QuoteHey, old people.

And yes, I'm talking to you.

I've been tooling around on EN World for a long time, now. I've been immersed in gaming culture for far longer than I'd like to admit.

One thing that jumps out at me, from all this talk of the next edition of D&D, is talk about the fiction thatshould inform it. From talk about the kinds of art that should be included, to the stories that should inspire its mechanics - the kinds of stories the players grew up on should be considered, when looking at a game.

That is an entirely understandable sentiment. After all, you want a game that can do Conan, and Elric, and Frodo, right? Those are the kinds of stories you grew up on. The kinds of things that drew you to gaming in the firstplace.

So now I'm going to tell you that you need to go step back, and - in essence - go away.

Your stories aren't relevant anymore. I'm sorry that this has happened, but it has. I have met no one in my age group that has heard of the Dying Earth series, and yet D&D's default casting system is based upon Vance's work. The only reason I'm aware of the guy is because I spend far too much of my time on gaming forums, studying the history of gaming and what-not. I've never read his works, and, honestly, I don't care to.

The same thing can be said for Conan, for Frodo, for the Gray Mouser, for... whatever else traditional sources you can name for D&D. I know there's all kinds of sources, all kinds of books and what-not that no doubt innumerable people that frequent these forums can toss at me.

It doesn't matter anymore.

The old guard needs to start giving way to the new, at some point. Perhaps now is that point. I don't want mechanics steeped in the old, anymore. I want a game that can give me things like what I've seen in the Redwall series, in Last Airbender, in anime like Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. We've got to be able to follow the style of things like Harry Potter, because that is today's fiction, today's stories, the things my generation is familiar with.

Maybe this post is coming off as harsh, and I'm sorry for that. But I've been thinking about this, and it just seems reasonable to me that gaming needs to understand that the environment in which it was born is changing, and that it needs to change with it to stay relevant. Because if game designers keep talking about Elric and Frodo and Conan... you're going to lose people, and the next generation of would-be gamers aren't going to care. Talking about the old stories and the old lore demonstrates an unwillingness to recognize cultural change, and ifyou aren't willing to accommodate new takes on fantasy, then you risk becoming irrelevant.

If the next edition of D&D can't do Last Airbender or Harry Potter, then what incentive does the next generation of gamers have to pick it up?

It's like AM and TCO had a bratty lovechild on ENWorld.

I really think you should be doing your own trolling. Reposting someone else's bait is lazy and unoriginal. :enworld:

The ENworld dude is right. If D&D 5e does not emulate the fantasy fiction that teens and young adults enjoy in 2012, it probably won't entice that audience.

The new Conan movie and the new John Carter movies tanked. For whatever reason, they had nothing in them that speaks to the dreams of today's youth. And you can't dodge with "they were bad movies" because plenty of bad movies that speak to today's youth make a fuckton of cash.

It's a new generation and D&D needs to speak to them if WotC expects them to support them with piles of money.

Quote from: B.T.;536990It's like AM and TCO had a bratty lovechild on ENWorld.

Heh, pretty much, although while AM might chase the new cool the way fratboys in Mexico chase Tijuana whores, he's still not ignorant of, well just about everything like the OP is.

What he's talking about as his list of cultural touchstones are in most cases derivative and deconstructive, authored by wanna-be iconoclasts, who, for all their terminal case of irony, are also not completely ignorant of the cultural icons they are deriving from.

There should indeed be newer influences on D&D as D&D matures, but going with whatever's dope this week isn't the way to do it.  For all the money they've gathered, Twilight, Harry Potter, Transformers etc... isn't going to be relevant for long.

Even the anime influences he mentions, like Cowboy Bebop are just the same old derivative, deconstructive, ironic ripples (which do happen to be entertaining) made from the splash of Shirow and Atomo (who themselves were influenced by "old white guys" who apparently don't matter).

It's the same kind of ignorance shown by someone coming out of a Shakespeare movie saying "too many cliches", which of course, is now a cliche itself.

Quote from: CRKrueger;536997HeFor all the money they've gathered, Twilight, Harry Potter, Transformers etc... isn't going to be relevant for long.

Only a couple generations.

Twilight and Harry Potter were phenomenons for the childhoods of millions. Many of those children will grow up to be authors, producers and content developers of future entertainment. There is no doubt that their creations will be deeply influenced by what they loved as children and as teens.

Quote from: Spinachcat;536996And you can't dodge with "they were bad movies" because plenty of bad movies that speak to today's youth make a fuckton of cash.

Yeah, you really, really can.  Think of a terrible suckfest movie that made a billion dollars.  Got some, ok they all share at least two of the following things in common.

1. Jaw-dropping special effects that make God wonder how they did that.
2. A massive toy campaign, possibly even preceding the movie.
3. A children TV series they derive from.
4. A new branding of something their parents remember from when they were kids.

If they had preceded the Conan movie with a Conan version of the Batman comic TV series that had a toy market to stand on, it would have made X hundred billion no matter how much it sucks.  Since it didn't have that, the way to "Speak to" anyone is to make a good fucking movie.

"Speaks to today's youth", is a total bullshit phrase that really means "what we've shoved down their throats since they were babies", or "something that speaks to their parents so they buy it for their kids and do the shoving down the throat for us".

Quote from: Spinachcat;536998Only a couple generations.

Twilight and Harry Potter were phenomenons for the childhoods of millions. Many of those children will grow up to be authors, producers and content developers of future entertainment. There is no doubt that their creations will be deeply influenced by what they loved as children and as teens.

