Why is stereotypical high fantasy so dominant in hobby?

user could still be right, I'm sure Gygax tested his rules before releasing them.

I think that user was right about inspiration. Quote from the article talking about Gygax:

>He was a fan of the Conan the Barbarian books by Robert E. Howard and wanted to try to capture that sort of swashbuckling action in a war game. (Interestingly,he loathed the major fantasy touchstone of the time, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. "It was so dull. I mean, there was no action in it," Gygax says. "I'd like to throttle Frodo.")

>"I'd like to throttle Frodo."
So is this why he created both halflings and the Tomb of Horrors?

People play what people want to play. On top of that, the easiest setting to use is probably high fantasy because it's very familiar to a fuck load of people.

People just want to gave fun and play some elfgames without giving you a handjob about how amazing your setting is where the dwarves are all skinny beardless faggots and the elves look like kobolds.

I'm only half-joking.

probably because of familiarity

its a lot easier for people to understand human/elf/dwarf/hobbit, and they immediately have an idea about what to work with

they dont need to do homework to understand whats going on, since having to explain what the heck warhammer 40k is before playing dark heresy is gonna get tiresome after a while

ask anyone on the street what fantasy is, and most will immediately describe some kind of nowhere-land fantasy with elves, dwarves, dragons, dungeons, knights, castles, etc.

>Is it because of D&D prevalence?
yes, popular things tend to be the first thing people think of
its unlikely a normal person has heard about shadowrun
>Do people lack imagination?
yes
>Is originality overrated?
yes, trying to run a super special snowflake OC setting with no basis in pop culture is going to turn off most players
not to mention its not gonna be very original, since there is nothing new under the sun, you would just re-invent the wheel

>And on related note, what makes a good setting for you personally?
as long as it is wide and open enough not to restrict my choices and has colorful and interesting places to visit and people to meet, i will be content

i will play in generic fantasy land easy if it has places to go and people to meet, since the setting at its core is just a blank canvas for people to go out and draw on
a stage for the players to act out their part, and as long they all have fun, it was a good setting

>Is originality overrated?
As others have mentioned, basically this. I could tell you about the Theem, tall humanoids with oddly bulky proportions, gravelly purple skin, red slit eyes, and a theocratic monarchy based on divine right. But at the end of the day, they're not really doing anything beyond being harder to keep track of ("Which ones were the tall guys? Theem or Doakor or whatever?") and being very momentarily more interesting ("Wow, I've never seen boring PURPLE reptilefolk before!"). In the long haul, I could just say Prayer Elves or Aztec Lizardfolk and accomplish pretty much the same thing in a fraction of the time and effort.

But then, you knew that, because:
>Sometimes it also has a little "original" quirk on the top.
When people DO try to be original, you recognize it for not usually working out, both in the sense of not actually being original and not really adding anything to the setting. Attempts at truly original settings are usually just that writ large, and result in contrarian clusterfucks with no real merits beyond "being different."

>Is originality overrated?

Yes. Not a lot of people go out of their way to make something subversive (at least, not a lot of people who produce quality work). They make something that makes sense to them and then make that thing good. Being genuine has more value than being subversive. Besides, so long as a work is good and genuine, someone will probably think it's subversive anyway.

If they're not plagiarizing Tolkien, they're plagiarizing mythology, which is where he got his ideas anyway.
That's just how the genre works man, what can I tell you. As for settings, I like a setting with a lot of political bullshit just so long as I'm not expected to keep on top of it all. I always liked how in The Witcher games there's always political intrigue but it all just sort of becomes background noise to Geralt. He keeps up with it, but frankly, it's always some asshole vying for control against some other asshole, names and dates aren't super important. I guess political intrigue is something I always expect in a fantasy setting but am really averse to having be the focus of the story.

My two cents on originality. It is indeed overrated, because execution is what really matters. You can make great over the top setting full of original concepts without it being a snowflake-thingy in the same manner as you can make a setting with stereotypical premise without it being another cliched bore-fest.

