How does one successfully replicate the lofty and solemn tone of LotR without being super boring?

This, the first Dark Souls did a marvelous job setting up the world and telling you a myth, while the second did a fantastic job introducing you to the realms of men and how the Curse grips everyone a bit differently.

Dark Souls 3 was a good *game*, but it really did feel like they put a bit too much Member Berry sauce on the meal to make it it's own thing.

Three had it's moments though, I do have to say.

Seeing the sun covered by Dark in the last level was incredible, for example.

That's about it. Making a setting that is lofty and solemn isn't too difficult. Finding players who will respect the setting is the hard part.

Here's my advice for the first part.
1. You want to make sure that evil is already taking the upper hand. Some adventures are about trying to stop evil from rising to power. Your adventure should have evil already doing great, and the players should try to stop it from pushing the forces of good over the edge. Evil should be strong, and clever as well. The enemy should have their hands in every pie, a constant reminder that evil is everywhere.

2. Mundane problems are just as good as evil. Weather, provisions, and the labor of travel are just as important as the enemy. I sudden blizzard can kill you just as easily as a monster. It's not to say that the world is especially cruel and unforgiving, just that the world is not a modern civilized place with indoor plumping and paved roads. Make wild areas wild, make people have to hunt, cook, camp, and scout the woods.

3. Combat should not be too common. Your party should spend more time traveling than fighting. There's a lot of room between most adventurer's and their goal, and the way is generally not crawling with enemies. Make every encounter long and meaningful. Consider having recurring ultra-powerful enemies that can be beaten down but not properly killed that stalk the party. Remind players that they may have to run away from enemies from time to time (don't balance every encounter to be winnable, but make it obvious when the players have not choice but to stand and fight). "Mini-bosses" are your friend. Save the fodder enemies for large scale epic battles and heroic final stands.

4. Magic probably shouldn't be too common. If there's too much magic available to use, problems will be too easy to get around with very little effort. A solemn setting needs to require effort to play in. This is not a beer and pretzels game, things should not be easy. Do have a very few extra-powerful artifacts that the players can focus on. Make them a risk/reward item to use though.

5. Give the players something to fight for. Make sure that there is some power of good that has been fighting for a long time, but is tiring out, fading into the eternal night. The party must have plenty of NPC connections, and I don't mean relatives that stay at home, make sure they get to see and help their friends, and let their friends help them. Threaten their friends constantly, but don't kill them wholesale. You want the players to feel the danger, but not get jaded to the death of loved characters. You need to connect the PCs to the world as much as possible. Perhaps let them in on a worldbuilding session and give them each something to make, then when you are writing the plot, connect them to something they made or something that they thought was cool. If I helped a GM make a nation for a setting, I'd sure as hell fight for it in the game.

It has literally never been done, even by Tolkien.

>LotR without being super boring?
I thought the LotR were quite boring the first time I read them.
I can still enjoy something but acknowledge it's boring and probably not for everyone... Then the movies came along...

>The word you're looking for is "Nobledark,"

I always refer to this as "a world half full" when dealing with people who might not be familiar with Veeky Forums slang.

Make the world a beautiful thing worth taking seriously, in a lofty and solemn way.

>nobledark

Well memed

Only the first one.

The point of inventing a term for it is kinda lost if you have to explain what it means every time you use it.

>nobledark

I see that the TV Tropes cancer is terminal. You really ought to kill yourself at this point

>colour

British chap acting needlessly prickish, colour me todgewangled

That's kinda how words work. You come up with a word and a definition, the more you explain it to people the more accepted and understood it becomes. Plus the word does include enough context clues to give a general idea of what it means under the context of "fantasy setting".

I didn't get the memo it had stopped being Veeky Forums original content and had become official TVTropes property. My bad.

But what if he's a continental who has been taught British English in school?

Stop speech policing, you giant faggots.

Stop faggot speeching, you giant police

This.

LotR is excellent overall, but the writing flows like thick shit up a hill.

Wrong.