Potter, yeah you're probably right, although someone who does go on to be an author or producer is also going to find out about the influences on Twilight itself, and bring those into their work as well.

Twilight, not even close.  Hell the post-Twilight college girl who stops masturbating to fake werewolves and vampires once she gets fucked by a real life bad boy is already a cliche that's popping up in campus creative writing circles according to some lit profs I know.  It has lasting influence as a punchline.

I don't quite get what's supposed to be the connection between D&D and fantasy fiction here anyway. Do you have to have read Voyage of the Space Beagle to think displacer beasts are cool?

I'd have thought a kid picks up the RPG, and they see the concepts in terms of whatever fantasy stories/tropes they're familiar with. If they think "wow I can be a badass fighter dude like _____" it doesn't matter if the first image that comes to their mind is Conan, Samurai Champloo (?Is that a real name?) or whatever.

The LotR movies were a huge success and I fully expect that the Hobbit movie will be a big hit as well.  As far as Anime goes, Lodoss War or Slayers anyone?  D&D works pretty damn well for those.

Here is what I do not get.

Anime has been influenced by D&D since Record of Lodoss War and now people are saying that anime influences gaming too much? They haven't been really seperate for years. There is a huge amount of overlap for those two different forms of media. So what is the complaint?

Talk about tilting at windmills.  The OP already got what they asked for. It was called 4E and it tanked.

Rereading the OP from ENworld, you can do everything in Cowboy Bebop with Traveller. 'Nuff Said.

Quote from: B.T.;536990It's like AM and TCO had a bratty lovechild on ENWorld.

Got a link to the original post?

Quote from: Fiasco;537017Talk about tilting at windmills.  The OP already got what they asked for. It was called 4E and it tanked.

No. 4E was more influenced by tactical skirmish games - World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Final Fantasy (Tactics especially), Magic: the Purchasing, etc. It works great for telling stories punctuated by regular bouts of extreme (X-T-REEM!!!! ?) violence, where the violence is really the important thing. It's not so good for anything that doesn't involve flipping out and kicking arse.

You couldn't do Harry Potter with it. You couldn't do the Deptford Mice, Twilight, Dresden or Redwall (And that's the limit of my knowledge of even vaguely contemporary kid lit; get back to me when D&D7 is being developed and I'll doubtless know more). I can't actually think of many books it would be very good for.

And that's the sort of thing D&D5 needs to be able to give you the tools to do. Not to the exclusion of all else, obviously, but WotC needs to make it obvious that their game will cater to the younger audience, and the things that influence them. Include the stuff for older influences as well, but that audience (If they buy into the game, which isn't very likely) will be quite happy to dig beyond the obvious stuff. Hell, be sneaky about it; mark the Conan-imitator sneaky/fighty class an "uncommon" or even "rare" class. Kids will leap at the chance to play it. Guaranteed.

So what if not all of the modern influences will last for generations? They're what matters to an audience now, and for the foreseeable future. Back in the 70's, nobody could have been certain that all of Gygax et al's original influences would last this long.

Focussing on the old-school gamers who already have a system that does exactly what they want, and not bothering to consider anything after the things that influenced them, is a mistake (Especially after the rise of the OSR). Those people already have their game that they are perfectly happy with, and have no reason to buy the new thing. They're equally as much of a design trap as the Warcraft crowd were back in 2006 - 8.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;537003I don't quite get what's supposed to be the connection between D&D and fantasy fiction here anyway. Do you have to have read Voyage of the Space Beagle to think displacer beasts are cool?

I'd have thought a kid picks up the RPG, and they see the concepts in terms of whatever fantasy stories/tropes they're familiar with. If they think "wow I can be a badass fighter dude like _____" it doesn't matter if the first image that comes to their mind is Conan, Samurai Champloo (?Is that a real name?) or whatever.

The issue is, the "Appendix N" list was not the most popular selection of fantasy in the 1970s or the 1980s either. If D&D had been targeted squarely at what was popular, it would have been a high fantasy game based on LotR, The Belgariad, Shannara and whatever would make the renfaire people interested. Instead, it was a personal selection based on what some guy in Wisconsin thought would best work in his game, a game which was in turn partially based on that same reading list (yeah, it's a bit circular, D&D is its own genre, blah blah blah). You can do Gandalf in D&D, and he is a 5th-level Magic-User, while Conan is a 6th level Fighter.

The renfaire fans weren't happy about it either. Actually, even when I started gaming in the 90s, I would routinely hear arguments about how AD&D sucked because it didn't do Tolkien right (or because it featured spell memorisation, hit points, abstract AC, or classes and levels). Well, it didn't do Tolkien right because it wasn't trying to. It had its own identity, and it did well on that strength, because - and never tell the bitter online people that, because it will drive them up the wall - the D&D formula works if people are willing to accept its basic premises. You are a Fighter and that means a measly hit with a sword won't kill you, you are a Wizard and you have to relearn your spells every day, great; now that this is out of the way, let's have an adventure.

Most newbies get that fairly well, although they will draw on different sorts of inspiration when visualising their characters and adventures. That's cool. The people who have the most problems with the D&D formula are the same disaffected thirty- and fourtysomethings who can't enjoy D&D anymore because it doesn't let them accurately model Cowboy Bebop and My Little Pony and those other cartoons which are so popular with disaffected thirty- and fourtysomethings. Then they write screeds like the OP on ENWorld, SA or RPGNet. Well - it is their problem. The rest of us will be happily playing a D&D.