Planescape is obvious example of former. It contains a lot of fresh ideas and concepts, and in contrary to example of people without any problem are able differentiate things like githyanki and githzerai or baatezu and tanari. Nirn from Elder Scrolls has all your humans, dwarves Who are not really dwarves, elves, high magic and civilizations that can be described in stereotypes, but execution made it great.

Thus said, 95% of settings are boring and mediocre because 95% of things are boring and mediocre. Most people lack fantasy Pun not intended and love things that are familiar. D&D is a part of it, but than again it has things like Planescape.

>And on related note, what makes a good setting for you personally?

I've read somewhere, that in order to make a good and believable setting, you should first tell a story of a God, then you should tell a story of a farmer, and then you should listen to what the dog has to say.

I'm not really into fantasy I'm mainly a sci-fi guy, but for me setting is good when it's believable. I love clever and well developed mundane and slice-of-life details. Other than that I love settings based on their ability to tell a story.

>Is originality overrated?
Generally minor yes, on Veeky Forums however it is underrated.

>Is originality overrated?
There's two main issues. People think originality is an end in itself, and people who think they are original often aren't.

High fantasy as a genre suffers from people filling their backstories with esoteric details that don't end up mattering, and they create their own races that totally aren't elves, dwarves and orcs but end up filling the exact same roles. And most of the time it's like the people who are trying to be original are entirely unfamiliar with the genre as they'll proudly say "this is not like Tolkien" while presenting exactly the same type of cynical fantasy that has been dominating the genre ever since Conan the Cimmerian.

It's so players don't have to spend three hours learning about a super special snowflake race in order to play them. It's not necessarily a lack of imagination as it is a choice of familiarity. So in other words: And then we can ignore it in favor of something easier in our game of pretend because none of this shit matters and setting an ideal to attain is as pointless as kicking a ball through an empty goal post.

Tolkien isn't high magic, unless you count parts of Silmarillion.

Hobbit - literally everyone is a martial class, there's a couple of minor magic items and the only "wizard" is an angel who still flees from a fight with more than a few dozen goblins. The entire party shlepp their way across the continent instead of teleporting, and they carry provisions with them.

Lord of the Rings - same story. There's a plot-centric artifact that you can't really use, still no wizards and lots of martials.

If that's high fantasy, I'm all for it. D&D is far worse than that, it's all teleports and wishes and wizards.

High fantasy refers to the black and white morality of the setting, last i checked. Orcs are just inherently evil and "ok to kill". There's a generically evil villain who is just evil and wants to literally set all the lands on fire into a volcanic hellscape.

Low fantasy has considerably more realism with regard to conflict. Villains may have noble ambitions. Nobody is inherently evil. Everyone thinks they're the hero, or at worst they're just in survival mode and understand they're just robbing you to get through the day themselves.

Personally I think high fantasy mentality is evil IRL and refuse to play it. It's dehumanizing the enemy- same sort of mindset nazis cultivated- and why the typical adventurer is a "murder hobo". I get some people are lazy and want to turn off their brain to kill shit, but for me getting into the habit of thinking like that is wrong in and of itself.

High and low magic are unrelated to high and low fantasy. High magic low fantasy is a valid combination. Tolkein would be low magic high fantasy. To his credit, Tolkein's greatest regret was making the orcs uniformly evil, and got especially mad when people tried to make a racial allegory out of it.

>a gazillion of stories are set in real, modern world
>do people lack imagination?
if you think that a unique setting is a prequisite for a good story, you're a faggot.

>ttrpgs have alot of people with literal autism diagnosis.
for example those who need "original" settings. i fear therapy hasn't helped them so far, maybe we need to up the medication.

>he believes that it should stay exactly the same for decades
no, user, what is autism is the inability to recognize that mankind has a range of favorite settings to serve as backdrop for telling stories. some historical, others purely fictional. your
>muh original setting
has in all likelihood a modicum of originality going for itself in comparison to these established settings and nothing else. your aesthetics and world dynamics don't tickle the fancy of people out there nearly as much, which means all that is left for you to do is to adopt a smug grin and scoff at all the plebs out there who don't recognize your true genious(tm)

>"Nobody is evil, evil doesn't exist."
>"Except playing pretend that evil exists, that is is evil."
Alrighty then.