Good posts user. I never considered the darkness and harsh nature of LOTR because the themes of friendship, beauty, upholding the good and celebration of the simple life kind of makes one forget that part. For instance GoT has most of the above but the difference is that even though the world is dark in LOTR it doesn't have a sneering way of telling the story, instead it tells the stories of good succeeding in this harsh world.

Lotr fans will never admit this, but it's true. Doesn't stop them from being excellent and profound. Silmarillion is on a whole other level though god damn that shit is damn near unreadable.

You're getting mad at the wrong person, winner. This dipshit started the policing by trying to correct OP's entirely accurate and descriptive language into overly jargonized meme-speech.

Also, LotR isn't even "nobledark" to begin with. It's just a regular fucking setting. It is not overly dark or overly light. The jackass spouting off "WAH JU MEN WAS NOBLDORK" and you are the problem here, not the people arguing that we should speak with a modicum of intelligibility.

It’s impossible to recreate the feel of Tolkien without being boring. The two are intrinsically linked.

Even Tolkien couldn't manage that.

>t. philistines

>the filthy Farmer Maggot virgin replying to chad Baggins, Bolgers and Brandbucks
sad

Most words do not require an in depth explanation to be understood. The ones that do, such as long loan words from Latin and Greek, are almost exclusively used within academia. It also helps that most new words aren't entirely original but rather simple compunds from already commonly understood elements (and while nobledark is a compound, the individual parts that make it up aren't commonly understood in the context of imaginary worlds). But even if I make up an entirely original new word, say "fompish" as in "the whole thing felt a little fompish to me" you don't need me to explain what "fompish" means to understand that it's most likely something negative because of the context I use it in as well as the associations the sound itself creates.

Nobledark is a term that only makes sense to people from a very niche subgroup of (the already very niche group of) people who are heavily invested in fantasy and sci-fi, and even then it's not really practical. I've known about the term for about a decade now and I still can't keep straight which is which of Nobledark and Grimbright, for example (by comparisson I had no trouble at all memorizing what most of the cards did in MtG when I started playing that game in the early 2000's).

there's a meaning behind all the things that happen. it's never just "and then you fight this enemy because it gains aggro on you".

>Don't talk to me or my hobbit ever again

isn't the setting in that game a hopless nightmare land far beyond saving?

They're hopeless nightmarish lands because the games are set in post or middle of the apocalypse, depends how you define that, but the world never really ends, it's in the process of beginning anew, and the player is an active agent in that process.

Yo maybe he meant like in a tabletop game

>but the world never really ends
I thought this is why everything went to shit

In the first game, you are told that you can save it by sacrificing some part or whole of yourself to reignite the first flame, and the game never suggests this isn't the case (You can choose to not save the world, but the implication is that this is done out of selfishness, not because it wouldn't work). Lordran is all fucked, but the outside world is apparently less so, and lordran is all fucked to a large degree because it's where the zombies get dumped.

In the second game, it's in some ways less hopeless and in someways more: you discover that whether or not the first PC chose to save the world or not, others did so, and would continue to do so. The outside world is again described as being relatively normal, with the playable area, Dranleyic, being where people with the dark sign end up wandering to or being dumped at. Ultimately the PC can decide to do their part anyway, though they know they have essentially been mind controlled to get to that point, or just fuck off and let someone else do it.

Three is where it gets really bleaked. The whole world is way more fucked than before, and all of it, not just the player area. Lots and lots of people have sacrificed themselves to keep the world alive, but it's become less and less effective each time, to the point where the world has all but rin out of suitable candidates. When one who was created to be an ideal sacrifice chose not to cast themselves into the first flame, it raises from the dead previous sacrifices who survived the flame but later died to be burned again, but they all fuck off. So plan C: animate the corpses of shitty humans to go kill the sacrifices and bring their essence to the flame to rekindle it. Well you CAN do that, but the ending implies that it was an ultimately futile effort. Alternatively, you can snuff out the flame, ending all the zombie nonsense for good, but also bringing about an ambiguous "age of dark". Or you can steal the flame, you prick.

