In high fantasy, said demons are so much stronger its doom for a continent.

That's a joke?

>At what point does it magically become baseline?
When it do. When else?

>words have set in stone meanings created by god
The definition of high and low fantasy has changed twice depending on the time period.
50's-70's was when it became commonly used and referred to s&s and epic fantasy. Then nowadays, it's a sliding scale of realism.

So semantic change isn't a thing? So when someone says that 6 year old males can't be called girls; they're idiots and wrong and have been passed down dumbassery from dumbasses of ages past?

Rejecting the idea of semantic change is a hallmark of autistics ime.
The values are assigned subjectively for the most part. Genres aren't these hard and fast things, they bleed over into each other a lot. It's like arguing over whether I Robot or 2001 are hard sci-fi or not. It depends on how fantastic you find the idea of intelligent robots and aliens.

The generally accepted definition is the correct one, otherwise there is no point in calling anything low fantasy.

Is solomon kane low fantasy? It's about a puritan traveling around colonial america and africa.

If you have a higher than 50% chance of having to explain what you mean by a word or correct someone else for 'using it wrong,' it follows you don't have a generally accepted definition.