>And on related note, what makes a good setting for you personally?

A generally low level of socioeconomic development (like, less medieval, more ancient or early classical) that leaves a lot of open space to explore and conquer. Lots of hidden, weird shit that's just outside of the scope of civilization. An actual motivation for the player characters to adventure beyond "some evil dickhead is gonna wreck your shit."

It's not that black and white at all. The only orcs you see in Lord of the Rings are enemy armies. At no point does the fellowship of the ring go into an orc nursery and kill orc babies, y'know what I'm sayin?

There's all sorts of conflict between "good" races and kingdoms even if there was no full out warfare (mostly because everyone was tucked away in a corner and too few to bother), southern humans were shown in the positive light in one passage out of maybe 2 where they were mentioned at all.

It only becomes black and white if you take Silmarillion into account. Lord of the Rings is bands of "civilized" people against an immortal evil wizard overlord that wants to take over the world with help of a magical item, a perfectly good character for low fantasy.

Medieval fantasy is easy to write, because people don't look at the science or geopolitics of such settings as hard as they do modern or futuristic settings. I suspect bronze age and classical settings don't get as much love because of their association with Biblical fiction, which as part of American culture wind up kind of passe by default.

Not him, but you guys are seriously rump-ravaged. You should just let an accusation of autism roll off your back, because it's obviously without serious backing, but you were insecure enough to give that guy some (you)s. Does being forced to question your tastes cause you that much discomfort?

>"It was so dull. I mean, there was no action in it,"

Pleb as shit.

...

He's right though. LotR was a bland read without the necessary deeper themes to justify that slog. It's an impressive literary achievement, being basically Catholicization of the Nordic saga, but still bland as shit. It's Moby Dick without the depth.

>LotR was a bland read

Opinion discarded.

>posts a picture of the modern day blandlord himself in rebuttal

Kek.

Because my players are idiots and get headaches when I try to explain any setting that goes so far as to not have elves and dwarves both.

>he didnt get the joke

Fair point. There's a nuance I failed to get across.

1) Evil is absolutely NOT an inherent trait. That's the fundamental attribution bias. If somebody does something wrong, it doesn't mean they're a bad person in essence. They're just- in that moment and circumstance- being a shitlord.

2) That does not mean evil does not exist. It exists as a trait of an action, not a trait of a person. A person may have evil habits, but they are not themselves evil in a way that only death can solve.

Basic-bitch elf opera is prevalent because everyone is familiar with it and it's easy to get into without a bunch of explanation, reading, and multi-page of background material handouts.

If I join a new game, and the common races are elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs, I have a pretty good idea what each one is all about, how to play them, and what to expect. Everyone is on the same page and we can get started right away. If the common races are T'sal-vengai, T'sal-dorgai, The Unchained, and the Murk-dwellers, I'm going to need a lot of explanation before I know what's going on.

There's nothing wrong with either approach. Done well, both can be a blast; done poorly, both can be a headache.

"I like thing but dislike somne moments. I'm gonna modify it a little so I'll like everything in it."
Chack out Dominions for some actually original stuff. I mean, it's all stolen and mixed from history, mythos, fantasy and shiet, but it's more history and mythos than tolkygax stuff

Fastest way to a semblance of originality: make cultures, then races. Oh, and drop in little details of life. Everything has been done before, but maybe not in that combination...

>what makes a good setting for you personally?
Some semblance of realism and internal consistency. If it's a fantasy setting I also prefer it to evoke the feeling of ancient myth rather than that of fantasy novels.

I don't like settings that include whatever the author happened to think sounded cool as he wrote a particular segment, and neither do I like settings that pretends to be realistic by including excessive amounts of violence and sex while being filled things that are highly improbable or even impossible even if we take into account that it is a fantasy setting (GRRM, I'm looking at you).