Yeah, LotR is sometimes described as "nobledark". Things are grim, but not hopeless, as long as good people are willing to oppose evil.
The whole story is about some youth from an isolated, backwater town getting tangled up in a plot to destroy literal Satan of the setting.

The reset button gets shittier everytime it's pressed, but not pressing it yields different results

>Or you can steal the flame, you prick.
I remember reading or hearing a theory that this was actually the good ending as it supposedly ends the cycle and the condition that causes hollows to become mindless husks after some time, or something like that. Granted, this was before the DLC was released and I haven't played it myself so I don't know if it actually holds validity after whatever information it revealed.

Granted, I think this is mostly based on a lot of conjecture on the fanbases part. I prefer to go by only what's told explicitly in the game, and when doing so I see very little reason to believe that rekindling the flame would be anything else than the good (yet futile) option.

>I remember reading or hearing a theory that this was actually the good ending as it supposedly ends the cycle and the condition that causes hollows to become mindless husks
Nah, that would be putting the flame out, which, while not cheery, is presented as the most hopeful of the endings. There are two endings where you can steal the flame, and both require bitter cruelty, and are presented as being selfish and evil acts. One in particular the game goes out of its way to insult you for choosing.

Make it a hentai

Play TOR, my dude. It's got all that good LotR shit built into the system, down to the melancholy of the world and the effect it has on the heroes.

Could link a Mega for the pdfs if someone wants em

>dissing Farmer Maggot
You obviously haven't read the book if you think he's filthy or a virgin. I assume you watched the film and assumed that's the role he played.

Guy was a fucking chad and played a key part in the hobbits getting out of the Shire unharmed.

I think lofty and solemn things aren't super boring, but they also aren't automatically good either. Finding a GM who doesn't suck ass at presenting information in an appealing way, and who has a good idea of how to use player actions dynamically, is *way* the fuck harder than finding folks with agreeable notions of storytelling.

TOR is da best

I'm interested to see how it works

this so much.
If you have a party full of roleplayers, you'll tell a fun story.
If you have a party full of people who just want to fight monsters, you'll have fun combat encounters.
If you have a party full of people who just want to goof around with joke characters, then you'll all have fun shenanigans.

Now here's the challenge: your party contains all of these people, and That Guy.

It's a shame that this board almost never talks about it, and when it does get mentioned most posts are like ie very positive. Not sure why that is.

Anyway; mega dot nz slash #F!tbpzXJLY!h2QSWJuAGFau0TWXEPFHyA

...

Which may be better than just the straightforward reset. It's "open for interpretation", but based on the third game may possibly be so. It's not like we'll ever know and that's kind of the point. You pass on along with the world.
The world is fucked, but only that iteration of world, and consequently a new for-a-while-unfucked world emerges, until it makes way for something new again.
Dark Souls is purposefully ambiguous to set a lot of the tone, sometimes to a fault, but this creates a feeling of mystery that fits the world and the story. Sometimes not telling everything makes things more interesting.

Thanks brah

>there must be more to life Flwyn.

>lofty and solemn tone
>without being super boring
Up next, we try to respirate without breathing

The state of Veeky Forums.

LOTR is rightly sneered for its prose, but it's not boring, imho.

Is this the part where we pretend that the movies were garbage because they over dramatized isildur's betrayal?

>Nobledark and Grimbright
Looking at it just now, with no further context or awareness of the definitions? Nobledark suggests that which is dark, yet noble. A dark setting, but in which the principles of nobility still hold strong. Grimbright suggests something bright, yet grim. Things look good and shiny on the surface, but the truth is far grimmer and more horrifying.

I'd say these are satisfactory compound words.

But LotR WAS boring.
You're trying to emulate a masterpiece while removing one of it's few flaws.
That shit isn't happening.

GoT fanboys go back to your fucking septic tanks and stop polluting this board with your mindless drivel. Away with you!

this
The mean fucker even told off a wraith