>Evil is absolutely NOT an inherent trait. That's the fundamental attribution bias. If somebody does something wrong, it doesn't mean they're a bad person in essence. They're just- in that moment and circumstance- being a shitlord.
A person is defined by their actions. Doing an evil action necessarily makes that person slightly more evil.
A person being "inherently" good or evil means jack shot if they don't act it.

He who is good will do good.
He who does good is good.

Yeah I ran a sci-fi dungeonpunk cosmic fantasy mess and kept forgetting what I had and hadn't explained to the players. Some of that is becaue it was my first time as a DM, and some of that is because it's more fun to just jump in and play than it is to explain 4000 years of original backstory.

The thing is if your players don't know your setting well enough before character creation they can be really disadvantaged in game. Someone rolling up a sorcerer in Dark Sun because it's d&d and they like playing casters in d&d will have a VERY different experience to someone playing the same sorcerer in Planescape or Dragonlance.

I've never liked the idea of 'always chaotic evil' in fantasy. Or sci-fi. Feels like a cop-out.

The Grineer in warframe are 'always evil' because they're mentally subservient to the Queens (villainous). There are Grineer who aren't subservient because of genetic quirks, and they're fully sentient and capable of independent thought.

The Vord in Codex Alera exist to eat everything and have a biological compulsion to do so. The 'rulers' which are essentially the brains to the Vord 'body' are intelligent but completely incapable of understanding other species. Some of these sentient Vord are shown to have 'good' qualities like sparing civilians in warfare, making friends, and forming an emotional attachment to their children. It is possible that a 'good' Vord could exist, though nigh impossible.

Drow are assholes but they are sentient assholes. It's possible for them to develop a conscience and act heroically.

Tolkien's Orcs don't get a lot of sympathetic screentime, but they clearly have a social structure and aren't all about slaughter (as one group of orcs are describes as conscript soldiers).

If you can't tell, I like my evil races to have tangible reasons to be evil. If you make an evil race, always come up with a scenario where one of them could pull a Drizzt.

tl;dr if you're going to make orc babies evil by default, make their first words 'hail satan' and don't let orcs be playable.

There's nothing wrong with having mind flayers or zerg or any other similar fictional race that is so dissimilar from humanity that any lasting peace is unlikely or impossible.

Now, on the other hand, having totally human bandits that fight to the death is wrong.

If I remember correctly, Tolkien was always really conflicted about whether or not Orcs were inherently evil. He said they had a propensity towards evil, but he hated the idea that any thinking creature could be irredeemable.

The action is like after 3000 pages on geography

"As per Tolkien" is a surprisingly common phrase on the book (at least it was, before the Tolkien State sued the TSR)

Not OP. It's a creature that replaces the tongue of unintelligent bipedal humanoids like that insect and the fish, but it's benefit is that it can domesticate them and generally they can form a mental link to act as a second brain. The creature looks like crab in it's juvenile form, but molts it's eyes and most of it's outer shell in adulthood. Many tamed or infected humanoids wear bits to avoid killing the creatures. The creatures themselves are called "freeloaders" for lack of a better term. They or the host can communicate in rough terms.

Humans and advanced races can be infected, but because of their smaller mouths only rare, small individuals can attach into adulthood. Reports from the infected individuals who have since lost their freeloader "say" that cognitive ability is greatly increased as well as coordination and boast an increased sense of smell.

>Tolkien was always really conflicted about whether or not Orcs were inherently evil
Ehh... He said that he had trouble reconciling their evil nature with his Catholic beliefs, because, while he never intended his stories to be consistent with Christian mythology, he did intend it to be consistent with Christian theology. Which lead to this glaring issue of how it could be that all Orcs were evil since they clearly couldn't be born that way. In the letter where Tolkien mentions this, he essentially concludes that he decided to dwell on it too much even though it did conflict with his Christian belief. I think there was also some quick mention about how "maybe Orcs can shed their evil nature and become Elves" (paraphrased), but there was, as far as I remember, no mention, or even indication, that there actually were good Orcs.

In Morgoth's Ring we get more of an insight into many of the theories Tolkien had about Orcs, their origins, and their evil nature. The theory that they were corrupted Elves seems to have been abandoned by him, though not easily and what he ended up replacing it with is unclear to say the least.

The one other theory that seems to have been prevalent in Tolkien's mind was that Orcs were forgeries and not actually truly alive. Though the idea that they were made of stone or clay seem to have been even older than their Elven origin and abandoned before that theory was conceptualized. There was another theory about them being simple animals and beasts turned twisted and humanoid by Morgoth which he mentions in a longer conversation with himself about the arguments for or against Orcs being in origin Elves. However, that conversation also ends with the conclusion that Orcs may have some Elven blood in them as they could also be a crossbreed race between Men, Elves, and twisted animals.

Because high fantasy is an easy and total sort of escapism. Nothing to consider when you can play an elf.

Not the point. Design a new culture.

There like elves, but their bodies are made of burning plasma.

He was quite clear in that LOTR-stuff's inclusion, specifically Hobbits, Balrogs and Rangers, was purely a marketing decision since it was extremely common for Convention-goers to request playing Hobbits and Aragorn-types.
Gygax had already added dwarves, elves and orcs at that point though, inspired by myth and by different fantasy authors like Poul Andersson's The Broken Sword/Three Hearts and Three Lions. (iirc he outlined which books inspired the high elves, grey elves and wood elves but I can't recall which was which)

He didn't dislike Tolkien though, he liked the Hobbit, it was just LOTR that he didn't particularly care for.

>since it was extremely common for Convention-goers to request playing Hobbits
Hobbits come from Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement, though, which is pretty much exactly LotR the Wargame.

I think Mike Mornard is one the record of convincing him it was a good idea to his mild regret.

High fantasy is easy to game things up and to just put all the spicy magic stuff you want anywhere. Low fantasy removes the risk-free aspect of a lot of concepts, depending on the system, and usually ask for a better understanding of medieval combat, or use magic with wisdom.
For most people, they'd rather just slap the hitpoints away from a dragon and be told they saved the day.

Escapism is disgusting.

Who is the guy in this pic?

He meant you are the blandlord and your tax policy if missing

There really isn't that much talk about geography in LotR, nor is there much description or purple prose. Ironically, these are the things people like to bitch about the most.
And before you try to object: find me the part of LotR where Tolkien describes the color of Legolas's hair.

>High fantasy refers to the black and white morality of the setting, last i checked.
Whatever you "checked" was wrong, high fantasy has nothing to do with morals

He's a character from the video game King of Dragon Pass

A clan ring advisor from the KoDP game

>1) Evil is absolutely NOT an inherent trait. That's the fundamental attribution bias. If somebody does something wrong, it doesn't mean they're a bad person in essence. They're just- in that moment and circumstance- being a shitlord.
user, Tolkien was a dogmatic CATHOLIC. All creation, to him, was good and redeemable: he even describes this in letters when he talks about orcs and how they must be necessarily redeemable because nothing exists that isn't. If you'd read the Silmarillion, or even just the Aulindale, you would know that nothing exists that does not have its ultimate source in Eru's (God's) "song" (plan), which means that Evil is not an inherent trait. In other words, in no way did Tolkien endorse the very un-Catholic attitude that "evil is an inherent trait." Please educate yourself on a topic before you talk about it like this.

The Silmarillion (which, admittedly, is sort of a jumbled collection of a lot of JRR's notes) strongly suggests that Orcs were descendants of the first elves contacted by Morgoth before Orome found them.

>is sort of a jumbled collection of a lot of JRR's notes
It is also not based on the latest versions of his notes. Christopher has admitted that he sort of rushed the Silmarillion and hadn't done a ton of research into his father's work before he compiled and published it. Morgoth's Ring instead offers the notes in their unaltered form, and includes many of the later ones that contradict much of the information given in the Silmarillion.

Escapism is what you call the mess in your pants?

Marche plz